10 posts tagged “mother”
My time here is coming to a close.
No more lazing around. No more healthy square meals cooked for me every day. No more fluffy cats keeping me company. No more mother to hang around with. It's back to the real world.
I had some specific goals in coming back here. The main one was to finally get my grad school applications done.
Besides all the time and effort, it cost me a lot of money.
The GRE prep course: $1,000
The GRE test: $150
Application fees: $60~$105, and I applied to nine schools
Ordering official transcripts: $16, and in total I had to order 13
Ordering official GRE scores: $20, and in total I had to order nine
First class mail for letters of recommendation forms: $25, I mailed out two of these
Mailing supplemental forms to schools: $13, and I mailed out four in total
Which means it cost me over $2,300 just to APPLY!
It's probably going to cost me more too, because I have to order more transcripts and GRE score reports for scholarship/fellowship/financial aid applications.
I've worked so hard, and spent lots of money. It will all be worth it in the end though. It BETTER be worth it!.
I'm going cross eyed from all these stupid confusing, disorganized financial aid forms and applications. I've just decided to not look at them until I get to Tokyo. I'm going to enjoy my last three days here. I've finished all my applications FINALLY, except for two that won't let me upload some things, but that should be sorted out by tomorrow.
I got a job! Translating war memoirs for a writer who needs them for his research. Yes yes yes yes YES! I'm looking at this as a sign of things to come. This acceptance should indicate a deluge of acceptance letters in the near future. My friend told me to visualize myself succeeding. So instead of drowning in images of myself failing miserably all over the place, I'm imagining myself getting accepted all over the place.
My mother works so hard. She has two jobs and she stays up late every night and wakes up early every morning and even works on her one day off. But she never made me feel like I was in the way or that I was draining her money, free time, energy, or inconveniencing her in any way. She's actually acting like it's a privilege to have me around. Maybe that's how things are supposed to be, but that's not how it was with my father and sisters. I shouldn't hold on to my anger, but honestly, I'm going to be upset about how they treated me for a long time.
I know people who grew up never knowing if there'd be food in the house, or whether their parents would come home, or if they'd be kicked out of wherever they were staying. It wasn't that bad for me, but we lived in constant fear of my father's irrational temper though.
I told my friend Marty about everything that went down. I told her that when people are accusing you of being crazy, you can't really defend yourself. She said yes you can. Just hold your head up and live your life (how Oprah is that?), and she is right. That's what I'm doing anyway.
Speaking of holding my head up (haha!), the ghetto club is already stressing me out. The boss told me not to expect steady work or a good salary, then D-girl tells me that they need me back really badly. My best customers never even go in anymore apparently. Excuse me, why should they? They're MY customers, they want ME, they don't want the ghetto club, that's for sure. Well six months ago they wanted me, now they probably can't even remember who I am.
When I get back to Japan:
- I'll figure out those financial aid forms
- I have to put a major plan in place to MAKE a lot of money and SAVE a lot of money. If I think I'm going to grad school, I seriously need cash flow, yo
- I'm taking my favorite aunt and spinster-before-her-time cousin on a vacation to Korea
- I'm sending my mother bath salts, green tea, Japanese sweets, and some books, DVDs and CDs
- But first, I'm going to Australia!
And before any of that, I'm taking a bath right now. I'll read over some of the translation/research material in the tub (because I'm working again!), and enjoy the open space and silence of this mountain California town. Lord knows I won't get much of that in Tokyo.
Oh shit, I'd better email my friend that I blew off too, before I forget.
of my mother and me!
Saw an old friend today. Our parents were good friends, and he was born three months after me and my twin sister. We were treated like triplets, and wore matching baby clothes. He stayed in the tiny hippie town we were born in, and my family moved all over the place. But it was great to see him again. He's really tall, I'm really short. He's as blonde and blue eyed as they come, I'm pretty dark. He's very calm and centered, I'm definitely not. But he's my brother, and I'm his sister. We're both a little lost right now. I might go to the hippie town where I was born and visit him soon. I'll convince him to leave it! He can help me finally defeat that red wood tree that I humiliatingly got stuck in when we climbed it all those years ago.
