Personality changes

Some personality changes have been creeping up on me since moving to Japan.  A couple I noticed within the first few months.  I used to not care about small dogs, but now I'm secretly obsessed with long-haired dachsunds. (they don't walk, they just flow!)  I used to have an active dislike for babies but now I want all the half-asian babies to be mine.  I have growing preference for girls who are tiny and overly cute (as in the pop sensation AKB48, which makes me feel ooky inside because they're mostly of legal age but their appeal is looking and acting like high school girls.)  Please reference also one of my roommates, Teru-chan, who is older than me but tiny and adorable.  I often remind her to study hard for her high-school entrance exams.

All of these changes are innocuous enough, and not that surprising given the abundance of small and cute in Japan.  (Although my fascination with AKB48--unabashedly one of the most over-produced, fake, devoid of talent pop creations out there--is disturbing in its own right.)

A couple bigger things, though...  I had said for years I would never never never want to live in Tokyo.  Ever.  Too big, too impersonal, too much rush hour.  But now I'm having to take back a couple of those "never"s.

I started thinking about it first for the work commute - I'm probably looking at a 40 minute door-to-door commute (at best) once I start in September.  Its honestly not that bad considering I currently do close to an hour each way to school, but its not something I would want to keep up forever.  (This coming from the Spokane boy who used to think driving fifteen minutes to the valley was unfathomably far.  Distance perception has honestly been one of the biggest changes.)

But beyond that, I'm suddenly discovering there's a lot of stuff to do in Tokyo.  In the past couple of weeks I've suddenly been going out much more than I did during first semester (when I didn't have enough money to buy blankets for my new apartment, haha).  Part of it is that I have money not only to buy blankets but also enough to go out.  Part of it has a lot to do with me now knowing more people outside of the foreign student bubble, and in turn part of that is a recent break-through in my own language ability.  It's only recently that I've felt I've reached a casual fluency (very different than the academic and specialized fluency we study in school) that actually allows me to express some degree of my authentic personality.  Eli is no longer so quite so polite and taciturn, and as a result Eli has a lot more fun.

Something I really struggled with was the language limitation - my arguments in class were previously limited by my clumsy ability to string words together, resulting in a lot of half-developed reasoning and generalizations.  I had been aware of that for a while, but I was becoming more and more aware of how that same limitation also stunted my reasoning, not to mention my social and emotional expression.  (This is probably why I got so addicted to facebook recently, as my one chance to unleash a perfectly crafted status update that casually wields humor and insight.)  But now, I'm getting closer and closer to a point where I actually sound like me in Japanese.

And somehow that sense of self affects my sense of place: My idea of Tokyo is now very different from my previous image, an impersonal dichotomy of depressed Japanese salarymen commuting to work and ignorant, spoiled foreigners clubbing in Roppongi.  As I'm getting past more of my personal barriers, it looks like a lot more places and opportunities are opening up.
 

Anyway.  More important than anything else I have otherwise discussed here: I ate a pudding the size of my head.  Please play this song for inspiration while gazing upon my photos and thinking glorious thoughts of pudding.

PURI PURI!  PURI PURI!

Preparing to extract the pudding into a pie dish.

Pudding brings joy to everyone!

Obligatory photos of puddingy goodness