My resolve is stronger than ever.

It's like my body is exploding--when I think back to those hot nights in that second story room, pitch-black trains blowing by at 60 miles per hour in the after-midnight, emotions there thicker than the darkness, and sometimes, more tangible than the flesh attached to my bones.

Last night I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, and then out the window at the leaf-blown yard and its yet-to-be-evaporated puddles; and then all of a sudden, when my thoughts were halfway between the immediacy of that cool breeze creeping through my window and the hopelessness of the future, one of those amazing memories that you can feel came upon me like one of those trains pounding by...

The Kenshukan and the cramped dorm room. A certain obnoxious roomate. Late, late nights studying, just the two of us. Those clubs with their music and those subways with their people--oh, those people! The kitchen and the people who would wake up before me. The TV room. The computer room. Those familiar places... like a trembling in my heart came fluttering back in crystal clarity for a fleeting moment, to excite me and energize me, and make me think about all those that I love and have yet to meet again...

Takayuki and Yasukun had left that morning. Back to Tokyo...

... and there I was again, disconnected, in my bed; confused by these memories that just won't let my soul have any kind of peace.

Yesterday was a sort of second ending, because though I had actually left Japan over 2 months ago, Japan had finally left me, when those two turned their backs and walked toward their plane... just like that, gone.

It's amazing how much one's life can change in such a short time.

A year gone, and here I am.

Moved from a comfortable life of working and school and hard-earned 4.0's in Lincoln, to the unknown of Japan, then back to Lincoln for a winter break that was filled with more love than four weeks were meant to hold, then back--teary eyed--to the comfortable life of Japan, then back to the unknown of Lincoln.

And it's the unknown that's the worst.

Returning to Lincoln was by far the most stressful emotional situation that I've ever had to deal with in my life. Between the separation from those I loved in Japan, and the rejection of those I had loved in Lincoln, I found little relief at night--even after the tears ran out.

And now here I am.

Things have sort of finally come to this conclusion, all at once.

Sara is gone.

Japan is gone.

And ... I ... just ... am.

Nothing seems appealing at all, except living, and just going through the motions, until who knows what.

Those dreams of Japan aren't really dreams at all, but just memories, and who knows what will happen if I ever go back, or if I even want to go back.

Everything just sort of feels lost, and done.

My inspiration is gone, my motivation is gone.

I'll just press on for now, without reason, without a goal, with nothing really in mind, at all.

I wrote that last post before I knew... but now I know. Must have been some kind of weird intuition.

...what does a breaking heart look like?

I'm feeling generally hopeless.

Found this site today. People write their unspeakable secrets on postcards and mail them to the author of this blog who posts them. It's amazing.

I really want opposable toes.

I feel like that would be something that might complete my life--not that I'm really missing too much in particular right now--but having opposable toes would really make my life better, I think. It would turn routine, once mundane activities into something new and fantastic.

The monotony of opening a bottle of beer: viola! Transformed into something fabulous as I open it utilizing my opposable toes. The game of darts becomes one-hundred times more exciting as I toss bullseye shots from my new digits.

This was on my mind today.

Did you know Koala's have opposable thumbs and toes? Could life get any better? (Never mind the bit about being hunted into near extinction...)

I mean, honestly, if I had opposable toes I could set a piece of paper on the floor during class and write my notes using my stinky feet.

I could also easily play as both players in a two player video game.

Imagine the new exercises I could invent, now, being able to actually hold the dumbells with my feet. I could even do upside down pullups.

Running might become a bit harder, though.

Not that it really matters, since I've practically abandoned the sport due to how busy I've been.

Pretty unfortunate.

It's strange.

Being back in this life of regimented behavior and daily routines that are pretty rigid. It's not as though the spontaneity of my life is gone, it's just that life has once again finally returned to the hourly schedule.

A bit different than the life I lived back in Tokyo.

I go to Chicago tomorrow.

Then I'll be going to Milwaukee in October.

Then New Orleans in November.

Then Chicago again in December.

And for winter break? Dublin, Paris, Tokyo, Seoul, Dominica or Mexico City. Not sure yet.

Probably should go back to Tokyo.

Aside from opposable toes, I've been thinking a lot about that lately, too.

Tokyo, I mean. And the future, too.

I started back at the Daily Nebraskan last night. It was a lot of weird memories and experiences coming together at once, and sort of reminded me of all the experiences I've had since coming home from Tokyo: being in college again, being a real student, having responsibilities, having bills, etc, etc.

