hot and wet

When I thought about blogging during the last 40-plus hours since I last slept, I planned to call the first post "long day's journey into night," but as I sit down to write the title above seems more appropriate. Theoretically it isn:t any hotter here than in WI, but it's so humid and there's no airconditioning anywhere....But enough whining.

It's so strange and cool to be back here, 18 years after my first visit, 13 years since my last...everything looks different through the eyes of a 34-year-old....

it's funny to contemplate how very little I know about anything, and how very much I used to think I knew....

At the same time, so many little concrete material things are so ordinary and familiar....

It's like revisiting a familiar country that has been entirely repopulated by people who speak a different language. But it's not about language--I speak the language almost as well now as I did when I lived here, in some ways better thanks to all the classes etc.

It's about the fact that my assumptions are vastly different, assumptions about what I know, understand, --what people were thinking, whether they were good or bad human beings, what the culture was all about...

Another weird aspect: I was as happy here as I'd ever been, but since then I've been much, much happier.

Well, I:ve been looking forward to a Japanese bath for the last 40-plus hours, so off to have one.

Before I keel over in the friggin' lobby.