Welcome to Earth
It feels strange to have had 10 seconds of Comedy Central fame that everyone but me has seen. I'll have to get a vidcap of that to go along with the leftover cock lollies, fertility charms and other paraphenalia brought back from that rainy day in Kawasaki. I'm sad they didn't use more footage but I guess that means less of a chance for me to have made a total idiot of myself.

I'm still in Michigan, this morning in Ann Arbor to meet another High School friend for lunch. We spent the weekend at my grandparents' recreational trailer lot in Rose Lake, "Up North." I came here with the conviction that after a month of being fed nothing but clean meat, organic veggies and soy, I'd try to keep up a purposed regimen. I threw that out the window on the second day (except for the soy milk) and caved to Grandma's cooking. That's what "family time" is all about: compromise, surrender and trying to keep a low profile to avoid upset. Between my Oma's domesticity and other relatives' apathy or invalidity (invalidism?), I had a lot of time to walk and think, sit and think, or just sit.

Being here surrounded by family certainly could drive me quickly mad, as it may well my mom when she arrives later tonight. So far, however, I've been able to view my relatives with a sort of curious detachment, almost as I viewed life in Japan for the first few months. The way of life and coping mechanisms that are established among my family are so alien to me that I feel like I'm observing another planet, stuck somewhere between amusement, fascination, confusion, and horror.

But something has changed, either as a product of my time in Montana, my time in Japan or simply the passage of time. What "they" say and do can no longer touch me or harm me. With the strange and obvious realization that my roots are no longer here comes the awareness that I don't have to live with the goal of familial approval in mind: I have already made the greatest success in finding myself apart from them. That's not to say that family isn't a part of me; it is, although most of the time I have difficulty identifying which little part it is and where it comes from. This turbulent family, viscious in its strangling love, is a part of me but IS NOT ME.

I am not one caught in the past, where only memory is good enough, or one caught in the future, waiting for something promised yet to come... and I cannot be these things, memory or potential, for myself or for my family, because they are no more real in the present moment than the passing of a dream from the previous night. I am not them and they cannot harm me-- But I can watch them live their lives in their strange little worlds, from the safety of my own, and try to learn to love them, though they are still but hard to understand and very far away.