it is so strangely warm today. we have, once again, those blue skies that stretch for miles and miles with not a single cloud in sight. you don’t get to see that a lot back home. it makes me think of texas, for some reason, and i have never even been there in my entire life.

i’m sitting at the library, dreamily attempting to draw up my research schedule for the next three years or so. it’s hard enough to plan the week ahead – three years! how does one go about doing that? there are tinkling sounds in the air, as if someone had left a musical box open in the library. nobody seems bothered. nobody seems to have noticed. i cannot stop myself from looking up now and then; i am not quite disturbed by it, only curious. i take a stealthy sip of hot tea from my tumbler. you aren’t supposed to drink in the library, but it is simply another one of those rules made to be broken. an ambulance goes by. that distracts me. ambulances bring my mind to places it does not want to visit.

it has just hit me that my glass ring has yellow, blue, and white streaks across it; my tumbler has yellow, blue, and white flowers on it; i am wearing a yellow top with teal and white earrings. entirely unintentional, i swear. but aren’t blue and yellow the best color-friends ever?  sunshine and sky, warm and cool, bubbly joy and calm.

and i, am ever randomly yours. because i had a matcha old-fashioned donut earlier.

i like listening to 90’s hits on streaming radio through itunes. the 90’s were good. my teen years. angsty, stressful, awkward, wonderful years. why do things always seem good in hindsight? in ten years, i will be reminiscing this time in japan – this awful year of The Aches – the heart, the stomach, the shoulders, the brain… it seems unbelievable that this time in my life may actually look like fun at some other time in my life. unbelievable, and scary.

it was cold today, and will likely be, as well, tomorrow. i am spending the time snuggling in my toasty room, drinking hot tea, working on translations, making the unbearably achy shoulders even achier than ever, and listening to the radio. doesn’t that smack of some hollywood movie? not the really recent ones, but the ones made in the 90’s. more than 10 years ago. seriously?

can you believe that it is november? already? can you smell christmas, already? almost over, my final year as a 20-something year old. and as i say, year after year after year after year, nothing to show for it. more blog posts, perhaps. this combination of pms and fall/winter-blues is not good for me. i just want to hide away somewhere and listen to joni mitchell all day and feel sorry for myself. for my parents. for my family. for s (where are you? what are you doing?). because, strange as it may seem, i feel guilty that i seem to be the only one having a run of good(ish) luck.

credo! credo! credo!

the depression that is tokyo on a rainy day.

the southern island of kyushu has been going through a week of floods and landslides in some of the heaviest rainfalls ever experienced for this period of the year. and we haven’t even had any typhoons yet.

i was so exhausted from the two-day singing marathon that i did not wake up till past 1pm today, whereupon i commenced a round of ferocious dusting and cleaning to a live recording of misia’s ballads and violent sweating. nobody really believes that tokyo summers are more humid than it gets back home – they should have seen the way i dripped earlier.

i had my first cockroach yesterday, a cunning creature that had slipped into the room with me when i returned from rehearsals. it went into hiding at once, cowering in the comforting brown-ness of my winter boots, so it was a simple matter of shoving the boot out the door again and waiting for it to scuttle off down the corridor. i simply could not summon up the courage to whack it to death.

the next two weeks will be round after round of rehearsals, culminating in the festival in karuizawa, so i mean to snap out of my doldrums and get to work on my paper – insignificant molecule that it is in the ocean of academic publications out there.

it was supposed to pour for most of today, but the skies have chosen to remain gray, without shedding as much as a drop, leaving us with just that stifling humidity in the air that comes when it fails to rain.

i finally got down to tackling the stack of scores for this weekend, hitting my extremely tiny keyboard and clucking in frustration at how often i seem to catch two notes (or more) at the same time. i have fat fingers. ’nuff said.

it is nice to be able to make time for music again, living and breathing brahms for the next couple of months. it hit me earlier that i have never sung any brahms in all the more-than-ten-years i have been singing. what a humbling thought. and certainly, there must be many others. there is so much music in the world, and so much more being made every day. it makes me panic a little. how long more can i hold on to this voice i have now? 20 years? perhaps much less.

sometimes, i hear the voices of little old ladies with that… timbre and (excessive) vibrato unique to their age group, that they can’t seem to quite control, and worry so much about my own time coming that i feel as if i must, somehow, seize my moment. my now and here. the biological clock is invincible, whatever we may choose to believe.

