新しいのライフ

Summer <3 Mix '09

1. Passion Pit - Smile Upon Me
2. Deerhoof - Snoopy Waves
3. Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - Optimist vs. The Silent Alarm
4. Cotton Candy - A Sentimental Song
5. Belle & Sebastian - Simple Things
6. Shugo Tokumaru - Green Rain
7. Bob Nanna - Blueprint
8. Chad VanGaalen - Clinically Dead
9. Yes Please - Love Probe
10. Asobi Seksu - Blind Little Rain

If you want one, let me know. I'm in The Heights now and I'm writing on my new iMac, but these things are for a different post at a later date. Perhaps not too much later.

。。。

Last night I saw Tokyo! at the Cleveland Film Festival. It was pretty much the Paris, Je T'aime of Japan: three short films by three different directors. It was alright, and I was constantly saying 'Hey! I understood that!' in my head, and was also in shock of the rapid Americanization of the language. Words I have learned in the past few years from my outdated text are now just the katakana equivalent of the English. I imagine that in 100 years, Japanese will strictly be a katakana language, but still an entirely different language than English, i.e. "Where is the Seminar House?" in English, and "Wairu isu sa Seminaa Housu?", or ”ワイルイスサセミナーホウス？” in Japanese. Still unable to be regularly understood by one another. Katakana is ugly, nearly runic, and will surely rid Japan of it's culture of cute. I'm absolutely convinced of this.

In other recent events, I've hit an all-time procrastination low (hence the meaningless blog entry), and haven't been reading much at all, let alone spending time on homework. I knew this time would come! I'm just ready to be done with this last semester so I can send my transcript along to Cleveland State and register for graduate courses! Yeah, that's right, I'm staying in Cleveland. But I think this is a good thing (assuming you're already questioning my decision). It will get me into the city for the first time in my suburban life, and will keep me near the things I love (Ryan, family, friends, Vine & Bean biscuits and gravy), and can't get rid of (Aladdin's, Nighttown, Coventry). Plus, Cleveland is probably the best city of the schools I applied to, as well as the cheapest, and most hood. I should be moving (to the Heights/Yuppyville?) as well as having a big graduation party at home in June. If all goes well, the summer months will only burn a couple tanks of gas for me, rather than 1/week. My Wolfsburg will love me back, and I don't imagine I'll be missing driving over an hour every day just to go to school and work. I'm over it. I'll also be ending my four years of work study in the Admissions office (!!!!), and four years as a DJ and Music Director at WJCU. I'm sad about the latter, but it's time to move on, take a break, and hopefully get involved at WCSB, or find something else to waste my time. Last week I tore some posters off the walls of WJCU (Gwen Stefani & really awful pop/punk groups from years ago), and replaced them with the new (Bonnie Prince Billy, M. Ward, Dan Auerbach). As for the Admissions office, they've treated me well, but it's just time.

Totally unrelated, I would like to mention a funny little Irish lady named Eileen who was one of my managers at Aladdin's for well over a year. As a longtime member of the Sunday opening crew, nearly against my will, I spent many sleepy and jealously beautiful Sunday mornings in the confines of those dank, falafel stinking walls talking with Eileen and sharing fattening cakes and cookies at the expense of Mr. Aladdin himself. She had the guts to teach at innercity schools and tell anyone exactly what was on her mind. She was an awesome and genuine person that will be missed.

The heart, no valentine,
decides to quit after lunch,
the power shut off like a switch,
or a tiny dark ship is unmoored
into the flow of the body's rivers,
the brain a monastery,
defenseless on the shore.
-Billy Collins, Picnic, Lightning

一番二千八！

I have a little bit of downtime tonight since I finished a project for my Chaucer class early (Editions of The Canterbury Tales), so I figured I would post something I've been meaning to post for the last 2 months... My top 10 albums of 2008! At the same time, I'll catch up quickly with what has been going on as of late.

