Appetizers

• Now insta is showing me videos about releasing jaw tension???

• You know when you record your own voice and you play it back and are shocked because it sounds so different from when it’s echoing through your bones? Well, it’s weirder when you’re recording yourself speaking another language. (This is a great activity for improving pronunciation, but I can’t do it without taking some psychic damage.)

• Found a mosquito on the wall of my bedroom after getting bit four times while peacefully chilling on my bed. Couldn’t kill it, so I caught it and left it overnight in an unused rice cup sealed with the thick cardstock of my water bill. Set it free the next morning (and it was still alive??).

• Me fighting sickness to feed myself: “I hate cooking, but -points to myself in the mirror- I do it for you.”

Main Dish: Learned Shamelessness

I think fall is officially my favorite season. Once a season tainted by the start of another year of compulsory education, now a yearly rejoicing of all the fruits, flowers, and squash that come out to play while the leaves show off their brightest hues. I paid a fortune for a bundle of chestnuts, steamed them all, and then ate five from their shells with a spoon while standing up at my kitchen counter.

I used to dislike running for how boring it can be, but now I love it partly because the same route will surprise me throughout the seasons. One day I’m out sweating in late-summer 27C highs and the next day it is a crisp fall-like 20C and I discover spider lilies that sprung up along the roadside overnight.

Spider lilies are infamous in Japanese folklore. They symbolize scary and transformational things like death, renewal, and the afterlife. Japanese philosophy associates the seasons with stages of life, with Autumn designated the sunset of life. It’s the period of culling down, reflecting, tying up loose ends, and winding things down to a close before your inevitable winter of eternal peace.

In light of this season of self-reflection, I’ve been thinking about my journey here to where I am today. I’ve come to realize the real reward of the years I spent studying language was the shamelessness it taught me to cultivate. I used to wonder how far I could go without being held back by fear, and now I know as I stumble around the office getting basic greetings wrong, rehearse what to say when making phone calls to government offices, run around public transit with no plan and getting my legs slammed by the plastic gates, and totally embarrass myself left and right in a foreign country. All of this would have been entirely unthinkable for me four years ago. That version of me would have perished a thousand times over. But here I am today, surviving and thriving on being an agent of mistakes and chaos.

I think at some point I just got tired of worrying. There is also something to say about it being easier to accept your flaws when you’re the foreigner and mistakes are expected of you. Still, a major factor in me letting go of some anxiety has to be the seven years of exposure therapy to the embarrassment of not getting something right the first time. Accepting your shortcomings and your mistakes as a part of life is a skill. I’m thankful that I stuck with language learning long enough to finally start building the necessary shame tolerance for existing on this earth. Now it’s time for me to take that learned shamelessness to other areas of my life.

Also, there is always a win somewhere in the sea of blunders. It felt amazing when I called to make an appointment at the Japanese DMV, gave my extremely long foreign name, and they paused to ask if I was calling on behalf of someone because my rehearsed script and subsequent improv was just convincing enough.

Work Thoughts

Desk Change!

At long last, we have finally implemented our long awaited desk rotation so that I can sit directly next to my supervisor. The plus of having my new corner seat at the edge of our little division is that I now have some room behind me to sit back a bit and use my lap as a rudimentary keyboard tray. I also gained some privacy to crack open my little tupper of fruits and nuts as a 3pm power snack.

(Nobody really snacks at their desk here. If they do, it’s quick, furtive bites of small pre-packaged items, like snacking is some kind of shameful crime. I’ve decided that until somebody comments on it, I will continue eating fruits and nuts with my mini Pokemon fork.)

My supervisor is the coolest human being. After I cut up half of my unfinished steak for her so she could eat it standing up with a spoon (more on that someday), I can safely say we’re bros. My respect for her only grows every day. I must take up on her offer to hang out on the weekends soon.

