Having cake, eating cake...You know how it goes.

I cleaned! Finally, I cleaned my apartment! It's been so long! But now I seriously have a pretty tidy place once again. I even, get this, I even cleaned my porch! It's AMAZING! Do you want to know how derelict my porch was? My porch was so derelict the landlord complained I had had squatters living there! And get this: I DID! Sometime in the last month or so, the pigeons who hang out above the pachinko parlor next door decided that they'd wing over to my side of the big divide, and then they moved in! I had pigeons NESTING on my porch! Nesting! On two eggs! How the hell long could the thing have been there for? The nest was enormous! I guess it must not have hurt that I had a bunch of dead houseplant skeletons and broken flower pots and closet hangers and other detritus to use as nest-making materials. But still, this is my house! No matter how decrepit it gets!

It's not my house for much longer though. I've got just over two months left of my life here in Imabari, and I suspect that it is going to whizzzz past. No luck so far on the job search in Matsuyama, but then again, I haven't really kicked into too much activity about it yet. Which is worrisome. Partly, I'm wondering how long I want to spend in Japan before coming home...I keep getting all these facebook messages from friends who miss me, and god, I miss them too. I miss being loved by a million people. Not that they don't still love me, but that's the whole idea--they do still love me and I love them all too! And I miss them all! And I want to be able to be loved not from a bazillion miles away. Weird. Life is weird. Things can be so nice here and so melancholic at the same time.

I haven't been to much aikido since getting back from Malaysia either, and that has had its ups and downs...aikido's the thing I'm trying to really focus on now, now that I've decided to stay here and move and do all the stuff, but it's the times I put it on the back burner that I enjoy my Life In Japan life a lot more. Like today; today I cleaned my house and made it really nice to be in again, but when's the next time I'm going to spend more than an hour or two here before going to sleep? I've got aikido keiko (class) every day from tomorrow until the end of time. It ends up feeling like a big one-or-the-other trade off: either I do aikido, or I can have a life. Having cake, eating cake; you know how it goes. I guess that's the idea of me moving to Matsuyama really, is that if I didn't have to spend an extra four hours per class getting to and from the dojo (that's not an exaggeration) then maybe I will be able to have a life style that incorporates my devotion to aikido, instead of a lifestyle which gets put on hold in favor of my devotion of aikido. ("your sad devotion to that ancient religion hasn't helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, nor has it given you prescience enough to discern the location of the rebels' hidden base...nor does it let you magically teleport yourself home from keiko anytime before midnight three nights a week, nor does it let you find much peace of mind with the retarded Middle School Empire's archaic nonsense, nor have you been able to Force-talk your way into keeping a girlfriend..." man, choke that muthafucka!) For the time being though, even if it's a good sounding plan, since none of it has yet materialized in any form, it's only the not-real-yet-ness that I'm feeling, and it's hard to get excited about a plan that doesn't exist yet. Braaaa. These better be the droids I'm looking for yo.