Bright Lights; Bigger City

Takin apart my first bike in two years, it's as much of a question mark as it was with that dusty rusty Schwinn cruiser....but this time there's no co-op, no wall of wrenches! Which I miss! It's just me in a parking lot behind my apartment, squeezed between a rice paddy and Surprise Land. K-pop in my headphones makes this place as bumpin' as a gay bar, though, and I look pretty dykey so I guess it all fits.

Been seriously debating the role of the city in my identity. Like, what am I when people can't sneer that I'm a city girl.....just a dummy in a tank top with a weird haircut. Been trying to embrace that dummy this week. And having a surprisingly hard time. Doesn't help that I got wasted with students at a BBQ and karaoke and had to struggle with a terrible hangover my only other day off this week.

So I guess I'll have to wait and see
But I'm just gonna let something brand new happen to me

So this week it's been "deny the city, deny that girl, she's in Chicago, she's in Dakar. She's far as sin, so forget about her for a year and live this new life."
And of course LOVE this new life, too.

I been livin for the weekend
But no not anymore

And for a moment finally, I felt relieved....I can sit on my ass covered in dirt in a parking lot next to a rice farmer sowin' his rice paddy, and realize I don't have the right size wrench to pull apart a bike I got for free out of a student's garage.

But I thought about something really fucking awesome. That I want to want the city too, and that it's okay that I'm excited to be there this weekend.

And it may just be more of the same
But sometimes you wanna go where everyone knows your name

So shout out to my little sister, who's way wiser to me, and who brought me around to these thoughts with a bit of SICK pop music, thank you cee lo.


And it's alright
It's alright
Bright lights and the big city


Now Friday's cool
But there's somethin about Saturday night
You can't say what you won't do
Cuz you know that you just might
I'm alive this evening
It was love at first sight
This Saturday
And every Saturday for the rest of my life



And everyone's standin in line
Yeah lookin good and lookin for a real good time
So I'll never have to wonder if
I'll have someone to share all of this with




Yes I need it
Everybody does
Cocktails and conversation
Music and making love

Suwa-neazy me-eazy: A confession.

Torn between two lifestyles again—

ONE: there’s the first grader that wants to only live in books, with dynasties, and misguided evil-doers and charismatic, wise old tutors and lifelong kinship with horses, etc and TWO: that every-second-is-lent-to-you-by-luck to enable your personal efforts to slow the snowballing of pandemic poverty, so act accordingly, efficaciously and in good taste.

Suwa-shi is the most selfish place I’ve ever lived, THAT’S for sure. I have health insurance, I throw away leftovers, and I live alone, journal alone, read alone and catch up on the social media I missed as a kid…alone. I’m fascinated, entertained.
What do I remember from my youth?
The day I stopped shopping in the sci-fi, fantasy section. What a painful, terrible memory—like the moment you’re sent to military boarding school and your future is decided forever until the day you sit down in the middle of war and think “what am I doing, and who is it that brought me here?”.

I have a confession to make: I’m a nerdy-ass, super not-cool, sci-fi idiot….the kind that weeps!
Out of desperation that I’m not descended from gods, that I wasn’t orphaned as a kid only to discover later my latent destiny to revive the magic of mankind. I have been in mourning since the day I first put my butt down on the carpet in the Young Adult section of the public library.






I, Olivia, prefer my books today; and movies that take place on planets with beautiful people and righteous royalty…… what makes my books a stranger fiction than what people think about Burma or Tibet or the Arizona border, or child-sex-tourism...all of it is unreal to somebody--most of it is stuff we only read about anyway. Today, let's not feed anybody, let's fall asleep in a heavy fog and wake up with a certainty that this story ends delightfully.

I’ve been in unrequited love with so many facets of a turning page for too long, it's embarassing. I’ve just finally stopped being overwhelmed at the sight of the next blank page, the end of a book, like a genocide; the end of a thousand breathing lives! The melodrama delights me!

This was supposed to be a blog about my love of magic—my little sister’s AP tests are over, and her summer is about to start. She got a job as a lifeguard at a little pool in BG. I want her to run through a meadow and get sunburned and get tan lines and poison ivy and build a tree house and fish in a pond and jump in, and chew stalks of grass and feel the breeze and find a cause (and I hope it’s rooted in magic) but that’s too ambitious. a woman’s shelter, or the kid’s cancer unit….those things, I hear are magical.
I’m just afraid for my baby sister, who is living in a big house in a big suburb, and she doesn’t read sci-fi. How will she ever know that there’s magic all around if she doesn’t hear it whispering in her ear late at night with a flash light and a book just a little too close to her face.

One Piece; Monkī Dī Rufi

otherwise known as Monkey D. Luffy of the Mugiwara Pirates, or "麦わら海賊団" or Straw Hat Pirates.
He has a lot of friends, and this manga is about how much he'll do for them. He's sort of brainless and goofy and falls asleep at serious times, but his rage when his friends are threatened is sort of primordial and weird, but sweet.

Shout out to my Guatemala crew, my rugby family, to tequila sundays, to "how lucky we are", to taranga ji and brut and the ever-strong baobab, to mosques, and the call to prayer, to Model U.N. to Children's Day and the Solidarity Movement and all the strangers that have put me on a train or lent me a cell phone or laughed when I wiped out on the street.