Or I might just never go. I mean what's the point? Yeah I was born there, but I only stayed there for ten days. There's only red wood trees and hippies there anyway. And their confused offspring.
I thought I might miss the club and the girls and just being a hostess in general. But I don't. Just thinking about working again kind of makes me feel tired and nauseous. It's tough working a job where you have to deal with rejection all the time. And it's tough when it's YOU that's getting rejected. How attractive you are and stuff.
So now I wear no makeup, barely brush my hair, and my eyebrows are free and wild. And I haven't had any alcohol. It's awesome.
I didn't know what to say. Besides the obvious, which is "well you guys are divorced."
I probably should have brought some leftovers over though. Oops.
Then I find out that my dad had in fact complained to the landlord about the toilet seat, and that this man (who's name I later found out was Alberto) knows my dad and my twin sister and is really friendly and nice. He had in fact come all the way out to our apartment with toilet seats on a saturday morning, and I had insulted him to his face by rudely telling him to basically fuck off (he probably thought I was my twin sister).
My dad was a little annoyed. I apologized to Alberto later, and now we have a new toilet seat.
I've been hanging with my mom for the last two days. She moved to a totally boondocks town a few years ago after reading a big feature article in the LA Times about how this town will be the next resort town of California. She sold the house that she had only recently bought and moved with her two cats. Then she got really lonely because she lives hours and hours away from EVERYONE and there are no Japanese people. Now she said she's going to stay here because she "doesn't want to give up." She's no quitter!
My favorite Korean movie star is Lee Byun-hung. He is so handsome! We've been watching My Beautiful Lady, where he plays a boxer. The storyline is just really ridiculous, but it's all just an excuse to watch Lee Byun-hung look incredibly hot.
The father didn't live with them, so we had never met him. My mother said that when she knocked on the door, she almost fell over when it opened. "You know who answered the door? A man like Lee Byun-hung!" The father was a tall dark and handsome man with a heart-stopping smile!
"How could that lady be married to HIM?" was what my mother said she thought.
Hahaha.
Almost forgot it was my mothers birthday. Actually i DID forget. I called her today and apologized. She said she didn't do anything for her birthday, but one of my aunts gave her pajamas. I asked her if she's doing anything this weekend and she said that the San Francisco Saturday Japanese school she teaches at is having an 運動会 (sport's day). How cute! I don't remember having a sport's day when I went. Which is a good thing because I would have hated it.
I told her to mentally prepare herself for Dancer Girl visiting later this year. She's looking forward to seeing my mother and going wine tasting.
I promise I'll stop writing about my mother's visit soon.
Since I'm close to 30, my parents are much closer to death. That thought stresses me out and makes me feel sad. I left them when I was 17 and hardly looked back since then. My mom left a long message on my answering machine today. After going through a stream of consciousness thing about her cats and other stuff (like she usually does), she finished off by saying "goodbye Jade-chan, I love you, I really really do, okay?"
My cousin had to go to the hospital, and she left her little 7-month old with us. I had a lot of alone time with the baby, and she thought it was hilarious when I threw her up in the air saying "pyon!" She'd start giggling and she did this thing where she leaned her head back and shook it from side to side laughing like she couldn't stand it. Which just made me do it more and more. My oldest aunt looked at me and said "if you take a baby away from its mother when she's that small and give it to someone else, the baby won't remember." I disagreed and wondered why my aunt made that comment.
Of course she kept reminding me that I could be a mother by now.
Of all the cousins, there are only two boys. The younger boy is going against all family odds. Not only is he a boy (which goes severely against the odds of my family), but he also graduated high school, AND is going to university. On top of that, he's studying law, and apparently he's getting top marks in English (although he can't or won't speak English to me). As if this wasn't enough, he actually has opinions -- strong ones! He wants Japan to change, and he wants the citizens of this country to stand up and make a difference!
