“I realized just last night that I have to say goodbye to everyone in 6 weeks and it’s sort of made me want to say goodbye to everyone right now!”

And I might have deliberated upon that feeling further, but as usual, somebody else already said it better than I could:

“It had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past.” -Virginia Woolf

According to my blog stats, it seems that a few of you still check back here from time to time for new postings (with an odd spike in visits on Valentine’s Day–were people expecting that I would have some choice words for that heteronormative sham of a holiday?  Well sorry to disappoint, I was too busy making valentines.).  And apologies that your efforts are so infrequently rewarded.

The month of January was hard.  Waiting for the phone call that my grandfather had died, which finally came on the 28th.  I wrote my first love letter/manifesto in ages, and received a kind rejection.  And of course the whole depressive event was being articulated, just not here.  I spoke at “How You Livin’?”, an event designed by my friend Glen to give people a different kind of forum for monologues about their lives.  I’ve finally decided I am more proud of the things I said than I am self-conscious about my clumsy emotions.  So I’m posting it here, in a dramatic act of exposing myself as both a vulnerable human being and a human being who posts videos of herself for other people to watch.  I’m not really sure whether you non-Facebook users will be able to follow this link or not, but it’s worth a shot.

Kat Hartley – How You Livin’? Jan 2010 [HQ]

It was a relief to go home for Feb Break, even if it was for a funeral.  I wanted to be able to talk to people who already knew Na, knew what a character he was: pragmatic to a fault, hard-working, and unbelievably generous to his loved ones.  Full of corny jokes and lengthy stories about the colleagues/golf buddies that had preceded him in death.  Oddly, once I was back with family and helping with funeral preparations I was able to stop crying about his death.  Home was a salve.

And so far the spring semester has felt really good.   I feel a weight lifted.  Other than some time management issues, I expect nothing but good things out of the 100 days or so left in my undergraduate career.  I’m taking two psych classes in addition to my thesis, and have had the pleasant surprise of remembering that I chose this major because I enjoy the content.  My fourth class is offered through the dance department, and it’s called “Body and Earth.”  Last Thursday we experienced the process of evolution through physical movement–from flopping on the floor like single-cell beings tossed in a primordial ocean to wiggling like fish with our noses on the ground, and finally walking and pivoting like our hominid selves.  It’s so hilarious and awesome and different from anything else I’ve ever done.  I’m enjoying the fun challenge of moving back and forth between psychological rhetoric about the importance of empirical proof, and the sensation-based understanding we get in this dance class.

And finally, I’m in the midst of job interviews.   Last Friday was the JET interview, which was not as terrible as my anxieties had prophesied.  In fact, as part of the interview I had all three of my interviewers stand up and sing “Oklahoma” from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical with me.  Nope, I don’t think I’m going to explain that any further.  But I will say that the whole process made me really excited about the prospect of returning to Japan.  *Fingers crossed*, but I won’t find out whether I got the job or not until mid-April.  And next Saturday is the Green Corps interview, so more nervousness and trips to Boston for me.

This is the valentine I made for my friend Ivan. I HOPE you people get the "Say Anything" reference. I thought it would be totally obvious but apparently that scene isn't as famous as I thought.

xoxo,

krmh

I always feel like my pulse slows when I get back to Tulsa, and accordingly the first week or two I was here felt rather unbearably leisurely.  We live in this bloated house on the south side of the city.  Getting anywhere worth going requires a car, but I wasn’t leaving much anyway; my mom was relieved to have the opportunity to run errands in the afternoon (since I was home to take care of my grandfather) so I spent a lot of time alone.  More time and more space than I knew how to fill.  I watched movies on tv and soon wanted to gouge my eyes out from all the commercials.  I wrote foolishly lengthy emails to people I hadn’t talked to in a long time.  I waited for responses.  Of course, they didn’t come until after the recipients had finished all their semester work, and in the meantime I fidgeted and wondered why it was I ever exposed my earnestness to people anyway.  Finally I got answers and my brothers and sister-in-law came home and I had several awkward but enjoyable reunions with high school friends and I remembered that I was happy.  I am happy.