It's strange.

I got a phone call from four of my friends in New York City last night at 2 a.m. and it reminded me how easy it is to travel, how easy it is to just pick up and... go.

The next few months are going to be a whirlwind, I can already tell.

Half of me is excited. Half of me is petrified.

American houses are huge.

Wearing shoes inside is bizarre.

Everybody has a car.

The water glasses at restaurants are absurdly large.

Tipping a waiter is an incredibly annoying custom.

Valentino's Buffet is one of the greatest things ever.

Everything is so big here.

Wow, Nebraska is really fucking rural.

There's so many girls with blond hair!

Everything is really GREEN.

You mean New York isn't close, and neither is Los Angeles??

It's really, really hot.

The UNL stadium is absolutely gigantic.

UNL is gigantic.

Everyone is so nice.

Mom's cookies are delicious.

People really shower in the morning instead of at night?

America is scary.

Wal*Mart is so big it's incomprehensible.

The Omaha Zoo is also too big.

Americans are a lot more in shape than we thought.

...

Just a few thoughts from my visitors.

This is all giving me a headache.

I fell down on my bike the other day while riding to work. I was carrying a thermos full of coffee that I masterfully held onto--without spilling a drop--despite my crash landing.

I think I slipped on some kind of oil while making a sharp turn.

It was pretty neat, and now I have sweet roadrash on my ankle.

I hate looking at facebook.

It makes me depressed that I don't have 290 friends.

OK, finally done adding all the photos from my digital camera. There is one new gallery up, of my last night in Tokyo. Pretty sad stuff.

The pictures were all really dark (or really blurry because we were all too drunk to hold the camera properly), so there weren't too many I could use. Plus I sort of forgot how to edit photos to make them look pretty.

Anyway, I'm probably going to add one more gallery after I scan a roll I took using a disposable Kodak. I'll keep you posted.

Hey. Just put a few new pictures in the gallery. They are just some old ones from Japan that I hadn't added yet.

There will be more coming soon, too, now that my computer is fixed.

So I live in a neighborhood that's not the very best of neighborhoods. Not the worst either, of course; but just a little more diverse than your average South of South St. residences with their trimmed lawns, brick mailboxes and double stall garages.

It's never really bothered me.

I usually have figured if I can respect the people I live with, and around, they will respect me, too.

Of course, there are people who will never respect you, no matter how juduciously you treat them.

There will always be awful people, out to get you.

And the funny thing, is, I've discovered after not even a month in my new place, that the meanest, scariest, worst people living in this neighborhood aren't the black guys walking down the street, or the Iraqis hanging out in front of the Arab grocery store, or the Mexicans sitting on their porch, or the intimidating, shirtless, incredibly tan, incredibly tattooed men standing in a circle playing hacky-sack in their front lawn until the sun ducks below the treetops. Not even the bums on their way to spend their pennies at the liquor store or the teenagers playing loud music from their cars.

No, after a month here, the worst people in this neighborhood are--not surprisingly--the same as the worst people in my old neighborhood: they are the rich, white, college guys (sort of like myself, I suppose).

And despite the fact that their skin color and facial expressions aren't as frightening as an unknown black man, they have this amazing capacity to be unusually cruel to people.

I can't even count the times I've been yelled at from a car by a group of frat boys who have nothing better to do than make fun of a jogger on a Saturday afternoon.

That's actually what brought this post on.

A jog I went on the other day.

I mean, in an eight mile run I cover a lot of distance, from downtown, to South street, to 33rd, and back again.

I pass a lot of people.

The Mexicans on their porch, and the bums stumbling down the street. The Iraqis hanging out in front of their shop; the black guys, too. All the people who are different from us, I see them, I pass them, nothing happens usually except maybe a wave from the Iraqis.

But I knew immediately, when I saw that convertible BMW full of blond-tipped tanned white guys, that they were going to do something in an effort to mock me or make fun of me, like they've been doing for years... the same old high school schtick that hasn't failed them yet: picking on people.

It's funny, too.

It never fails. When I lived on 26th & Dudley it seemed like I couldn't go running without getting an earful of some college guy's bullshit.

And that neighborhood was really horrible.

But they are just words.

And they don't really matter.

...

Some white guy threw a brick through our Iraqi neighbor's grocery store for no reason at all.