Top 10 (I mean, 15) of 2008:

1. Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes
2. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
3. Passion Pit - Chunk of Change
4. Dr. Dog - Fate
5. Pwrfl Power - Pwrfl Power
6. MGMT - Oracular Spectacular
7. Lykke Li - Youth Novels
8. Chad VanGaalen - Soft Airplane
   
9. Foals - Antidotes
10. Lightspeed Champion - Falling off the Lavender Bridge
11. Of Montreal - Skeletal Lamping
12. Magnetic Fields - Distortion
13. M83 - Saturdays=Youth
14. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Pershing (Guilty pleasure alert!)
15. Deerhoof - Offend Maggie

2008 promised a lot more than 2009 has offered so far, but I will remain confident that some good stuff will come around later on. So far I've been digging the new Appleseed Cast and Matt and Kim, but not much else. My Music Director stuff at WJCU has been going well as I've been talking to most of my new contacts at aam, Pirate, Planetary, and a few other promotion companies. My replacement is studying abroad in China right now and will be taking over at the end of the semester when I graduate. As much as I'll miss the free stuff, I won't miss the hassle and mass quantities of voice mails and e-mails that I would never be able to respond to even if it were my only job.

I've also been working at the admissions office doing loads of data entry and filing, as well as Fady's falafel palace where it's been pretty slow and people have been cheap. Ah, the economy...

I've been reading a lot for my classes (ligitamately) for the first time in four years, and have also been regularly working out for the first time ever at the local YMCA's. Here's a list of the most recent things I've been reading:

• The Canterbury Tales: I'm taking a Chaucer course and we're reading most of the Tales along with some other poems and things.
• TS Eliot - The Complete Poems, selected prose, & his biography by Peter Ackroyd: I'm taking a course on Eliot and it's a little much. I love some of his stuff but I hate most of it. My professor just likes reading it aloud. We'll see how it pans out.
• A.S. Byatt - Angels & Insects: I couldn't take all of the rants about ants or the incest.
• Kazuo Ishiguro - Remains of the Day: Better than the latter but pretty lackluster. I would rather never read another novel about a butler again unless it's raunchy.
• Plato - Symposium: Changed my life.
• Foucault - The History of Sexuality: What the Foucault?

Other than that, add a little Japanese and then I've got nothing. I've just been waiting for replies from graduate schools to try to stake out my future after May, (EDIT: I was just accepted into Cleveland State!) and have been doing things with Ryan. He recently did a great presentation at Pecha Kucha night called Cleveland 3.1, we hit up the Tremont Taphouse for dinner on Valentine's day, and have been way too addicted to 30 Rock...

And on that note, it's Thursday night so I need to go watch 30 Rock after I down the rest of my White Russian.

Until a few months from now...

福助ぽん

I was in a bad mood from all of this schoolwork...

And then I found this!!

So. Cute. Speechless. It gave me the ability to write on! 11 pages done, 7 to go...

本、店、し、クリスマス！

Basically everything at The McSweeney's Store is half off. I got some Christmas shopping done the other day and of course bought some things for myself. This is a problem. Why?

Books I have bought/received as gifts and I haven't yet had the time to read:

• Michael Chabon - Maps and Legends
• Charles Burns - Black Hole
• The Book of Other People - Zadie Smith
• Dave Eggers - What is the What
• The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith
• The Children's Hospital - Chris Adrian
• The McSweeney's Book of Poets Picking Poets
• Alison Bechdel - Fun Home

Plus I get the New Yorker every week and barely get to open it. PLUS I've asked for tons of books for Christmas. What am I to do? I guess I'll read a book a day on Christmas break. That's my only solution.

Here are a couple of places where I'll be Christmas shopping online and you should too.

• Lush Cosmetics- All natural, vegan, awesome, handmade soaps and such
• Buy Olympia- Mugs made out of corn, paper goods made out of recycled paper, books from independent publishers. $10 T-shirt sale!
• Fred Flare- Store cute! Japanese imports, and lots of cute junk like these!
• And McSweeney's, of course

And here's a poem I wrote this week. It had to be in this specific form, which I'm not too keen on. It needs a little work but I think it's pretty alright. Right? I hope so.

*

50 Harley Salute

The black Lincoln
entered the gates
and into those
familiar, smooth, linear
aisle ways. 5mph
for the sake
of hitting whom?

After circling (rectangling) along
the guzzler was awarded
its resting place. I
stepped out onto the
lush, manicured, lively landscape.
Dressed up for whom?

Until I finally made it over
to the deep hole and
whimpered not for him, but
for the spectacle made in
his name. 21? More like

50 Harley salute.

Each one of those bikes was
accompanied with an accessory wearing its
most rebellious uniform. But what can
be more conforming—living by
a label or dying by one?

But of course I looked so plain
and boring by trying to be respectful.
They saw one thing about him and
attributed all those 65 years to
it. A patch on a vest.