Japanese people celebrate the end of a year with a 忘年会–”Forget-the-year party”.  And yeah, 2009 had some moments worthy of erasing, but overall it was unspeakably wonderful.  I’m often back in that 寂しさ of the rainy season.  Reading Japanese Literature during the rainy season taught me how to be sad, or how to be comfortable with sadness, rather.  As Glen claimed in his last email to me, we all recognize, on some level, that there is beauty in everything, even suffering.  I learned that best from Snow Country, and renga.  I learned how to draw sadness inside me with a deep breath, let it root around inside my chest, and then exhale and remember how lucky I am.  Is that it?  Is finding joy just a matter of understanding sadness?

But I’m not confident in this claim of having conquered depression.  Because it just happens that this past semester was wonderful in ways I didn’t expect and don’t expect to find again.  For once I was in a Japanese class that didn’t make me feel dumb.  And everyone says that opting to write a thesis is akin to death, but I was actually invigorated by mine.  And I got to spend lots of time in the art room.  Art rooms happen to be my favorite places in the world, so even scrubbing away at the sinks in the printmaking studio felt therapeutic.  And at the end of a really long day reading psych studies or playing with oil paints, I rarely walked home feeling burnt out.  Instead I turned the music up on my ipod and sang to myself and looked for Orion over the Green Mountains.  I live right on the corner of the second floor of one of the older buildings on campus, which means my room has two windows and high ceilings and this rattly old radiator.  The abundance of sunlight wakes me up in the morning so I rarely sleep past 9.  It’s the first room I’ve lived in since high school that I genuinely love.  I guess I feel like saying thanks.  To Providence, if it’s responsible for this good fortune, or to my friends, because I have so many good ones, or to wabi-sabi, because maybe I just needed to get an artistic grasp of loneliness before I could appreciate my life, which is good and meaningful as it is.

Cheers to 2009,

krmh

For some reason New York came up in conversation.  I had a great fall break in New York, really relaxing.  After Tokyo, New York City seemed much less intimidating (as Anna put it, now I’m in a major world city where, if I’m robbed, I’ll at least understand what my assailant is saying), and not even a little bit alienating.  How perfect, I thought, to be James, and to walk out your front door and into busy, beautiful SoHo.

But the original premise upon which my friend began the conversation was that I didn’t like New York very much.  Well, it’s true that I’ve got this vague longstanding aversion to New York City; some extended family on Long Island that treats me (raised in a Midwestern city of 600,000) like more of a country bumpkin than my friend who grew up in rural Connecticut (he walks to the dairy farm to buy ice cream); an upbringing in a conservative climate where people are sick of finding their religious beliefs the easy target of some faceless urban atheists.  I harbor these cloudy prejudices, on a micro and macro level, of a city that I actually, secretly kind of like.

So what makes me grit my teeth and spew dumb when New York comes up in conversation?  Today during art class my professor read aloud a lengthy article on Thomas Kincaid published in The New Yorker a few years ago.  In case you haven’t been in the living room of a middle class American family in the last 15 years, Thomas Kincaid is this guy who sells high quality reproductions of paintings of quaint, romanticized things–sunsets, cottages, lighthouses–in malls across the country.  Apparently Kincaid’s panties get all twisted when the art establishment calls him a hack and his work “irrelevant”.  Afterwards our class had a debate about the legitimacy of Kincaid’s line of work.  I said that Kincaid freaked me out but so does Sarah Palin and any other figure or movement based solely on populist appeal.  It’s fine with me if people want to put a cute, “Small Town at Sunset” Kincaid up on their wall, just don’t pretend it’s art.  My professor stepped in at one point to mediate, pointing out that our disagreement stemmed mostly from a disparity of opinions about who constitutes art’s true audience.  That is, who should control the evaluation of art: the masses, or the art insiders?

