one year soon

I was just looking back on the months I have been in Ubuyama. And as I look at the posts it seems that it was such a short time. It surprised me a little because the last 9 months or so since I arrived here have felt like a miniature eternity. The next three months also seem like a long time to go even with the knowledge of how the weeks dwindle and go almost without notice.

It's a blessing and a curse when short amounts of calendar time equate to long amounts of lifetime. It's as if you're off-schedule with almost everyone else. Then you come home and people will say, "it's been a year" and I will think "but it was more than a year...." At the same time I am confident that many of my friends feel the same way about the year.

How will I look down on this year after I have ascended from it in time? Perhaps as the crazy year where I ate snake, took care of toddlers, and felt the wisps of solitude. The year that I was allowed a year of vacation from my usual reality.

My friends down the road call the JET Program "the world's biggest loophole," because it involves paying a bunch of mostly clueless, if decently intelligent, foreigners to sit around mostly doing nothing. And then there are the ones who live in isolation, there are the ones who live with groups of other foreigners and learn almost no Japanese, and there are the ones who have a lot of work (mostly the high school ALTs and prefectural advisors) or create a lot of "extra-curricular" work for themselves as if the JET program were an extension of college. Usually, however, it can be little more than a hiatus from normal life for these people, sometimes a well-needed hiatus, and sometimes a hiatus that then transforms what normal life means (for example some people move here permanently or decide to teach English in other foreign countries). And Japan receives its own benefits from having us here, even from the lazy ones.

The life of the world traveler today is perhaps one that is almost impossible to justly chronicle. It involves so many details that become the swarm of past events and feelings that can thunder around inside us like a tempest, randomly spewing out pieces or sections, at any given moment, to remind us of what happened before. Some travelers, especially the ones who travel for the bulk of their lives, can be their only chronicle, if that. Writing down or representing their journies becomes practically impossible; even their selves, in the flesh, cannot display/remember what has formulated their past. Of course this is not yet how I feel my own life has become-but it is something I feel it could become if I travel much more. And yet it is not a terrible fate. Rather, it is an enticingly interesting state, even with its drawbacks.