Manga has a weird role here in Japanese culture, it's like the animated versions of Japanese selves that can never be. Fascinating, for sure. Definitely another weird side of Japaneaziness. But I'd be lying if I said America doesn't have it's own "manga fantasies". (Bad Girl's Club, America's Next Top Whatever, Real Life: I'm on crack, whatever whatever)

To pirates! :D


To the longevity of friendships started in dire circumstances, and what friendship isn't !?

Olivia

This is the way I live.

you know why time moves so strangely in japan, like so fast, and so slow, is because i can't read anything on the streets. it's all kanji symbols and katakana and slashes and dots, and so it's like i live on a sim city grid, and it's amazing and it's like a gift, as if time isn't happening for me this year....or rather, it's as if time is finally functioning as i need it to....without me in it.

it takes me two hours at the grocery store in the tomato aisle, thinking, today do i buy local or do i buy organic--organic: they say they don't use pesticides, but the trucks that transported them here caused enough air pollution to make bad their organic promise. BAM. do i choose water pollution or air pollution today, plus local farmers tend to have higher attention to social consciousness, so do i support them even if they used some OFF on the vines this year? Or should I just pick the tomatoes with the least packaging, because styrofoam is disasterous and embarassing to use....
but here it takes me a bewildered 30 seconds--to pick some tomatoes that are less than 100 yen and are probably genetically modified as is the japanese fashion--incessant genetic modification; everything modification.

it's not a good way to live, it's not the way i want to live, guessing, living, being, chillin. but it's a break, and i need it, and I'm grateful to pollute and be wasteful and a non-functioning slob of an idealist that lost her way.

it's like a day trip, this year. wholly intended to have no purpose, other than to fertilize the seed of the other side of this day.

and while I'm here, I'm learning how to buy tupperware and keep paper in folders, and have cool pencil cases and highlighters that erase, and manage a phone bill, and to buy too many shoes and talk less, and sing more, and more badly, and be at work 15 minutes early, and wear a white collar for a little while. those aren't the most important things I'm learning....I guess that would be learning how to live quietly, silently even, conversing constantly and amiably with myself. In short, my lack of input in this kanji world of rose blush and digitally magnified eyeballs makes for an exotic and revolutionary output in myself that is teaching me to breath and make decisions, and THAT is the most important thing I am learning in Japan. It's the land of not making decisions, of not having an opinion, and of not foresaking thy families or the clock.

And for me, someone living in the bloodied shadow of contrition, I am thankful to learn the little Japanese things, like a love for compartmentalization and efficiency.

And I shall be the most organized sociopath in the whole world, am I right, Maggie? :) Che started off in medical school. Malcolm X worked in an ice cream shop in Harlem. And even Chelsea Handler was a virgin once.

With much love and attention,
This is the way I live,

what and when will be my motorcycle diaries?

today i watched the motorcycle diaries, not indie, i know, but all the same, i quietly wept in my bed (my futon) for a people of chile that were thrown out landless into desperate means and baseless lives on which to feed their children in the 60's.
i then thought about, and wept more, quietly, about a people in afghanistan numbed by bombs and then i realized i was really weeping that im not seeing and meeting them, but instead, a muted and bored civilization alienated by their island life.





so you see, im weeping for me, that i am not there but here and as always, the tragedy is lost on a girl whose biggest luxury is reckless travel.

"how is it I feel nostalgia for a world I never knew"

Japaneazy queezy!

Moved from Senegal to Champaign to Chicago to Japan since I've last blogged. Expect more ideas from Suwa-shi coming up!

Serena Williams; Black Venus

Check out some of these comments I found beneath the video:

That's fucking rank

disgusting. she looks like a fucking ape.

and

thats nasty....on so many levels...

They are just a few of the startlingly abrasive and relatively anonymous sound-bites we get from the youtube-viewing community, which, among others, includes us.

Hall is correct in naming it the "Spectacle" of the Other because exactly what we can see is a showy demonstration of revulsion (or) hate (or) antagonism which implicates a sense of separation, distance and a violent attempt at distinction.

Hall asks why “difference is so compelling a theme, so contested, an area of representation”—but difference is of course a necessitated result of representation. And I just want to call out some of these overconfident and out-of-line commentators. The act of representation is identifying that which is outside of oneself. But marking something as different, exotic, strange or distinctive is actually a reaction to a thing’s comparability—to oneself! One doesn’t need to differentiate a table from oneself; a table doesn’t have the same shape that I do, nor does it communicate to other tables in the way that I communicate to other humans. I can’t draw parallels between the table’s urban and rural communities in the way I do for my own. Tables don’t walk, they don’t talk, and I can reasonably wait for a distant point in the future for the day that I may be suspicious of the table, itself, marking these same differences between us.

But as much as I insist I don’t look Chinese or Jamaican or even “American”, there is enough of myself that I see in the strange and separate “other” that I must mark it, forcibly, intentionally, and in some cases as we see, violently, as “different”.

So you, you-tube subscriber, that insists on the nastiness of this crazy black lady as someone that, presumably, lacks nastiness.....I suggest a moment's reflection on how quickly you've turned off those who will automatically assume your complete idiocy, even if, for them, they are doing so from a "completely different" and maybe even pretentious elevated level of scholastic open-mindedness. :)