Framing it this way, I suddenly felt called out as a snob.  No, I believe in the democratization of art!  I just wish, um, most people didn’t like such tacky, insubstantial shit…

And at this point I realized that I’ve located myself in the uncomfortable middle ground of some false dichotomy between the Coasts and the Middle, elitist and populist, liberal and conservative, rural and urban, intellectual and ignorant.  I can list a million inconsistencies between either of these characterizations and my self-perception, but the fact is, the stereotypes are there.  If a friend from school talks to me about Oklahoma, it’s because some Oklahoma senator made an inflammatory statement against homosexuals. When I go home my mom and I argue about groceries: Less meat, more local foods, I ask; when did you become such a snob, she responds.  I’m sensitized to all these tensions between cardboard cutouts I know are mere cultural myth, and before I can dismiss them I’m bashing New York and California out of some defensive impulse for a state that feels less familiar each time I return there.

I’ve got this sense of my best self like I’m a many-armed Vishnu, a boundless explorer, I can live anywhere.  But what is home?  And where will I go next May?

I’m reading this poem called Hydrangeas by Kanai Choku right now. First of all, it’s intensely gratifying that I can read a poem in Japanese and understand it, not just the words individually but the beauty of it as a whole. It follows a lot of Japanese formulas, like using the season of the flower as a metaphor for the impermanence of love and the underlying wabi-sabi aesthetic of beauty in imperfection and sadness. When I read it, I see the hydrangeas overflowing besides the train tracks between Yotsuya and Ochanomizu. They bloomed in full force during 梅雨, rainy season, but were well past their prime by the end of my stay in Tokyo.

I also remember some things Professor Yiu said when we were reading Snow Country, Kawabata Yasunari’s masterpiece novel. The book is a bit confusing to read because it relies on an emotional logic, rather than semantic or chronological progression, in a way that is simultaneously very modern and very traditionally Japanese.  In old anthologies stanzas would link on for pages and pages, with no consistent plot development, and seasonal references that jumped all around the calendar depending on the connotations the author was trying to convey.  When men and women of the Heian period communicated with each other, it was via short poems heavy with references to plants and weather and the moon.  The goal of poetry was to evoke a response, rather than build to a moral. To fail to respond to a poem received was unthinkable.

The novel’s main character is ultimately unable to respond in kind to the courtesan from the snow country who has fallen in love with him. She sends her emotions out to him, but he is impaired; by the book’s end he no longer views her as aesthetic symbol, and he lacks the compassion necessary to love her as a human being. I guess we’ve probably all felt like this before in human relationships.  Like you’ve sent a stanza out to someone and he or she, for whatever reason, is incapable of responding in kind. It is a very sad thing when the poetry ends. The last words spoken are likely to reverberate around inside you, until the last echo is almost indiscernible.

I think it’s very likely that I will not spend a lot of time outside of this apartment while I’m in New York.  It’s not just my conscientiousness as a house-sitter, or loft-sitter, as the case may be. I’ve been very tired and there’s a pretty heady feeling about being set free in a place with such a huge scale (canvases on the walls that rival the area of my Tokyo accommodations) and minimalist aesthetic. The only thing that penetrates the heavy police lock on the front door is the angry honking of cab drivers on the streets beyond the fire escape.

krmh

1) Lack of epistemic motivation

2) Insufficient time

3) This blame is heavy, do you mind if I just set it on your shoulders? Oh no, actually, that’s okay, I think I’ll lug it around inside me for a bit longer.

I also have a few saving graces:

1) I like reading, writing, and drawing.  I do.  Now let’s remember that as I begin my homework.

2) Some friends who really get it.

3) I’m not a person who values things all that much, but look, something feels more right when I’m drinking tea from this plain glass bottle and climbing trees in this floppy 25 cent red cardigan.  Aesthetics? I don’t know, but I can’t argue with it.

Vaguely,

krmh

Given the often self-absorbed way I behaved during my month at home, I don’t know if I can claim any more maturity than I had a year ago.  But I also know that some of my withdrawal was pure self-preservation.  The emotional numbness that settled over me in Tulsa like a heavy blanket may have inhibited me from acting from the heart, but I think it also saved me a lot of unnecessary flailing.  I wouldn’t use the word buoyant, exactly, but for the most part I escaped being a plaything of the waves, and when I washed ashore I was not worse off.