The Auntie Lunch Squad: Asian Matchmaking

At one point during our usual lunch, I mentioned how parental leave is garbage in the US. Apparently, typical parental leave in Japan is three (3!!) years, and you also get a separate special leave for giving birth.

The aunties were aghast when I told them the horrific fact that parental leave in the US is on average just mere months. They immediately assured me that if I get married and have kids in Japan, I will have all the time I need to recover from any physical and mental L that comes before the eventual W of starting a family. This led to them inquiring about my partner situation.

One universal experience of interacting with asian aunties is that they start matchmaking you with their sons the second they hear you’re single. However, to my surprise and amusement, aunties in Japan do not seem especially enthusiastic about their own sons. One of them was literally like “yeah, I have a son near your age, but you don’t want to meet him.” What??? What do you mean I don’t want to meet him? What did he do to get dunked on in public by his own mother??

They then jokingly suggested my coworker who sits seven feet away from me as an eligible bachelor. The aunties crave office romantic drama, but unfortunately for them, I excel at having a peaceful and mundane single life. My coworker remains safe for another day.

One of the interesting cultural differences I learned from the aunties is that men here are not pressured to be especially considerate to women. Their impression of America is that gentlemanly gestures is a huge thing there. They also straight up told me that men here tend to be pathetic and spineless. Absolutely baller of them to totally dunk on not only their own sons, but also all Japanese men in general.

Well, men of Japan, you heard the lunch aunties. Do better.

Free Manzai: Chatting with Grandpas about Paper

One of my favorite projects so far has been translating this massive packet of information about the history of washi papermaking in Fukano, a former village in Matsusaka. My supervisor and I pulled up to the Iinan Washi and Wagyu Center one mushy, humid morning and found a bunch of volunteers outside beating wood pulp and boiling fibers in lye for a fresh batch of washi.

I was mostly expecting to chat with some folks there about the jargon that came up in the packet, watch them work a bit, and then go home. Instead, one grandpa led us inside the facility, which doubles as a museum, past glass displays of intricate paper crafts made from handmade washi to what looked like an old elementary school classroom, complete with a blackboard and an ancient box tv. He then brought another even older grandpa in and sat us down to give us the best spontaneous manzai comedy show of our lives for free-99.

Interacting with aunties at lunch is one thing (and is actually quite fun). Getting a pair of chaotic grandpas to stay on topic for three full hours is another thing entirely. Every time I asked a question, the elder grandpa would launch into an incredibly fascinating but yet still irrelevant story that had a 50% chance of actually answering my question. The other grandpa kept having to cut in as the tsukkomi (a persona in the traditional manzai style of Japanese comedy), chastise the other grandpa for being too wordy, then give me the one sentence answer I was looking for. He never missed an opportunity to jokingly boast about how cool and awesome he was for answering my questions quickly and simply.

(Bless that elder grandpa. I learned that he is a descendent of one of the papermakers central to the history of washi in Fukano. I wanted to hear more of his slightly irrelevant stories, but alas, during work hours I am a business boi on a business trip.)

One of the features of the Japanese language is that the way you address people changes based on age differences and familiarity. When my supervisor mentioned she spent a lot of her youth in Iinan and was therefore familiar with a lot of the places the grandpas were name-dropping, they got all excited and added the endearing honorific -chan to a spontaneous nickname they gave her. I interpreted this as them treating her like she was another grandkid running around her hometown. It was very adorable to witness.

Side Dishes

Weeknight Gym Successes & Outdoor Adventure with the Bros

We did it, friends! I finally figured out how to go to the gym on a weeknight, and it involves rushing to the train immediately after work and eating a wretched convenience store dinner while standing on the platform. I will have to finesse my fueling strategy later, but for now, just working up the courage to climb at the end of the day when I’m at my least stoked was a huge win. I finally got a real gym membership so I can maintain a baseline level of strength and coordination and train more consistently.

Then at last, after persistently poking and prodding, I managed to weasel my way into my first outdoor climbing day trip!

