Page One Adventures

Disability (n): 1. a condition (such as an illness or an injury) that damages or limits a person’s physical or mental abilities; 2. the condition of being unable to do things in the normal way : the condition of being disabled. -Merriam Webster, 2016 It’s about time that we as a society re-evaluate how we think about disability. No able-bodied person expects to be judged on the same level as an…

Le Updates Part 01: Murphy’s Law

Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. -Murphy’s Law Two months later, after packing up my life and moving back home to good old Chino, and here is what I’ve got to show for it: The Good: -Another year of life (semi-)successfully completed. Check. Quarter-life crisis. Check. YAY LIFE! Many thanks and lots of love to all the friends and family who were able to make it for cake and milk. – I’m…

The past four months have been chock full of doctors’ appointments, physical therapy, a malicious (thankfully, now ‘former’) coworker hacking into my blog and changing no less than 5 posts, and even more recently a two week sojourn to Aomori to settle my affairs and move out for good. This means there will be many updates to come. First, there will be the matter of continuing with my…

  Got medical leave to temporarily return to Japan for two weeks to finish settling my affairs and say one last personal goodbye to everyone.  I arrived home last night. Tired and sore but happy to have seen so many wonderful and important people to me in Aomori. On a map, it’s this strangely misshapen prefecture. It doesn’t look like much to people who place undo emphasis on the convenience of…

It’s not every day that you stumble upon proof of the exact moment in which you meet someone who will forever change your life. And as I was cleaning out two years’ of accumulation from apartment and vehicle, I stumbled upon an old parking ticket that had somehow managed to wedge itself into the car’s plastic interior.  Excitement beyond anything, is the only proper way to describe this chance…

Angry Oni and Silly Oni Waiting at Haneda International for the flight that’s going to take me home, when this lovely young woman just settles down across from me and… “Oh. My. God. JENNY?!” “Is it really you, VIVIAN?!” We may have given security a bit of a heart attack with all the cuddling and screaming. But when you haven’t seen a friend in over two years and suddenly they’re on the same…

Back When I Thought I Could Art, Part One

That moment when you manage to salvage your failing external drive and come across an embarrassing file you’d thought long lost to the oblivion of multiple drive transfers and the wibbly wobbly nature of time… Well. Not everyone can be so fortunate and I was not one of them. Apparently there was a point in my life when I thought I could art and I find these so laughably awful, I thought I might…

I’ve never once had to give up on something that I really wanted out of life. I’ve always been able to fight it through, think it through, work it through, or somehow just make it through. Until now. And it’s a life lesson that doesn’t get any easier to swallow with the approaching days. At risk of romanticizing my life in Aomori, I will openly say that it is only while on the JET Program that I…

“It’s all in your head,” he finally told me after two and a half months of condescension and gaslighting. “You don’t have pain. If you just believed hard enough you would be better by now.” I sat immobilized by the weight of those words. But the pain coursing from my back to my toes didn’t go away simply because a doctor refused to believe me. My pain was there, had been there, and and it only…

(Sort of) Foreign Film Fridays 05: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015) + Review

Solo: What’s wrong with the Patou? Kuryakin: Nothing. If you’re fat. Before Yuri the Trainer Who Trains there was Illya Kuryakin the Soviet “Architect” Who Fashioned… Take(-ing) Care of Business with style since 1964 ;) First and foremost… Please just go to this link now: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (it will all make sense, I promise). Okay and now that we’re back from what has to be the funkiest…