Overall, the reunions have been unexpectedly wonderful.  What a relief to find that my best friend, though we had barely spoken in months, was still a kindred spirit, still my best friend. How great that even though only a few of my friends from high school were in town, my big brother was living at home, too, and has become somebody I love to talk to. Even coming back to Midd, the mere thought of which filled me with dread for most of the year, has been a reasonably smooth transition. It’s hard to frame being a senior in college as a positive experience, or unique from any other year of college besides that it is now becoming crucial to have a plan about what happens after the spring semester.  So far, though, my senior year has felt very balanced.  Everything I’m engaged in–the art classes, the thesis, the parties I go to, the conversations I hold–feel very deliberate.  Maybe it’s my own version of that buoyancy, but I’m constantly guided by the principle that I want to be honest to myself this year.  I want to feel things, but I don’t want to let my feelings gnaw away at me the way they sometimes have in the past.  I’m searching for more answers about how to conduct myself as both an individual and as a communal being.  I’ll try to let you know how it goes.

A mostly finalized playlist:

Home-Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Train Song-Feist&Ben Gibbard

Use Somebody (Kings of Leon cover-Bat for Lashes

Magic in the Air-Badly Drawn Boy

Travel-Thao and the Get Down Stay Downs

Benefit of the Doubt-Dark Dark Dark

La Valse D’amelie-Yann Tiersen

Stupid Memory-Sondre Lerche

We’re All in This Together-Ben Lee

Ukulele Song-Sophie Madeleine

This Must Be the Place-The Talking Heads

Little Eyes-Yo La Tengo

Lights Go Down-Telepathe

I’m Going Home-Ervin Webb & Group

Sleep All Summer (Crooked Fingers cover)-St. Vincent and the National

Young Pilgrim-The Shins

My Wandering Days Are Over-Belle & Sebastian

Leaving on a Jet Plan (cover)-Artist unknown

上を向いて歩こうー坂本きゅう

01 REC (at Saltholmen) 1- Jens Lekman

Folding Chair-Regina Spektor

The Trapeze Swinger-Iron and Wine

Hopefully I’ll get around to recording these busy, wonderful, awful final 2 weeks at some point.  But no promises.

-neko hatori

So today I sat in my usual spot with my usual specimen of Japanese lit. spread eagle in front of me while my mind wandered to its usual haunts, when a sort of unusual woman sat down two chairs away.  The way she kept glancing over at me I could tell she wanted to say something but for whatever reason I felt powerless to open conversation myself and so remained quiet.  After 10 or 15 minutes though we chanced to make eye contact, and she jumped into the average questions and typical barrage of compliments–excepting one.  She told me I had really nice skin (weird, since I feel like a greasy frying pan with legs walking around in Tokyo’s summer humidity) and even inquired into my skin care techniques (um, a bar of soap), but she didn’t say a word about my hair.  I’ve come to hate getting compliments on my hair, because it always seems to highlight some kind of differentness, and a completely artificial kind of differentness. Sometimes I wish I could look Asian for a few days to sneak past the walls of superficial first impressions.

"We're not so different, you and I."

In a few minutes we jumped around from my future career plans (nil) to organic farming in Japan (she just happened to be reading about some famous organic apple farmer from Aomori) to her work as an art therapist at a flower arrangement studio.  Then she started asking me some pretty probing questions–what was hard about being in Japan, if and when I would come back, was I dating anybody, whether or not I was going to marry the Japanese boy I’ve been seeing.  To this last question I gave an unequivocal “no,” and she seemed confused by this.  “Wait, you won’t get married?”  “No, I don’t think so.” “Oh.  Why?”  Reminding her that I was only 21 and not yet interested in marriage apparently didn’t strike her as sufficient explanation.  So then I’m trying to elucidate the finer points of cross-cultural relationships to a total stranger, how tricky it is to date somebody who comes from a culture where people apparently don’t discuss their feelings. How there’s something essentially unsustainable about it for me.

