We'll take it!
And while I may suck at consistently keeping up this blog, score-wise, since my last entry, I've been whipping the asses off 2 through 7, and 10. Proof that all isn't completely hopeless and that I might actually be growing up a little. Sweet Jeezus, I hope so. But summer's here and off to a playful start, to the point where I could huff a whole bottle of Coppertone suntan lotion and stage a lockdown at the FOE pool. Knock on wood, 2009 has been mighty fine - so far.
I've discovered that my intuition does indeed rule, as does not having to answer to anyone, or anything - and owning yourself wholly. I'm the sole property of me, myself, and I - and anyone who doesn't like it gets banished to Fuck-Offity Landia. So let's raise our glasses to sweet autonomy, not squandering our resources, and moving forward with the struggle - living, loving, and learning, and all the other happy horseshit that lights up our worlds.
Clink...Oooohh, and while we're at it, let's give heaps of praise and thanks for the almighty and most-blessed Hitachi Magic Wand, and the latest round of low fares on American Airlines. $1099.33 for DFW-NRT, or Dallas/Fort Worth to Tokyo Narita, to be specific.
Clink...and refill.
It's all happening. Come late July, Mama'll be crossing the International Goddamn Date Line, winging her way west for a two-week taste of the east. Seriously. I'll be flying into Tokyo and hopping on the bullet train into Kyoto to meet up with Carmen, who'll have wrapped up her year of study at
Midorikai, the Japanese tea ceremony school operated by the
Urasenke Foundation.
Yes, Japan! It still hasn't hit me yet that I'm going. The day I bought my ticket, though, I was merely following my intuition, which told me in no uncertain terms that I'd be seventeen shades of dumb-ass not to experience the whole mind-fuck of going to a place where all my preconceived notions and expectations will be debunked upon arrival, and where the customs and entire language and writing system will send me into a tizzy. Unlike with Mexico and the UK, I have no frame of reference for Japan. But I'll be seeing the culture and way of life through the eyes of a trusted friend and another like-minded
gaijin (i.e. barbarian honky), and wouldn't you know it, I'm schoolgirl-giggly at the thought. Plus, it'll be summery like it is here, which means I can travel light and move freely about the country and load up my suitcase with trinkets like
these.
Ironic, insignificant and slightly-far-out fact: I was born in a town called Temple, in the Year of the Monkey. Kyoto has 1600 actual temples, and a monkey park. Cool.
Oddly enough, and don't be hatin', but before Carmen went off to study in Japan, it never even occurred to me as a possible destination. With Turkey, the timing was a mite off. There's time for that in the next couple of years. Besides, my big hard-on has always been for the Canary Islands and Spain, and you bet your boots I'm still planning on slathering my fat, half-nekkid ass in olive oil and passing out under the arbors in Valencia with a glass of the sludgy local wine in hand, hopefully by next spring or early summer.
But now, it's all about Japan, so I'm loading up on maps and books:
Victoria Abbott Riccardi's Untangling My Chopsticks,
Will Ferguson's Hokkaido Highway Blues and
Donna George Storey's Amorous Woman. Guess I'll look into the
Fodor's Guide at some point. Or maybe not. A pocket-sized Japanese phrasebook might come in handy, though. And I should probably learn to use chopsticks at some point, for chrissakes, seeing how I plan to
nom-nom-nom my way through Nippon.
Regarding the resolutions that didn't quite make it, they're really not so horrible. Even here in the gayborhood, the creeps are merely part of the scenery. Other than the homeless guy I occasionally catch glimpses of either jerking his gherkin or shaking the dew off his lily behind the dumpster in my alley, it's a hoot being able to walk everywhere - the drugstore, bars, restaurants, therapist's office, video store, the park, the post office, et al. All one has to do is throw on a pair of sunglasses and take Iggy's 'heart full of napalm' approach to the douchenozzles trolling for coinage or groinage.
Blog-wise, I promised to keep this puppy up...yeah, yeah, yeah...but as far as finish my attempt at the Great American Trashy Novel, I'm back plugging away at that, after a self-imposed seven-month break. Lawdy, a dirty-minded girl's job is never done. Blogging took a back seat when my trashy tome project took flight as a short story in 2004, and five years later, I've nailed my ending. I
think. Not that I'll be leaving revision hell anytime soon, or quitting my day job, which I actually love, but the story has a new sense of direction and purpose.
Finally. And for once, I wasn't at all embarrassed when someone recently asked me to describe what the story was about and I just rattled off my fantasy flap-copy: "The bastard love child of Jackie Collins and Sam Peckinpah." Oh, why not?
Actually, who has time to be cute or prolific these days? Who's not busy living paycheck-to-paycheck, bleeding what little pleasures we can eke out of life and savoring the dregs when possible? Maybe perfection is within reach, but sometimes it strikes me as overrated. And boring.
Learning to pick my battles has been another blue-ribbon mind-fuck this year, but a necessary and liberating one nonetheless. As long as I remember that what doesn't kill me may make me a little insane, and how this in itself is not entirely horrible, I should be all right.
