3 months of adjusting

Well, it's been 3 months since I left Japan, and I can't say that it has been an easy adjustment, although sometimes I really doubt if there ever is an easy adjustment (but this seems the hardest to date).

I’m sitting in my living room right now watching “Much Music” which is Canada’s version of M-TV, only slightly less mainstream, but the only music station I know with a sock puppet as a VeeJay, and I’m listening to their show “One Hit Wonders” and drinking root beer (which is actually nothing like real beer) and trying to think of something exciting to tell you about my last three months back in the real world. (That is one horribly long run-on sentence; let’s just call it flow writing instead, sounds more professional).

I’m a little bit tired today since Mondays are quite busy and today is Tuesday. I do aikido and jazz dance consecutively on Monday nights. This week is my third week at Jazz dance and I feel slightly less uncoordinated than the week before and slightly less frustrated. My friend Becca and I decided to enrol in jazz dance after a sober night of dancing at the Eighties Night in town, which brought about the even more sobering realization that despite my lessons from Amanda in Japan or copious amounts of alcohol, I will never be mistaken for a member of Fame. So with the goal of becoming more graceful we enrolled together for the November/December classes at the local YMCA. The music in the class ranges from Madonna to World Beat to Old School rap such as “Can’t Touch This.” And despite my degradation of musical taste in Japan to the top 40 hits on my well-known compilation CD’s, I really enjoy the diversity of music in this class.

So after that one-hour of my week is over, what exactly do I get up to the other 6 days and 11 hours? Well, I can’t say that life here is really all that exciting and I think that might be my own fault. But I do try to make the most of things. Living with my parents is starting to grate on me and on them too I am sure…

Ok, sorry, this is a few days later, and I’m now sitting in my living room with my guitar trying desperately to practice “I’m a Believer” by the Monkees for my friend’s wedding in NZ in January. I only have about four weeks left before I leave this wet winter for the hopefully warm beaches of Dunedin and I need to have a good grasp on music and this one song in particular before I arrive. But at this point my poor fingers are getting sore and I am taking a break by writing you and trying to think of any other revelations I can tell you with regards to my new life in Canada.

Well, one thing I have realized since coming back is that I have a very poor sense of smell. So, I do want to apologize if my clothes, my apartment, or me ever offended your olfactory sense. I honestly really wouldn’t know. I do know I can smell smoke, which is a good and potentially life-saving thing, but because my allergies are so severe, I can’t smell a whole lot of other things unfortunately unless they are quite pungent. I am now paranoid of being smelly, so I use a ton of detergent on my clothes and I am constantly taking showers (another new paranoia). I think I’m going to have to do a bit of research into the subject of loss of smell, since it also affects taste, and is quite a pain. Maybe some kind of new antihistamines would help?

I have been spending a lot of time with my grandmas, getting them to teach me their recipes before they are lost. I am lucky I did, because now my oldest grandmother has dementia and is rapidly deteriorating…It is sad to watch and hard to accept, but she is 88 now and that is a pretty old age to keep living on your own…. my mom was fixing her dinner during the week and at one point was feeding her breakfast as well. Her memory is all mixed up, but she still remembers who we are, thank goodness! …Other family news- my brother turned 19 a few weeks ago (official drinking age in my province) and we took him to the bars for his birthday. It will probably be the last time he goes drinking with his older sisters anyways, so we bought him as many shots as we could. He only puked once, which was quite good. I always thought it would be weird when he reached this age and I could potentially run into him drunk at the bar (he is seven years younger than me after all). Luckily it hasn’t happened yet. Not that I go to many bars anymore, don't know why, must be getting old.

Other than that I have been catching up on all the movies I missed over the last two years. If you get a chance, download a high quality version of Napoleon Dynamite. It is a cult classic now. But I don’t know if it has been released on DVD yet. I heard it was filmed in Cache Creek, BC, Canada even though it is an American film.

well, take care.