Perhaps it’s telling that at this point in the conversation I became vaguely uncomfortable.  Living amongst the notoriously chilly denizens of Tokyo, maybe I’ve picked up some of their distrust.  I watched as she emptied another creamer into a glass already empty save melting ice cubes.  “This woman must be a little off,” I thought, and excused myself to refill my cup of water.  Bit ironic, on the coattails of my criticism of the closed Japanese mind.

Of course distance has been on my mind more than it’s been off it recently.   I’m constantly aware of closing the gap to August 1st and home as I move through the Tokyo labyrinth.  I’m running into ghosts of memories all the time, walking through a subway station and remember that time I was there with so-and-so, looking for this or that.  And I’m searching for the meaning in it all–how can I make harmony out of this collage of place names and faces and feelings?    I went over to Takayanagi’s a couple nights ago and I think we talked about everything.  For those of you who don’t know, Takayanagi was my Japanese T.A. at Midd for 2 years, and coincidentally we became Tokyoites together last fall as she was starting her graduate work at Waseda.  We got to talking about all the people in my year for Japanese back at Midd, and it was pretty funny to hear her give her candid opinions about people now that she’s less of a teacher and more of a friend to me (still, I can’t break from calling her sensei).

The people who take Japanese are by and large an offbeat group, but for most of them it’s not too difficult to venture a guess at why they chose to study Japanese.  I mean for the Chinese and Korean kids it’s pretty predictable, and the manga/anime kids are obviously just making an academic career out of their hobby.  Someone like Tom might seem unlikely–the tall, preppily-wardrobed Connecticutian with no particular interest in economics?–unless you know that he spent his elementary school years playing super famicon with Japanese friends and found a comfortable second home in Japanese aesthetics and technology.  But really, we persisted, why did I pick Japanese?  Most of the other unaccountables dropped out after a year of study, but here I am still plugging away, hoping to take the JLPT Level II this December.

I think I’ve come closer to an answer, but probably no more satisfying than previous theories.  Sure, Japanese is really different from English, and it has been an adventure, but probably any language could’ve taken me to a place where I would be challenged.  I had to pick, and I don’t believe it was arbitrary.

Recently we were studying Japanese poetry.  Not in depth, mind you, just dipping our toes in.  In introducing the Kokinshu Professor Yiu explained that this early anthology isn’t organized by chronology or author, like any proper Western tome.  Instead it’s organized by themes of  “a peculiarly Japanese sense of fitness”: seasons, love, travel, laments, elegies, parting, etc.  Somewhere in my mind I remember I conversation I had with Jason ages ago; he was moving through his iTunes library, correcting misattributed songs, inserting appropriate album names.  But I liked having my songs organized in a way that’s unique to my memories, I insisted; I’d much rather designate the origin of those songs using the title Anne wrote on the mix cd just before she handed it to me.  It’s not just about the objective data of those strangers who recorded the song and what they called it; the subjective, less concrete qualities–how I acquired a song, where it belongs in my experiences–weigh just as heavily in my mind.  For better or worse everything around me will always go through the kokoro.  Call this a silly comparison, and yeah, I didn’t know any of this specific information about Japanese poetry anthologies when I was picking classes for my first semester of college.  But I don’t think I’m being a windbag (well, at least not a totally inaccurate windbag) by suggesting that maybe I was drawn to the poetry I felt in my scant exposure to Japan in my pre-college days, and maybe that’s what brought me here. I have not been disappointed.

krmh

I guess other than competitive soccer I’ve never been part of an organization for any serious length of time, so it’s pretty predictable that futsal and the walking society (as well as a number of clubs from high school and Midd: speech & drama, stuco, the bowling team, quidditch, the college magazine, etc.) failed to hold my fancy for too long.  Doesn’t it always just feel like the organization is demanding more of you than you’re really getting back from your involvement?  I love the idea of having a bunch of like-minded allies to rely on, but in practice it always starts to feel burdensome, and I’m rarely altruistic with my free time.  So I guess the weekend in Tochigi prefecture with the Art Society held some instructional value.

