- my war paint is sharpie ink -

...well, if I was sunburnt on the 21st, I'm extremely so today. The day (birthday!) spent cycling and swimming on tiny Taketomi Island was wonderful, and everyone was really sweet about it being my birthday. But, ow. One of my friends compared the colour of my back to roast beef - a little crude but not far off the truth, sadly! Still, despite coral scrapes and terrible burns, if Hokkaido was chill, Okinawa was epic.

We had the perfect number to travel with, and our hijinks - from beach photo shoots to being chased with sea cucumbers to izakaya hilarities always brought about uproarious laughter. It was definitely one of my busiest holidays; in retrospect, hard to believe that we did all that we did in four days! We were always moving (when we weren't sleeping, that is.)

...perhaps a little heavy on the conbini-food intake, but it gave us tons of time to make human pyramids in front of classic castles and race down the coast to watch whale sharks in a massive aquarium. Sea, sun, sand, and the occasional car of gorgeous J-guys? No complaints here! ^^

It was a holiday of scenic routes and rally stages (on car and on bike for both of the above, much to everyone's amusement); of epic omiyage shopping - largely on Naha's Kokusai-dori, as we dashed from awning to awning in the midst of a tropical storm. Of finding the most authentic tacos we could (some of them came with instructions on how to eat them, I kid you not.) It was a holiday of dancing, of wandering, of shared smiles, of laughter, of teamwork, of evil navi systems and of more snapshots than I can imagine.

Good times. Now to get around to posting those pictures!

- measure me in metered lines and one decisive stare -

There's nothing quite like going to Tokyo Station and just... sitting and people watching to reassure you that despite satellites and the Internet and trains breaking 300 kph that the world remains a massive and wonderfully dynamic place. A thousand protagonists to a thousand different stories have walked past me; some notice me, most do not - some stand out, others blend in.

There was a kid with spiky hair and a bright red bag who stood in a way that practically begged to be drawn, there was a young woman in ruffly white who was so pale and ephemeral that her Coach bag seemed the most solid thing about her. There are my pillar-mates - the cowboy with his boots (heels and all) and brutally short hair, there's the quiet businessman who hasn't got off his cell phone (or said a word) in the past ten minutes.

I could write an essay on the shoes alone, or how the echo and boom of the trains below shake the station like clockwork earthquakes.

I could probably write a thousand essays and not scratch the surface of this bustling, bowing, enigmatic city - but this will have to suffice for now.

♥


circumnavigate this body of wonder and uncertainty
armed with every precious failure
(and amateur cartography)
I'm breathing deep before
I spread those maps out on my bedroom floor
(and I'm leaning on this broken fence
between past and present tense)

- the weakerthans, 'aside'
(...I just like the ring of it)

- that solo's awful long, but it's a good refrain -

...right now, this song just about says it all. Am I amused it takes place in a school? A little.




Living. Breathing. Finished two books in two weeks - more than I've read in the past two months somehow, and that's embarrassing. House of Leaves was alternately solid and scary - a pain to read with all the turning of the book (seriously) that you have to do sometimes, but tragic and twisted and ultimately well-written. Wow. Comparatively, Murakami's South of the Border, West of the Sun was a breeze, but I'm going to re-read it because there's a lot beneath its surface.

...coming from Canada, it's a strange thing to read about places you know - when the character talks about pursuing a mysterious woman through Aoyama, I know the streets he's talking about. When he mentions Hakone, I wonder if my upcoming school trip will take me under similar trees. It makes me wonder how people feel who have grown up in cities that are heavily chronicled - London, Tokyo, oh, poor Paris...

On one hand I envy that their cities and their histories are so well-told and twisted around into a million different inadvertent autobiographies. On the other, it gives me hope that maybe I can find one of my own for where I first called home.