Because when he was 21, not 50, he
sat in a lawn chair on the back
porch with my grandpa. Drinking cocktails, smoking packs,
shootin’ the shit. Never once did he wonder
if his funeral would be a fashion show
loud enough to make his life a cliché.

*

Yay bulleted lists!

PWRFL POWER!

In case you haven't heard of him, I'll give you the info.

A while back I got 2 EP's in at WJCU entitled Electrified Fruits and Extra Ball. Homemade looking things are usually terrible so I wasn't expecting much when I popped the first one in. The first song "It's Okay" came on and I was immediately hooked. Using Google all I could find on Kaz was that he had recently won a contest in Seattle that got him a starring role in an Esurance commercial. Strange. That was it, so I added him on Myspace. Last month I caught him at a CMJ showcase at Crash Mansion along with about 5 other people, and he played a lot of new songs. He was possibly the only person I saw at CMJ that didn't have a computer on stage doing half the work for him. It was kind of refreshing. Oh yeah, plus sometimes he sings in Japanese. But just a little bit.

So, I hope you check Pwrfl Power out. Here's his Myspace, and make sure to check out his top friends. You'll see my face!

Oh, and of course, here's the Esurance commercial:



♪♪♪

NaBloPoMo?

Yes, that's right. It's National Blog Posting Month once again. This will probably be my only post for the whole month, but that's okay right? This is my one evening of effort. But actually, it's not much effort since I'm just going to copy and paste some stuff below. Poetry, that is. So, I guess I should start off with what I've been up to as of late.

I took the GRE last weekend. It was effing terrible. 'Nuff said. I've been working on my graduate school applications off and on. I've got 4 going right now and just have to work out some stuff with my "statement" and such so I can get my recommendations rolling. My goal is before Thanksgiving break. That's next Wednesday. The writing sample I am going to use is a paper due next Monday for my 19th Century American Literature class. It's a 10-12 page/7 sources paper on Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Nathaniel Hawthorne's crazy short story "Wakefield." It's all about how the men in both texts think they're in control of the women, but they're so obsessed them that they're actually the ones being controlled. It's the only thing I've actually cared to work on for a while. Everything else has been pretty awful. My Philosophy of Music and Philosophy & The Holocaust classes have been taking all of the life out of me. They're just plain awful and both ridiculously writing/reading intensive.

A former John Carroll student is doing the JET programme right now (luckyyy) and hooked all of the advanced Japanese students (5 of us) up with high school pen pals. Mine is Manami and she's seventeen and has been taking English for her whole life. She wrote me a few weeks ago and I sent her a letter back last week. She writes in English with a P.S. in Japanese and I write in Japanese with a P.S. in English. It's good that she wrote first because then I knew how much decorating I had to do on mine. A lot.

Since my poetry midterm portfolio I haven't spent any time writing poems. I got a little burned out and because the entire class is absent just about every day and never does anything I just follow suit. But I (finally) got the portfolio back today (a month later?) along with a big A- so I figured I would post a couple of the poems from it. Once again, I'm not a poet. Don't hold this against me.

*

The Seesaw

My great-great Grandfather was a lumberjack
In the hills of West Virginia.
Those were the days of plaid shirts,
Pipes filled to the brim with tobacco,
Moonshine, and two-man saws.

His suspenders kept his pants up,
And his mouth kept on puffing,
But it was his hands and arms that worked
One end of the jagged and curved beast.

Its teeth stuck out for inches
And prided themselves for their sharpness.
Each one placed specifically and designed
To rid the earth of Mother Nature.

The wooden handles left blisters, then calluses
while the man on the other end was so in rhythm
With him that they had the same heartbeat,
As they sang the same song.

But now the saw hangs above my fireplace
Above pictures of me in wooden frames. Made in China.
Not only decoration, or dare I say antique
But the end of America, or what it once was.

Rock and Bite

The day he retired he drove his car
Into the woods and proclaimed, “I will never
Drive again!” He took the rocking chair
Out of the house and onto the porch.

He sat there for years, eating candy bars
And sharing them with my Pops if he was good.
He rocked and talked while looking at the trees,
And breathing in the fresh West Virginia air.

But what did he do for all of those years?
Eat chocolate, rock, and just enjoy the same scenery?
Wood creaking with every rock,
Blood sugar rising with every bite.