I’m a meticulous planner, so coordinating with the lax boulder bros from my gym was a challenging experience. The schedule stayed nebulous until 11pm the night before, and it turned out the plan was to leave at 6am. My body also happened to deteriorate the evening before and I woke up with a full blown cold on the morning of, but I pushed through for the sake of touching rock. If I missed this chance, it might never come again. The boulder bros kindly gave me the OK for joining despite my sniffles.

Time was of the essence, since a typhoon rain was supposed to hit around 1pm. The bros scooped me up in their kei car at butt crack o’clock in the morning and we headed for Miyagawa, a river flowing through a remote town called Odai.

Many rocks around this part of Japan seem to be located near rivers. This particular area features chert, a sedimentary rock that is often fossilized organic material. The structure of the rock breaks away to reveal thick rectangular chunks that are comfortable to hold and smooth to the touch. I was told that it’s hard to tell how to climb something on this type of rock until you chalk up because of how slippery it is. I found this very true when I kept peeling off a spicy 4kyu (V2) until I worked some of my dwindling chalk onto my fingers. I was suddenly able to stick on the shallow, slick hold that rejected me earlier and make the bump to a comfortable sloper on a challenging overhung start.

It drizzled twice before the expected typhoon rain. When the holds got too wet, the boss bro (who invited me on this trip) whipped out a leaf blower from seemingly out of nowhere, climbed up using the holds slicked with rain, and started drying all the holds. I had never seen this before today, but apparently people do this all the time.

My sniffles worsened into an extremely runny nose in the afternoon, so I retired to the side near an unused face of a nearby boulder to snack and rest. The boss bro apparated beside me and started wordlessly hoisting up massive chunks of fallen rock near our feet and tossing them over his shoulder. It seems that in addition to setting problems for our gym, he also helps develop local climbing areas. This means he cleans up landings to make them safer, brushes away dirt and moss from holds, and slaps some chalk on the rock to open up potential new climbs to be added to the guidebooks. I watched over the cleanup process from a front row seat, mildly concerned that he was violating some kind of environmental code with all the rock flinging and aggressive moss scrubbing. He then taught me the word for crimp in Japanese before casually finessing his way up a line of nasty little knife edge creases on his experimental problem.

Upon his return from the downclimb, he laughed about how the crimps hurt and then excitedly asked if I wanted to try it. I found this to be exemplary of extreme boulder bro behavior. I was like, in this condition? Hell nah. The comment about the pain and the quick glimpse I got of his flaking finger skin didn’t help sell it either. I do want to try an experimental problem in the future when I’m not ill, though.

I had only just met these boulder bros, but everything felt familiar. The relaxing and friendly atmosphere of cheering for each other while playing around on rocks reminded me of home. Bouldering in particular was something I only ever did with the people who love me. Finding my way back to that same feeling of community, acceptance, and mutual support while living on a foreign continent an ocean away from my core support network was the most important takeaway from this trip.

Boss bro seemed concerned that I didn’t top out anything I tried that day, but I was not there for the send. Climbing for me has always been about loving my body, supporting people I love, and proving to myself over and over that I’m capable of things I could never dream of until I believe it from the heart. It was through climbing that I learned to celebrate my growth instead of my achievements, let go of what I believe I can and can’t do, breathe through the hard stuff, and just play.

I had an empty tank but a full heart when I finally tucked into my loving bed and closed my eyes for a well-deserved rest.

SLEEP. Sleep sleep sleep.

I never used to have any issues with sleep until I entered my late twenties. Now, it seems like every night I am clawing my way past various mysterious sleep issues, like hormonal insomnia (terrible horrible), only to manage a meager 7 out of my required 8.5 hrs. I am not old, and everybody will be on my case if I say I am old, but every day I cannot help but notice more and more signs that I am no longer a spring chicken. I cannot deny the reality that age seems to be beating up my physical body. My fragile constitution has become even more at risk of losing balance and plunging into destruction and disintegrating with the slightest misstep.