I wasn’t the last one to board the coach that morning, but I was the second to last.  I gave a bluffingly confident “Good morning,” to the occupied seats at the front and got a fairly genki response back, even from people who obviously didn’t know me.  Feeling good (but self-conscious) I threw my backpack down at a pair of empty seats towards the back.  It wasn’t until I had finished fidgeting around with my belongings a few minutes later that I realized my mistake; I was still a relative outsider, and I had chosen the only spot on the bus with two empty seats next to each other.  “Great,” I thought, “now you’re going to spend a three hour bus ride listening to your ipod, further convincing these people around you that you’re unapproachable and uninterested in making friends.”  What a huge relief, though–20 minutes into the ride a 3rd year from the seat behind me asked if she could move up next to me.  Her nickname is Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame), and I’d previously taken her to be a bit unfriendly.  This isn’t totally true–it’s probably more accurate to say that she’s a little bit apart from some of the other girls in the club, which is a capacity I totally respect.  Later that night at the drinking party I noticed she was making her own decisions about who to talk to or how much to drink.  Word.   We didn’t chat like bosom buddies the whole ride there or anything, but I could tell even at the rest stop she was sticking with me, making sure I found the cheapest ice cream and got back to the bus on time.  Typically I would chafe at this sort of babysitting, but I recalled that the senior mentor-junior mentee friendship (senpai and kohai, as they’re called) is a prevalent relationship model in Japanese society and so stopped myself from removing myself as her responsibility.  Honestly, the help was welcome.  It’s just that growing up in the West has predisposed me to think of people who rely on the direction of others as dead weight or mindless followers, I think.

And I’d say this pattern reverberated throughout the weekend, with people going out of their way to make sure I felt included or recieved my food or understood directions.  Though I had anticipated feeling like the odd man out, unable to speak the language properly and looked upon with distrust, I actually felt very taken care of.  Like I said in one of my recent entries, this semester has been marked by a sparsity of reliable friends, so it was a pleasant and humbling surprise to find myself so accepted and guarded among people who didn’t really know me well.  Maybe they sensed my vulnerability and acted out of compassion, or maybe they were simply extending to me the same warmth granted to everyone merely by their participationg.  In any case, it gave me a little more faith in the collective, or my capacity to be absorbed in the collective.

waiting for dinner at the farmhouse

Philosophical musings aside, it was also just a really nice weekend.  We stayed in this huge old farm house where all the rooms were separated by screens and there was a traditional-style firepit built in to the living room floor.  There was also a long corridor on the outside whose screens were generally opened so that you could see a nice view of the mountains.  Whenever I walked along this hallway I could hear snippets of conversations happening in the rooms I passed, or catch glimpes of people through the partially-opened screens , and it felt like I finally understood something very old about Japanese aesthetics.  My literature class had discussed kaimami, “fence-peeping,” which is a kind of love that requires the object be obscured from view.  More generally I think it describes Japanese appreciation of mystery (in fact, Japanese mystery stories rarely follow the Nancy Drew crime-investigation-solution plot formula; they tend to focus more on an atmospher of the uncanny or unfathomable).  So walking around this farmhouse I thought, ” Genji, Murakami, I get it.”

Doing ceramics for the first time was challenging, of course, but I managed to throw three pieces that afternoon that are functional, if not a revolutionary use of the medium or anything like that.  I swore to myself going into the weekend that I wasn’t going to be one of those people who are so self-infatuated as to display any old ugly piece of junk they made in ceramics class.  No, I thought, only keep one, and only if you really like it.  Two at most.  But of course once my hands had given birth to these three totally ordinary wares I became one of those parents who thinks their child with a wheedling voice and an underbite is the most precious thing they’ve ever seen.  So I left all three to be glazed, and am hoping I’ll feel less enchanted by the time they’re shipped to Tokyo so I won’t have to make space for all three in my suitcase.

my three very average children

Three weeks left!  Final exams, final goodbyes, and final responsibilities all await me.  Ambivalence continues.

Yours truly,

krmh