revealing ruminations

It seems as though the harder and deeper you look into something the more it reveals itself as an obscurity, and more often than not, an obscurity of undyingly complex, overwhelmingly enormous proportions. And so it is with many things, and so it is with written Japanese. Just to write the verb 'to write' in kanji, the Chinese side of written Japanese, consisting of thousands of symbols, about two thousand of which are supposedly needed to be able to read the newspaper with proficiency, is a complicated process that I have not yet learned to read or write.

Even if every journey starts with a single step I find myself flabbergasted by the steps I sometimes envision ahead. Sometimes this is paralyzing. So I pick my battles. To think globally and act locally may be asking too much. Perhaps one should think and act locally but with global effects somewhere in mind (like remembering that burning gas means more carbon dioxide which means more excessive amounts in the atmosphere, etc...).

And yet when one allows oneself to be relaxed, even simple-minded, one can come to startling realizations that can feel much more in touch with reality. The simple thought of one's organs and how they look like things that grow in the forest and how blood vessels look like root structures and tress. It has been said many times before: the simplicity found in complexity. Sometimes I think that it is a kind of stupidity that allows for our deepest thoughts. That perhaps this says something about the intelligence of other animals I would not doubt. If it is our simple recognitions that are our deepest, I would not be surprised if a dog could have even more of these than humans do.

Today I told my supervisor, one of the nicest people I know here, that I will not be recontracting for another year. It was something that I dreaded to say but then I realized that the best thing to do is to be positive about the whole thing--envision that I will have an equal, if not better, sucessor for this town and to be happy that I was even here in the first place (for an entire year!).

Recently I bought two snow tires for my front-wheel-drive car and found a decent gym to go work out in. This already has changed my mood about being here. I guess that I finally realized that one needs to take care of oneself because the other options are not good. Saving money is only good if you create a positive future by living a positive present.

Here is another photo of a cat I met in Nagasaki prefecture. There is something about its begging that makes me slightly uncomfortable. I know that it is manipulating me in order that I will feed it but it is a lie. It doesn't really want to be friends, it just wants food. But I cannot blame it for wanting to be fed and healthy. Try to count every hair on its face.