My sleep hygiene has never been good anyways. It was about time for me to finally clean up my act. One of the most important things for me was to set a very early, very strict wind-down time to wrap things up and get relaxin’. As a chronic mosey-er, I have learned to (begrudgingly) acknowledge my need to start getting to bed much earlier than I think I need to give myself mosey time.

(Someday, I need to unpack how I feel guilt about being slow at doing anything. I’ve never been a fast person in many aspects of my life, and I never will be. Except when I’m walking. My walking pace is so brisk it’s like I’m on a gotdamn mission.)

My evenings these days now have the following schedule:

• Pack lunch and do the dishes. Start this 8pm latest on a normal day, and 7pm if I have a time-consuming task I need to finish before bed (like washing my hair, meal-prepping, doing laundry, etc.).

• Do my physical therapy routine. Timing deeper breaths to my exercise reps helps me connect with my body and start the wind-down process.

• Brush teeth → take shower (i.e., degrodify). The warm water is soothing.

• Massage out the shoulder rocks. This loosens some tension in my body and mind and helps me monitor stress levels. If the rocks are bigger than usual, it’s a sign that I need to look into some probable cause and address it.

• Put on some relaxing tunes and transition into being horizontal with some shoulder mobility exercises and stretching. I usually start with the mobility stuff that requires me to sit upright, then transition to supine stretches that are usually done after a vinyasa flow before shavasana. This ties up the routine into a nice close and prevents me from looking at my phone, which is my eternal bad habit.

• Finish with a generous application of bean cream so my callouses don’t tear away the next time I try too hard on my project.

• Close eyes, and profit.

The best part of this routine is making the time to breathe deeply and ground myself. I am terrible at what I describe as “being in my body” (sort of like being present or mindful), so this helps me return to myself and reset.

Cough Drop Pronunciation Pointers

I am obsessed with phonetics and am constantly self-correcting my accent in Japanese. Some major differences between Japanese and English is how breath is distributed and how the tongue rests inside the mouth. Apparently, English forces your tongue to the roof of your mouth, and most East Asian languages require a more neutral or low position.

I’ve lately come up with new pointers for myself and realized that the physical production of Japanese vowels reminds me of what it feels like to keep a cough drop in your mouth. The following list of pointers I wrote for myself is based on this idea.

• Central a feels like you have a cough drop on your tongue.

• i and o is a little nasal. Throw them further back than you expect, like you’re about to swallow the cough drop.

• Push the cough drop out with e.

• Slight lip protrusion with u like you’re spitting out the cough drop, but the vowel itself is far back.

• Consistent exhalation in voicing and breath usage.

• Relax the lips!

• (It’s all about depressing the tongue and divorcing it from the roof of your mouth. Everything else sort of follows after that, with other small adjustments.)

What I’m Reading/Watching

• Harrow the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir

• The Return of the Obra Dinn (Triple play with the homies)

I finally, FINALLY finished Obra Dinn, a fantastic sleuthing game where you are presented with scenes of the moment somebody dies and are tasked with figuring out who killed who and how from using context clues and details. I love sleuthing, but frankly, I’m bad at it. It was helpful to have three brains on the task. Solving puzzles with the homies remains one of my favorite pastimes.

I’m still not entirely sure of what happened in Harrow, but it was good.

Upcoming Menu

Goals for next month:

• Come up with more friendship schemes for people I see at the gym.

• Fit more yoga and stretching into my schedule. My legs need more mobility.

• Finally figure out how to pre-purchase bullet train tickets so I don’t stress myself out before my conference in November.

Really looking forward to the conference, because I’ll get to hang out on the East side for a day. I’m hatching plans to go climbing outdoors with some friends living in Tokyo. We’ll see how it turns out.

Stay tuned for another helping.

Your rock touching, boulder bro befriending, drama dodging ineligible bachelorette,

Alex