May 2, 2005
The Years
It’s 7:30 am and a van is travelling around a close radius of our house, and someone is shouting something into a megaphone. There are chimes. This is not why I’m awake. I am awake because I looked at my clock at 6:30 and misread it as 8:30, and then got up and began to do the laundry. I am unemployed! After a year of major count-down-itus (we’d start playing the Remix of Ignition every Wednesday morning to bring on the weekend and only two days out of five were really worth living) it’s amazing to have nothing at all unpleasant scheduled. On Sunday I stayed in my box-like house for the entire day, because I couldn’t be bothered to go out in the rain. Yesterday, we met my friend Miho and her fiancee Yasu and went out for lunch. Following that, we embarked on a rather whimsical fishing trip with them that resulted in no fish, but we had a spectacular amount of fun. We got back to town in time to take the train to Akashi and meet my friend Jon and his fiancee Eri for a long long dinner, and it was wonderful. She has nearly finished writing the kanji for my haiku book. Today we’re going to spend the day in our beloved Kobe, and we’re meeting our friend Sarah for coffee after dinner. We are similarly booked up the entire week, and it’s going to go by overwhelmingly fast. This time next week, I will have been on a plane for a remarkably long time.
The three-years put-off “The Years” by Virginia Woolf turned out to be a sensational book. I’m nearly finished and it’s nice to know I can appreciate books I didn’t like three years ago, which may mean I haven’t gotten too stupid for graduate school. Look! Someone is mapping literary Toronto.