Until his stroke, and my grandfather
To follow in his footsteps, and that rocking
Chair rocking slowly in the front if my fireplace
In the wrong neck of the woods.

*

So, before I go- 1 more thing. Or 2. Check out Nomenclature and KateSpace who are actually participating in NaBloPoMo. And also, hello, is there anybody out there?

しのクラス

Writing fifteen pages of poems for a midterm is an overall bad idea. I can't really work on just one or two and I'm desperately looking around trying to find an idea. I'm excited for this to just be over...
But I figured I would take a break and post one here. Mind you, I'm not a writer and especially not a poet. I'm just taking this class as an elective/for fun. I thought it would be easier than it has turned out to be. Boo! But I'm pretty sure with all of the major loser Freshman in there with me what I've got the highest grade. Anyways, enough of my disclaimer. Here's mah shi:

*

The Extraction

Jaws filled to the brim with gauze,
And dried tears down my blowfish
Cheeks, I walked into a holding room
Where bright lights cued the pain.

The foreign objects (evolution gone wrong)
Were no longer a part of me.
Like little babies cut from the womb
Unable to make their proper exit route,
They now lay inanimate and covered
In after birth. Roots all twisty and turny,
Curled around as if they had been little feet
Dancing
Within my face.

What a party! I was only invited to it
The morning after when all that remained
Were empty sockets and a hangover
Strong enough to last a good two weeks.

*

So that's it. Wonderful, right? I'm being sarcastic. Now I'm off to finish the rest of this junk. Wish me luck, Tuesday I will be in NYC trying to forget about all of this.

Note: The word for poetry in Japanese is "shi" and it's one letter- し. Cute?

CMJ 2008

Here's what I'm up to next week. I'll be in NYC from Tuesday through Sunday. Maybe I'll even take some pictures for once. Here's what's on the game plan so far:







See you there.

Letterboxing?

What?

Well, while perusing Lake View Cemetery today I saw something blue peeking out from a pile of rocks at the bottom of a tree stump. I asked Ryan to open this thing up afraid of what would pop out. I figured it was drugs or condoms but then seeing a notebook figured it might be a diary or secret notes (!!!). What it ended up being was a little notebook that had been there for 2 years and was completely filled with stamps and writing from tons of different people. On the inside of the lid it said to go to Letterboxing.org if found accidentally and to please put it back in its original spot. How odd.

Anyways, I don't really know what to think of this. It's quite strange that I saw the box within the tree/rocks to begin with especially after reading the long instructions on how to find this specific box on the website. It's like a little time capsule I found. Worst of all the notebook was full. Should I go put a new one in the box? Am I getting sucked into this weird cult? THIS is the page for the specific letterbox. Maybe I'll "contact the placer." Regardless, I'm off to a hockey game and will have to continue these thoughts later...

ぞうさん、ぞうさん

ぞうさん、ぞうさん
おはなが長いのね
そうよ母さんも
ながいのよ

ぞうさん、ぞうさん
だれが好きなの
あのね母さんが
好きなのよ。

We've been singing children's songs in my Advanced Japanese class. This is a traditional song about an elephant. Roughly translated:

Mr.Elephant, Mr.Elephant
Your nose is long, you know?
That's right, my mom's is
long too.

Mr.Elephant, Mr.Elephant,
Who do you love?
Ah, it's my mother
That I love!

I'm guessing his mother got killed for her tusks. Or am I just thinking too deep into it? And in case you wonder, here's a 1989 creepy kids show with the song. Embedding is disabled so here's the link: clicky.

Misc.

1. Bicycles are time machines,
As he rides he appears to be
From any era.

, or, my poetry class is ridiculous. 'nuff said.

2. なんでやね？！ Learning Japanese isn't the same without learning Kansai-ben simultaneously. There's no phrase that can live up to "Chauchau chau n chau?" or, "It isn't a Chow Chow dog isn't it?"

3. Rachel Ray's Carbonara recipe! Gives you can excuse to drink the rest of the bottle of wine used for cooking and possibly even some more.

The Teenagers

Okay, so this may be a little outdated... I'm alright with that though.

Homecoming:

ポエム

At first I was bummed that I had to stay home tonight and miss a promising show at the grog shop as well as my other half, but then I came upon reading this. After reading some shitty Hawthorne short story as well as some old wordy Arendt Totalitarianism junk earlier today this was like a breath of fresh air. Ahhhh... Enjoy.

