Our family is flying halfway around the world on a trip of a lifetime. We'll be landing in Tokyo on July 6th for a two-week visit to Japan. The city, Kyoto, Japanese Alps, and Mount Fuji are in store. Bullet trains, konbini, jet lag, and heat await. Since we're so close, and since our daughters are so enamored with everything K-Pop(ular culture), we will be stopping for a couple full days in Seoul as well. You will probably never see pictures of our participation in a planned K-Pop dance class. :)
Visiting Japan and Korea have been on our radar ever since Jesse and I arrived at adulthood. Most of my friends who are reading this will know that I was able to travel to Japan, South Korea, and China (Beijing) in college. This was an incredible trip as part of a college symphonic band. While it was very fun, it was, as my friend Derrick said, like traveling in a fish bowl. We were placed into new and unique situations on occasion, but we were also together with friends throughout the experience and we could be mildly uncomfortable together. There was culture shock for sure as our group was largely rural country mice from the Midwest centered on Eastern South Dakota. It was a comfortable culture shock, though, if that makes any sense.
The biggest pain of that trip was that Jesse was unable to take the trip. While she was part of the symphonic band, she had a required class to take over the time we were away. If she skipped it she would be a year behind on her nursing degree, and that just was not an option. This was very hard for her, of course, but also a challenge for me to be away from her for nearly a month and to be frustrated on her behalf that she wasn't having the experience we were having.
Now twenty four years later we are incredibly grateful to be able to visit and re-visit the area along with our daughters. The world, and knowledge of the world, has changed a fair bit since that 1999 trip. There will be fewer surprises traveling in 2023 as the internet has allowed us to read and watch all kinds of information about our destination. The cultural differences will be felt in a different way as we are a group of five instead of eighty.
Lots of plans are already made and we'll be plenty busy throughout our travels. Yet there will still be moments over time when we will feel out of place and, well, foreign. We are going to be an uncommon, though not unknown, presence in the place that we are going. This is all part of the experience I want for myself and my family. To understand what it feels like to be out of place a bit. To experience many different ways of doing things. To learn that our discomfort can eventually become comfort. And to learn that while all these differences exist and are real, our commonalities greatly outnumber our differences.
We're excited and we're pumped and I'll talk to you in a month. In the meantime it wouldn't surprise me if I post some pictures to my microblog.
Twins Win
"Twins Win!" is not a frequent phrase around here this summer, but I did have the good fortune to have quite an experience at the stadium earlier this month.
Announcing
Lots of nice stuff is happening at Good Enough, with a very recent prototype project landing in Quack (Beta). Quack is a front-end implementation of an idea we had to provide a link to beautifully rendered markdown text. We think it’s quite pretty, fun, and a little unwieldy, but also useful! In case you’re curious, I wrote about the Why and the How.
We've been also trying to answer eternal questions, publish our favorite internet videos, and Shawn's even working on a zine. I've been writing a fair bit over on the Good Enough blog.
Ephemera
Rhythm Nation.
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Gonna try getting more “engaged” into socials (Twitter, Mastodon) via our Good Enough accounts. Wish me sanity.
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The Apple Watch feature that I want is automatically recording outdoor walks omg.
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Semisonic.
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Looking around, it both feels like America doesn’t care to drive regular cars anymore and America has more hatchbacks than have ever hatchbacked.
A hatchcback by any other name would smell as sweet.
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Click through for more ephemera.