pressures of life

Section 121 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 September 02 Thursday.
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A few cool days and then the heat of summer was back, adding to the pressures of existence. Yesterday, on a train platform at Yokohama, I saw a young Japanese woman who had obviously been overstressed by something. She was heading down the platform with an open beer can dangling from her hand, and the beer was slopping out, a slurp at a time, with every step she took.

Right now, with the heat, with work and with the demands of baby management, my life has become an exercise in pressure control. I'm living by the slogan "Keep going forward!" Don't worry about how you're going to cope one year, five years, then years from now. Focus on getting through today.

It helps that I'm gradually getting better at coping with baby Cornucopia. One great discovery is that she will lie quietly in her reclining high chair, in the kitchen, and observe work in progress. The "lie quietly" part is a relief because often, in the evenings, she demands to be held, and will cry if she's not. And it's not enough to sit down with her in your arms: you have to be standing, carrying her around and rocking her in your arms.

Anyway, baby Cornucopia seems to see me working in the kitchen as a kind of entertainment. I keep up a running commentary while I'm doing stuff.

"This is a bowl. It's a white bowl. It's microwave-safe."

Despite the pressures on me, life continues to deliver some writing opportunities, like a couple of spare hours between classes a couple of days ago. Not enough time to go home (an hour there, an hour back), so I hid out in the subway system, parts of which are reasonably well air-conditioned, sitting on one of the platform's plastic chairs, working away on my personal computer with the loudspeaker announcements going and the trains rolling by.

Section 121 Entry 0002. Date: 2004 September 03 Friday.
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Today I took advantage of the gap between an early morning work assignment and an evening work assignment to go and see the Michael Moore Osama Bin Laden / Iraq war documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.

I saw the movie at the Ebisu Garden Place movie theatre at Ebisu, near Ebisu station, which is on Tokyo's Yamanote Line. I took my seat early, and, as I was waiting for the lights to go down, I became aware of the lyrics of an American song which was playing softly in the background.

The lyrics included the refrain "burn, motherfucker, burn," which caused me to reflect on the fact that one of the mildly interesting things about living in Japan is that nothing in the English language is ever bleeped, and you can occasionally hear the most surprising things being shamelessly broadcast by respectable free-to-air television stations.

A snippet of the same song, complete with the three unbleeped words quoted above, turned up in the movie.

The movie, actually, was a bit of a disappointment, in the sense that it seemed distant and historical, quite unrelated to my own life.

A few months ago, I wouldn't have had the same reaction. But, with the birth of my baby daughter, my horizons have narrowed. Today, for example, I went online for just three minutes in the morning, the time it took to check my e-mail and to make sure that no global catastrophes had happened overnight. Saturday and Sunday, I'll probably get in the same three minutes each day.

By contrast, earlier this year, when my wife was up in Gunma Prefecture, staying at her mother's place, preparing to have the baby (one aspect of Japanese society is that a mother often looks after her daughter in the weeks leading up to a birth) there was one weekend when I was online for a solid twenty-four hours, driven by my nonstop clicking curiosity, pausing only to finally realize, "Whoops, it's been a day and a night and I haven't watered any of the plants, and if a single one of them dies then I'm in big trouble!"

It's not just that I don't have time for wholesale Internet use. It's also that I don't have the interest. My life has narrowed, very naturally, as I focus on coping with the practical challenges that each day brings.

We none of us know how long we have, and I don't know if I'm still going to be around twenty years from now. But, if I were to look back at this period of my life from that unimaginable future, then what I would remember, I think, is not the alarm sirens of the headline news.

Rather, I would remember, perhaps, yesterday afternoon. I got back home to my home in Yokohama for a few hours in the interval between an early morning work assignment and an evening work assignment, and I spent some of that time sleeping in the airconditioned room downstairs, stretched out on a futon, baby Cornucopia asleep on her baby futon beside me, my wife absorbed with wifely tasks like folding the laundry and checking her e-mail.

And, waking in that protected zone, sheltered from the intimidation of the summer heat, I felt, for once, utterly at ease, and the old-fashioned phrase "in the bosom of my family" went through my head. Yes, safe in the bosom of my family.

Section 121 Entry 0003. Date: 2004 September 7 Tuesday
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Tonight I'll get home about 9.30 pm and baby Cornucopia, now in her fifth month and weighing close to seven kilograms, will be waiting for me to give her her bath. I always keep up a running commentary while I do this, for example "Let's washy the little head" and so forth.

This is language for talking to babies, and not the standard English one might study at school in Japan, so it's not necessarily comprehensible to a Japanese national. My wife, for example, having heard my commentary from outside the bathroom, was moved to ask me "What is the left cabbage patch?"

I had to explain that it's neither standard English nor customary "talking to babies" English. Rather, it's my own invention. When I was a child (or so my memory tells me) from time to time my mother would tell me I must wash behind my ears because "it's so dirty there you could grow cabbages there!"

So "the left cabbage patch" means "behind the left ear."

Tomorrow, I have nothing scheduled in the morning, so I'll be home for the first half of the day with wife and child. Some unscheduled time, for once. I'm also home on weekends, but Saturday is my busy day (vacuum the house, do the grocery shopping then look after Cornucopia in the afternoon while my wife goes out) and a chunk of Sunday is given over to my own preparations for the upcoming week (chiefly ironing and lesson preparation.)

So it's nice, now and then, to have a morning when we just wake up when we wake up, and say hello ... taking the day at its own natural tempo rather than one engineered by an external schedule.

Right now, this is how I'd define "happiness" - an ordinary morning at home with nothing special planned.

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