The coming new year...

What's inside the coming new year? What will develop? What is to come?

The future sometimes seems like the destination of a roaring freight train: as long as the train stays on its tracks, as it most likely will, it is destined to reach its destination.

Then again, sometimes the future appears much less destined.... Sometimes there is simply no clear view of it at all.

The new year, for me, is unclear. It remains a mystery. A box that cannot yet be opened.

But there are those around me whose new years are much more clearly visible. They may've just become engaged, or they are in the middle of a job they've had for years, and will have for many more to come.

The truth is perhaps that life is never really like a train on the tracks, it just looks that way. It looks that way until something completely out of the blue happens that washes away your once perceived reality....

Merry Xmas from the California Grudins.

ubuyama no tomodachi, yoroshiku!

Every now and then my mind wanders to my little town of Ubuyama, the only little town I've ever really been a true citizen of.

And if you are possibly reading this, dear Ubuyama chugakko, shogakko, and hoikuen teachers, dear eikawa class ladies, dear Mieko-san: I wish you happy holidays, and despite my poor skills at staying in touch, I have not and will not forget all of you. That goes for everyone else too: Hanae, Chris, Vicky, Austin, Tomoko, John, Miyuki, and many more. You guys were wonderful to me and I will always consider you my friends.

Sometimes I also wonder why I would leave such a stable, well-paying job with so many perks. The easy answer is that I do not like jobs with time limits, especially if those jobs require you to be completely isolated for 2-3 years. The more difficult side of the question is the human one: I never wanted to say goodbye to the people that were part of my life. And to that I say that sometimes life gives us little choice in these sorts of decisions.... That I had to do what I had to do.

Decisions can be too final. Saying goodbye to that little village was one example. No one leaves Ubuyama unscathed. I fear the scar from leaving will never fully disappear - that I will always feel my traveler's heart yearning to return. But return only for a short time?

Time is limited. And yet airplanes devour the circumference of the globe in only a little more than a day. What voracious beasts airplanes are! They travel so unnaturally fast. How can the human heart survive such a thing? Is it because the heart has been numbed, anesthetized, before the travel even begins? Or are we like the dogs who ride in back of trucks, eagerly awaiting potentially unknown destinations?

Happy Holidays!

The other day I was wondering about cuteness... I was thinking about how even stuffed animals can be cute... Doesn't it seem funny to you that an inanimate object can elicit a response? Shouldn't we be smarter than that? But no... We usually aren't.

And without cuteness where would we be? We certainly wouldn't be such caring mammals as we are. We love cute things and we take care of them sometimes solely because they are cute. That is just part of who we tend to be....

So many of the things that we do have no good moral, or even realistic, foundation. We are mysterious creatures capable of incredible, and incredibly unconscious, acts. Bravo!

Just some pictures from my time in SF. I have since moved to the east bay and bought a ten-year-old red stick-shift Jetta for way under blue book. Now the all the vast Americas are just a drive away....

Photos from days of yore.

LA TRIP

This weekend I saw artifice that stretched for miles and miles, I watched the perfect movie for occasion (Science of Sleep), and I saw people that bring sunshine into my soul.

Concrete, metal, rusty metal, smooth trains (Metrolink).

Griffith Park, Claremont foothills, Santa Monica sand.

Stuff, stuff, stuff. Artifice. Waste, creation, destruction, and all the emotions involved. Alive.

(picture not from this trip, but must plan l.a. photo trip soon)