Variation on the Word "Sleep"

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.

-Margaret Atwood
Courtesy of this website

うん、ううん、うん、ううん。。。 あの。。。

School starts Tuesday. One of my professors shot me an e-mail in June with a list of 8 books to buy and 1 to read before the class started. So of course 2 months later I'm trying to plow through it. Here we go again procrastination. This is what I'm up against this semester:

EN 301 - Intro Poetry Writing Workshop.
EN 371 - 19th Century American Literature.
EN 488 - History of the English Language.
JP 301 - Advanced Japanese.
PL 398 - Philosophy of Music.
PL 450 - Seminar: Philosophy & the Holocaust.

So the summer is ending although I've been pretty much over it for a while now. I quit my job of a year and a half at Aladdin's but will soon be back to my poorly paying work study job and my non-paying job at WJCU.

Books I've read over the summer? Not as many as I had lined up. Kafka on the Shore and After Dark by Haruki Murakami, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Currently: War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust by Doris Bergen.

Flipping through my old Genki book I found a column where I appropriately wrote "wtf!". There are 6 words for wife in Japanese. I've forgotten what little I have learned.

But this is it for now. I'm sure I will have nothing interesting to blog about but I will do it anyway as opposed to the last few months of silence. You can suffer through my boring blog or just not read it? Yes. Now I will leave you with a few of my favorite back to school material goods.

-Moleskine 18 month planner. Like a Bible.
-Cardigans! Sloppy yet smart.
-Eco-friendly pencils. My cat likes these. I only have 4 left.

スカンクツロニクス

(Update: iTunes updated yet again and all of my problems are gone. I must have not been the only one.)

Thanks to the iTunes update I'm now incapable of plugging in my iPod or putting a CD in without my computer freezing. This led me to my old CD cases and the millions of burned discs with pink bubbly teenage letters all over them. I feel like I'll be telling my grandkids one day, "One time there was this thing called Napster and you could get whatever you wanted on the Internets for free and then we put the stuff on CD and called it burning!" Because of all of the free time I had back then (oh, those teenage years) and all of the crappy punk rock I listened to (everything imaginable), I have about 5 versions of every song ever written by bands such as, Yellowcard, Thursday, The Early November, and of course Blink-182. I'm super weird about demos and usually like them tons more than the real thing. Lo-fi non-polished music is just a lot easier for my ears to adore.

Anyways, along this nostalgic journey I ran across some local stuff from when I was in middle school and early high school. It's hard for me to even fathom all of those bands and let alone shows that were around the area back then. So I put the CD's into my record player and listened to a lot of shitty stuff but stuff that makes you want to smile, dance and get rowdy. Rubber Cement, Howaboutno, Imperfect, Katty Whompus... Anyways, to make a long story short I ended up listening to the whole Skanktronics album and then remembering their video for Circuit to the Sun. Low and behold, I find the thing on youtube. It's a real masterpiece, let me tell you. So here it is:

夢の日本

So I usually try not to post ridiculous things which actually results in me not posting at all, but I had this amazingly weird dream last night which I feel needs mentioning even though it's all over the place.

So I was back in Japan, or so I figure it was because I was traveling with this dance team. We were performing this huge routine on a frozen lake and I was having problems with my tap routine because I kept slipping on the ice. Anyway, our team was famous because we made the biggest human pyramid ever. I was on the bottom holding this thing together and there were millions of people on top of me. We were right by a pier where people were watching us.

Anyways, I was pissed we had to stay up really late doing activities with the team because I had just seen an ad in a magazine that they had okonomiyaki at Arby's in Okayama. Apparently Okayama is a prefecture above Shikoku which I really wanted to visit at one time but also am reading craziness about in Kafka on the Shore right now. Anyways, it didn't even look like okonomiyaki. It was just waffle fries wrapped up in pita. I have no idea.

So to make a long story short, I ended up going to some place that I have had dreams about before. It's a big fancy hall type place with dark wooden walls and furniture that caters specifically for American's staying in Japan. So I was with Drew and we ate and talked to an old man who ended up having to pay for us because we didn't have any cash in our pockets. I wanted to become a server in this place. This money problem resulted in me having to search to find a Post Office ATM. This of course made us end up in the underground maze of malls which is Namba in Osaka. Eventually I found one and returned to this amazing food place with 2,000 Yen for the old man.