had a late night but woke up bright and early to the sound of cicadas – the first of the season. you need no surer sign that summer has arrived. i learnt about cicadas in japan, where before, they used to exist only in storybooks, city girl that i am. did you know that a single cicada could produce enough sound to make it seem like there was an entire forest of them out there?

lying on my white, white bed, staring out at the white, white sunlight out there – so dazzling i see stars… i find the sound of the cicadas comforting. even in the 34-degree heat. it’s that whole association of cicadas, and summer, with childhood. even though i don’t remember if i had ever heard a cicada in my entire life as a child. not that it matters. memories are the stuff that you make up, in your head, and not what really, actually transpired. and that is why they hurt so.

i am going to traipse downhill now for my dinner greens, and possibly get even more sunburnt on the way. what does it matter? it’s summer.

woke up to howling winds and cloudy skies today, no doubt harbinger of more rain to come. yet no typhoons have come our way so far, despite it being almost halfway into july. i do not quite know what to make of this – the summer that isn’t.

i finished the last of my battles for this semester last week, and since then, have lived in a fog of tv, anime, filing, and endless house(room)cleaning. i feel uneasy; schooldays are still a bit of a stranger to me, and i am more accustomed to the endlessness of work that is adult life. i had meant to commence work on the paper only next week, but in a fit of restlessness, began to compile my survey results last night. how surreal this all is.

and odd, that there is nothing to speak of, all of a sudden.

how beautiful bach’s music is. how grand it is to have found stroopwafel in tokyo, at long last. i really need to be getting a new container  of sorts for my burgenoning wardrobe, and an eyebrow trimming. i smell gas every time i open my fridge doors, and wonder if it will explode on me one fine day. i think i will give up cynical contemporary writing for a while and return to cynical austen and dickens. perhaps for a week.

you can’t count on anyone to give you hugs these days. you just have to do the best you can when you huddle among the sheets at night, arms wrapped around your own shivering heart.

the rain came down in sheets just as i stepped out of my room to get a cup of hot chocolate (or cocoa au lait, as it is elegantly labeled) from the vending machine at the lobby. i wish it would thunder as well, just to match my somewhat mutinous feelings right now.

the pain and reflux returned with a vengeance last night, for reasons i am not aware of, unless red peppers are also meant to be on the taboo list. i spent the night in bed, ravaged by pain and burping red peppers mixed with acid, and wallowing in self-pity. so much for a perfect day.

it all went on till this afternoon, and i had to plead off from choir rehearsal and a concert i had paid close to 40 bucks for. still, i must confess i wasn’t too sorry. these days, singing with others does not give me the same thrill that it used to, and it is such hard work dragging myself to all sorts of different parts of tokyo every sunday. i cannot quite put my finger on the reasons behind my lack of motivation – the music? the people? the money involved…?

losing something that used to be such a significant part of my life makes me feel rudderless. some days, i ache to feel that sense of satisfaction i get from simply warming up and being able to reach all the way to a high g; from getting a difficult interval right; from hearing how seemingly unrelated notes mesh together as if they were born to do so. singing in a choir, and singing alone at my voice class, used to make me so happy i did feel, literally, like i could burst.

these days, i cannot seem to feel the music with my heart anymore. i become frustrated, annoyed, dislike the way i sound, dislike the foreign sounds around me… there are many days when i croak out a sumimasen on the train and realize that i have not so much as uttered a word for days. it is so strange, this disconnection with sounds, with music, with myself.

i often say that i would hate to become one of those people to whom life is a vale of tears; who cannot stop whining; who is constantly depressed and seeking sympathy. but sometimes, when i stop to read through my blog entries, i see how dangerously close i hover to becoming just that, and jump back in alarm. i see that there is a lot more i could take into my own hands and i want to, i want to. i want to make so much more of my opportunities and the little talents i have. i want to pepper my days with tiny moments of pleasure; multiply those perfect days of mine exponentially. but why is it so much easier to slip into that rut of self-pity?

i woke up just before 11 this morning, and marvelled at my renewed ability to sleep. and sleep. and sleep. i have never slept like i did this past week, yet hardly have the energy to sit through those long class days. i am still barely eating, so it may be that my body is attempting to preserve energy by going into hibernation mode. that would be quite a disaster considering the two-papers-by-november fact, but i am so resigned to it all, i don’t quite wish to whine about it for a while.

lying on my bed now with my face toward the window, watching my laundry swing in the cool, unseasonal breezes, and the fresh smells of detergent entering the room in light, welcome puffs, i feel strangely at peace with tokyo for now. never mind the gastric pains, never mind my inadequacies in research; i have clean clothes, fresh bedlinen, and my closet of a bathroom scrubbed within an inch of its life.

