Last weekend was partly fun (Halloween party with our kids, pre-teen and teen) and partly melancholic (4th year anniversary of my mother’s untimely death from cancer).
But even before then, I just wasn’t feeling all that great. Not sick. Just sort of…not with it. On autopilot, kind of.
Now that fall is well and truly here, the pollen is going away and the skies are clearing.
Hoping I’ll find my muse again.
And, no, I’m not going to write anything about Twitter, elections, or crazy beliefs in satanic rituals making a comeback among the bonkers-crazy folk of my home country. Way too easy.
Includes such favorites as “pyke notte thyne errys nothyr thy nostrellys” and “spette not ovyr thy tabylle.”
Oh, and there’s some stuff by Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, i.e., Alice in Wonderland) and Axel Scheffler (The Gruffalo), among many others.
Two days ago I celebrated Thanksgiving Day, or as we call it, Turkey Day, with my relatives in the US. It was the first time for me to do so in over 20 years.
The myths about the holiday are well-known, so I won’t waste time relating them here (most Americans are happy to go on pretending the “Pilgrim Fathers” started this when really it’s just an excuse for a four-day weekend of stuffing yourself, watching football, and shopping).
In our case, it was the first holiday since my mother passed away. The next two will be even harder. But the oft-trite is oft-true: it was as if the empty chair at the long table was filled with her presence. This year was different.
A passing of the family torch. Dinner at my sister’s house, dessert with her in-laws. Boardgames with aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews. Family stories with grandpa. Skype with the grandkids overseas. Most of us drove seven or eight hours roundtrip just to spend one day together.
The grieving process continues. So does life. You can’t pick your relatives, but in some case you get real lucky.
Is it wrong to post something when nothing’s really been going on?
Well, not exactly nothing nothing. What I mean is, nothing particularly special.
Just work, family, day to day routines.
Influenza. Type B. (Not me, my daughter.)
Preparing materials for class. Doing it again. And again.
Trying to write. Failing epically. Zoning out on YouTubes on Ancient Greece and the Hittites (I’m on a big Hittite kick right now for some reason).
Finally getting to see the new Blade Runner at a friend’s house on Bluray (with kids it’s almost impossible to watch movies I want to see).
Practicing guitar for the first time in nearly a year. Then doing it every day a week straight. For 10 minutes at a time. (Before being told “Daddy, that’s noisy.”)
At the beginning of the month, I found out that my science fiction novella/novellette Adam’s Stepsons had won an award (Readers’ Favorite). The next day, I was selected as a Featured Author by BookWorks. And then less than a week later, Adam’s Stepsons got another award, this time Finalist for Best Novella by the Independent Authors’ Network. Inspired, I worked on my next SF novel and got the word count up to around 25,000.
Pretty cool.
And then it started to rain.
And rain.
And kept raining. For about eight to nine days straight. Mold everywhere in the house: the entranceway, the hall, the bath, the kids’ bedroom, even our little library nook (which doubles as my writing room/man cave).
Yuck.
And then (not done with us yet!) the typhoon came. No damage for us but plenty for some of my colleagues and neighbors up north in Kyoto and Gifu.
Our daughter’s sports festival – her last at the nursery school, in which she gets to play snare drum in a marching band – was delayed, and then cancelled.
Then both kids got sick. Waking up several times a night, coughing with stuffy noses, and still having to get up early each morning (6 – 6:30) for school and work for all four of us.
The Month of the Gods (神無月) became the Month without Gods (無 = na (of) as well as naki (without)). As if suddenly abandoned.
So it’s fitting that after only two days of sun, October will end with yet another typhoon. Yikes.
Probably a glancing blow, but the heavy rain that accompanies the storm will no doubt scuttle our plans for a Halloween party for our kids and their friends. It may inspire some writing, however.
In my blog about child-care and child-raising, I’ve written about cooking food with my kids and growing vegetables in our backyard garden. I grew up in a small countryside village (total pop. of about 3,000 if you include the three-quarters of the county that the township comprises), so this meant lots of land that could be used for growing green things. At home in Japan, I’ve tried to recreate what I can of my childhood backyard; that said, it’s of course impossible given that my parents’ land is at least four times the size of my property (even in rural Japan, land is not cheap, and often not even for sale).
Try to image this scene on Mars…outside a greenhouse…
No doubt this is a main reason why I chose to include a scene in Approaching Twi-Night where the main character’s family relationships are first described by his meeting his father and brother in their backyard garden. Although unlike my own father, the father in the novel is somewhat incompetent as a farmer…
Now that I’m beginning to turn my writing attention to other-worldly venues like the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere, I wonder how humanity would survive in environments that had no vegetation, where they had no access to fresh fruit and vegetables, where survival would depend on food rations and pre-prepared freeze-dried kits or soy-based products. Food flavor would be entirely chemical-based (even more than it already is, I mean). At least until we managed to terraform, we could also use greenhouses, but the area around any outer space settlers would be grey, red, brown…but no green. No free-standing bodies of water. No living things in the air, in the sea, on the land, but us.
How would the average person react over time, mentally and emotionally, in a sterile, lifeless environment? Not the average astronaut; I mean the average person. For civilization to survive and thrive off-world, people who don’t look like Hollywood actors or athletes would have to live on their own, isolated from terrestial food and energy sources for years at a time. What would children be like, growing up having never seen a tree or a bush, or even grass, without having touched a dog or a cat, or even ants? Living in a lush environment is connected to mental health; the new settlers would likely be extremely stressed out, all the time. Add multiple competing settler populations of ethnic groups with historical griefs and you have a recipe for interplanetary strife that might last for generations.
So, the moral of the story is simple: eat your greens to avoid endless internecine war in outer space. Who knew veggies could be so powerful?