♪The above picture was taken yesterday on a walk in 90 degree heat. The cottonwood trees decided to go nuts which resulted in it snowing in Ohio in summertime. That's my annoying dog Gomez.

夏のミックステープ

I made a mix for summer but the Internet refuses to let me put it up. I think this all stems back to how much Metallica sucks, right? Well, here's the track list anyways because it was good stuff.

Tracks:
1. Frightened Rabbit - The Modern Leper
2. Animal Collective - Water Curses
3. Foals - Cassius
4. M83 - Kim & Jessie
5. French Kicks - Over The World
6. Los Campesinos! - Don't Tell Me To Do The Math(s)
7. Flowers Forever - Wet Diamonds
8. Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin - Modern Mystery
9. New Bloods - The Cycle Song

どうして？

The end is near and I'm about to write my last paper for Late 18th Century Literature. I just read the prompt and realized that out of all of my classes this semester I might just miss it the most. Okay, maybe not miss but it may have been the most memorable. Note that there is a choice between these two prompts but they are exactly the same.

Prompt:

Choice one: A la Tristram Shandy: You are to write a personal response to a writer or work that we have taken in this course. The response, however, being personal, requires you to explain yourself to the reader. You should account for why this particular writer or work is the one you chose rather than any of the others that you could have chosen, and this leads you to other topics, never allowing you to return to the original topic, though you are aware that the assignment requires you to discuss the chosen topic. In other words, you are to create an essay in which the digression from the topic becomes the essay. 5-7 pages.

Choice two: A la Tristram Shandy: you are to start writing an essay on any writer we have taken for this course, but the writing or the writer reminds you of something else, the something else being something that you have been meaning to discuss. In other words, your writing divers from its topic, but the diversion becomes the essay. 5-7 pages.

So, my professor has been teaching at John Carroll for 40 years and he's taking a sabbatical next semester to ride his bike in South America. He obviously does not want to waste his time reading boring scholarly papers. I'm alright with that.

女と男!

In my Feminist Philosophies class I dream of having 8 children while others raise their hands and preach that marriage and even love are social constructs. By 8 I mean 10 or 12. I'd live on a farm and when my hubby and I were not fulfilling our normal roles as mother and father (and surely female and male), we would also be the family teachers, doctors, chefs and artists.

The girls and I would cook wonderful food all day and sew and dance in between meals whether it be inside with all of the windows open or outside in the pure sunlight with our armpits naturally smelling awful (but happy nonetheless). The older girls would be playing instruments in the kitchen with the cats resting on top of the refrigerator batting their paws at the loud noises and nonchalantly grabbing our sleeves as we walk by. Or maybe they would be reading Descartes or Hemingway out on the porch in my great-great grandfathers rocker that earlier they had decided to Mod Podge with old newspapers. I would be teaching the younger ones how to make food from all of the goodies we gathered out of the garden earlier in the day. Practical Chemistry and Mathematics. A couple would make juice or run out to milk the cow. They would knead dough, churn butter and throw food at each other. I, too would be learning from this whole experience with a fist-full of flour flying out of my hand. Domesticity, love, freshly sewn skimpy dresses, womanhood! The dog would lick up our messes and we'd give him ponytails.

Dad would be fulfilling his manly roles, of course. These would consist of little chores around the house early in the day with the boys and maybe a trip out to the woods to do some reading and writing in the late afternoon before supper. They would make mud pies and talk about flowers and trees while learning all of their proper names. Maybe they would be reading the Wonders of the East or the Vercelli Homilies in Old English. Loud and proud. They would carve their names into trees using katakana and possibly take some acrylics out there with them and paint simple yet lovely things on rocks and leaves. I'd send the enormous, shaggy, dirty but lovable dog out to gather up the men whenever the girls and I were finished setting the house up for dinner. We would do an extremely quick cleaning job while listening to music from my youth and letting the birds fly around the living room and eat freshly picked strawberries. Cleaning up old messes and creating new but not caring a bit.

After dinner some of us would read aloud, some would run off to finish making the wine we have been working on for a while. If it was cold we would use the kotatsu and fall asleep under it with all of the cats in the middle by our feet. The others would be playing with the new kittens that were just born out in the hayloft. Maybe the boys would mix a few things up and blow up a wall or spend the night up in their tree house. We'd dance and play the omnichord. Always something new, always something to learn from one another. Always fulfilling the roles of onna and otoko and loving every minute of our sexualities and "oppressions."