i have been living on bread for the past couple of weeks, figuring that i may as well get the maximum amount of calories from the limited amount of food that i can stomach. i meant to pick up some jam or honey spread at the supermarket yesterday, but came across some black sesame spread instead. but before i go any further, you have to watch this.

this guy (american, i guess) reviewed the various peanut butter alternatives to be found in japan, most of which i have also tried. there was a period of time when i used to really love the “peanut cream,” which he condemned and described as tasting like “vaseline” (i have never tasted vaseline…)  i suppose he feels the same way i feel about chinese food in japan. anyhow, i got over my craze; i suppose all that gelatin does get to you after a while.

so, returning to my foray yesterday… black sesame cream! it’s all part of the same jam series as the “peanut cream.” incidentally, these are the cheapest types of jam you can get hereabouts. black sesame spread! at 100 yen! how could anyone say no?

i should have taken a picture of it. fascinating. the spread was glossy black and gel-like, just like its peanut counterpart. i had some wild delusions of that lovely sesame fragrance filling my senses (living on a very limited selection of food does that to you). imagine my shock when i realized they tasted exactly the same. peanut and black sesame. it was all rather amusing.

according to the weather reports, we enter the rainy season this week, but nobody really knows what that means since it has been pouring on and off for the past two weeks or so. i have made concrete plans (seriously concrete) to buy a fan this week.

summer!

woke up past one with some strange feelings in my chest and could not quite figure out what was wrong. it was only when i sat up and started burping that i realised it must have been heartburn. the pain migrated to a more familiar place once i got out of bed and became gastric pains; that was it – so much for that one night of triumphant sleep. i have been rather religious about not eating before bedtime… perhaps it is time to say goodbye to coffee for good.

it was just as well that i had woken up, i suppose, because it started raining and i had forgotten to take in the laundry. the weather is being really weird still – hot and muggy at times, cold and muggy at times, warm and windy at times, cool and dry at times. i have never known a spring quite like this.

my friendly korean neighbor is chain-smoking despite it being past two in the morning; i am so well-trained i can decipher the click of her lighter and lean over to close my windows before the smoke flies in. i am going shopping for an iron tomorrow, because, i reckon, if she can get away with smoking in her room, i can get away with ironing and then some more.

i really do not like being awake at such times in the night, when all i can do is hug my blanket and wish i were somewhere very far away indeed.

it is very strange (and also amazing and awe-inspiring, i suppose) that the most appropriate music pops into your mind and stays there to serve as a movie theme for whatever emotion you are going through at that point in time.

i have been pondering the analysis of some data the entire day, attempting to sketch out a plan for putting it through various software to produce meaningful, wow-inspiring numbers and graphs. i must have come up with (and abandoned) 974 different plans and combinations of variables, dropping much imaginary hair and producing a very real headache in the process. for the past two hours now, this particularly ominous phrase in the requiem that i am currently rehearsing has been running through my mind – i can hear those chords being drummed out on a pipe organ in some dark, gothic church, urging me to repent of my folly and return to where i can be a happy fool again. urgh.

it does not help that the weather is being most indecisive today. a cold wind has been blowing away merrily since morning, but every time it falls – even for a single minute – the humidity becomes unbearable. sitting here staring at my data, i must have taken my jacket off and put it back on 974 times as well. the back of my knees feel sticky while my feet are like blocks of ice. what would i give for sunny singapore now, where all you have to do when it gets nasty is to turn on the air-conditioning? none of this indecisiveness for us, no.

i fell off my study chair this afternoon in a moment of excited confusion over nothing. this old swivel chair was possibly the height of comfort twenty years ago, but today, with the sponge padding peeking out from the sides of the chair, this rickety thing is slowly but surely becoming the bane of my existence. i come close to falling off it at least once every day; this afternoon, the curse struck, and i fell. hard. every time i look at my scraped elbows, i have to stifle a sigh commingled with amusement at myself. at my room. at my data.

have you noticed how things that seem highly uncorrelated under normal circumstances can somehow, when you experience something out of the ordinary, link up to form the picture of your life? right now, my life is a patchwork of tragic music, empty mugs on the desk, several pages of squiggly lines and writings that i like to think of as ”mindmaps,” an old chair, and a nondescript girl with thick glasses and scraped elbows… who, once upon a time, thought that she would be the proud mother of three at age thirty.

what a relief, really, that i am not. because it means that i can now eat an orange, and go calmly and sensibly to bed to dream about professors throwing papers at me.