…tomorrow’s not ours to see…

14Oct09

so many things running through my mind… where to start?

with the bad. so that whatever else that comes after that can only be better.

sis is going to lose one of her ovaries. worse (and what i have been trying to distract my mind from the past hour or so) is the fact that she is undergoing tests for the dreaded c-word. (think harry potter and he-who-must-not-be-named. i have so much fear of the word i cannot quite say it, nor type it.) but what i feel is secondary, i suppose. i keep thinking of the Ps – how they had lost one child, worry constantly over the health of another sickly one, and now, the one person we had always thought was amazingly healthy has to lose a part of her body. but… i have so much fear that i am afraid spelling it all out would make it all come true. so, onward to more cheerful topics we shall go.

i spent the last weekend at a major social psychology do in osaka – three full days of presentations and seminars and the kansai dialect. and the geeky verdict is that i totally enjoyed it. stimulating, and an eye-opener. but other than the research ideas that i took away with me (i start working on a new research proposal tomorrow!), my greatest revelation from the whole event – believe it or not – was that, for every one eminent academic, there are x times as many mediocre (or less than mediocre) ones. what a truly comforting discovery.

when i first took the plunge, i had accepted that i would likely be one of the mediocre ones (at best) for the rest of my life. and that hadn’t really bothered me (or so i thought). but after going through a number of presentations that left me restless with their… how would i put it… inadequacy, well, at the risk of sounding like an arrogant snob, i think i have a chance at being an above-average-academic (alliteration, always!)… in japan, at least, if nowhere else. i can’t even begin to describe what this thought means to me. excited and motivated, i am.

i am also eager to get started on making over my clothes and crocheting. we have been moving into fall and toward winter at a nice, slow pace. with some luck, i would have managed to make myself something nice by the time winter rolls around. i need the distraction and stimulation that comes only from doing something new and different.

it rained hard this evening and it hasn’t stopped yet. i can hear it still, and the occasional cricket, and trains passing by every few minutes. i am tucked up in bed with hot tea and crackers and a warm laptop.

hello, tokyo. i guess you aren’t all that bad after all.

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