They didn't even steal any money.

A huge sheet of glass crashing to the ground doesn't sound real. It sounds like something out of a movie, the shards sort of raining down on the concrete...

Friday night at about 2 a.m., I heard the giant pane of glass break and looked outside to see them speeding away, laughing, probably.

...

And this isn't to say that white people are bad.

I'm white.

It's just more interesting, than anything, I guess.

Our preception of things, that is.

Note: a friend of mine, Adam has arrived back in Japan after a hiatus of about a year. You should check out his blog which he and his girlfriend, Natsumi, write together. Hopefully he will keep writing at the same pace he is now, so we can all keep reading about what life is like in Saitama.

If I give it another 15 minutes, there might be enough caffeine in my blood to begin working on something other than staring blankly at the computer monitor.

Yawn.

I'm taking this year's Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December. Registering is sort of terrifying.

I'll be taking the 2nd level test, with level one being the most difficult. It only takes 60% correct answers to pass, which doesn't sound bad at all, until you hear that only 40% of applicants pass the thing.

Pretty strange. I mean, who would have thought that I would be flying to Chicago right before finals to take a test? Certainly not me. But they only provide one test a year, and Chicago is the closest testing center...

Though my comprehension of written Japanese is probably a lot better than my comprehension of spoken Japanese, I still think this will be tough, because, unfortunately, I have an amazing vocabulary when it comes to street slang--complete with those impossible-to-teach suffixes and intonations that are learned only through listening--but my "business nihongo" is lacking a bit.

No big deal.

I never really wanted to talk to the business types anyway.

I always wanted to be able to talk to people my age and not sound stupid doing it.

I get a lot of surprised looks when I use words like "buchake" and fillers such as "sa" ... suffixes like "jyan" and the confusing Osaka-ben "wa".

It's nice to be able to speak it again.

Learning language is probably the greatest thing ever.

I keep asking myself when I'm going to start on Spanish.

I keep thinking to myself how neat it would be to interpret, something I'm getting a lot of practice doing lately.

The thing, though, about translating--especially from a language like Japanese to a language like English--is that you have to train yourself to abstain from that irritating tendency to translate things literally.

I've seen the word "Atom bomb" translated as "Original Child Bomb" before (for a movie, actually), because the translator took the word and simply did a character by character direct interpretation.

It's wrong.

It's not profound.

It's just atom bomb, so translate it that way.

Basically what I'm getting at is that in order to be a good, functional interpreter, one needs to not think in terms of words, but rather strictly in ideas. Getting caught in a word slows you down, convolutes your dicussion, and in a lot of cases provides a translated expression that sounds a lot like broken English.

Lately I've realized that I'm thinking in this manner a lot more: in ideas. Because though it's possible to speak English and Japanese nearly sumultaneously, it's not really within most people's abilities to think in two languages at once.

It's a lot of fun.

It's the best.

Learning language, I mean.

I'm going to keep doing this for a long time.

So should I write one of those really depressing entries...?

I think I'll just skip it and say I did.

So two of my friends got married the other day, and the night before the wedding I saw perhaps the second most beautiful sunset I've ever seen. It reminded of the day I fell in love.

Four Japanese boys are here, in the big ol' YOU-ess-of-A; sleeping on my couches, complaining about the food and generally having their minds blown by everything from the size of water, to the size of Wal*Mart, to the size of parties...

... to the size of the cars, the size of my house, the size of the heaven and the earth and the sunsets and evenings that stretch on endlessly.

Yeah, it doesn't get dark until 9 p.m. here, but it's pitch black in Japan at 7.

The people are scary.

The alcohol is strong.

The girls are beautiful.

The gym at the university is unbelievable.

The cookies my mom makes are also, unbelievable.

The amount of police patrolling is... well, yes: unbelievable.

And I was driving the other day... and Takayuki was in the passenger seat next to me. And it was 27th and South street, and there was a red light and we stopped and I looked over. And it was unbelievable.

What the hell are you doing in America?

It's just... so... strange.

It's like all the memories I've had and all of the images that have rushed through my mind have now landed on my doorstep and my mind doesn't really know how to process them correctly, because this place ISN'T Japan, but... there's now a little bit of Japan here.

Sort of makes my bones ache a little bit, that longing feeling that seeps out into the blood and irritates the whole body like an itch that just can't be scratched... that longing for the past... and for the future to hurry up and get here.