My aunts all agree that it's just a phase and he'll (they hope) grow out of it.
My second youngest aunt revealed that she is a fan of a yet-to-be-famous boy band. She showed me a picture of herself with them. She said that they aren't famous yet, so they perform in malls in the boonies. She went to see two of their performances. At the second one, the leader boy pointed my aunt out and said "this obasan (which means old lady) came to our last performance, thank you for coming." She seemed happy that they did that. I would have been mortified.
I am exhausted. I spent the last three days at my aunt's house. A million aunts came (there are almost no women in my family), and so did my cousin with her 7 month old (my arms hurt from carrying her around and throwing her up in the air). It was nice being with my family, and nobody can cook like my oldest aunt, but I'm exhausted. I get tired hanging around my Japanese family because you spend the whole time stressing out about what everyone's doing for you, and then having to do ten times more for whoever did something for you.
Also, hanging around the town my family comes from is pretty depressing (I feel bad saying that, but it's true). It's a suburb bordering Tokyo. Talk about gigantic strip malls and losers with babies all over the place. It's like the whole city's in a competition to live their life without having to use their brains.
Thank god my mother ran away. I had a weird breakthrough with my mother before we went to my aunts. She comes from a really big family and she thinks she was the invisible sister. She thinks her mother actually never loved her, and she remembers being thrown face-first on the floor when she was a toddler and stuff like that. She said she felt like she didn't really exist, and that she had a real family somewhere else in the world and that her life was some kind of mistake that had to be endured. She was so miserable. And when she was seven she tried to drown herself in a bucket. I tried not to cry when she told me that. But we're a healthy and happy family now, so I don't run away and pretend I didn't hear things anymore.
I'm glad she didn't succeed in finishing herself off, because her life got a lot better. Well you could argue that it got a lot worse first. She met a guy with his own problems and went and had a bunch of daughters herself and passed on her misery onto us. Like my mother said earlier this week, we were a family of kids. But then we all grew up. And that was a miracle in itself.
Me, my mother, and two aunts visited the family grave. The newer one's where my grandparents are resting. And I found out that I actually had an uncle that died when he was a few weeks old, because he was there too. He would have been the oldest I think. I said "what's up" to them, told them thanks for loving me. Then we went to the scary older grave where the ancestors hang out. I said hello to them. I imagined them to be grandmothers and mothers, aunts and sisters with the same problems and struggles that my mother suffered from and that I suffered from, because they passed them on all down the line. So I said "I feel you, my ancestors. And lets make it better from now on."
I wonder if they look at me and think "Who's that girl with the weird face? She's the wrong color."
On the way home we stopped by the "mizuko" shrine to say what's up to my baby ("mizuko" means water baby, or babies that were aborted or that died, and there's a goddess that protects them all). Actually my mother ran over there and ordered me to pray there.
Then my youngest aunt told me a really funny story about how when she was a little girl she thought "mizuko" was the name of a saint. And there were mizuko shrines everywhere so she thought mizuko must have been an amazing person.
We walked past the dried up old sewer-like excuse for a river on the way home, and the aunts started talking about how they used to come with my grandma to do the washing in this river (back when it was a real river). And vegetables would come floating down because the farmers would wash them upstream. I bet they didn't know the area would turn into a concrete jungle in a few decades.
That must have been why my oldest aunt made me help her clean the bedding by stomping on them in the bathtub. Taking the kids to help with the washing at the water source must be a tradition.
Okay, this post is long enough. I'll post some pictures later maybe.
My mother's visiting me! I haven't seen her in ages (I only saw my Dad and sisters when I went to America last month). There's a Japanese word, "natsukashii," that means something along the lines of "that reminds me of back in the day," "how nostalgic," and "that brings back memories." My mother visited Japan three years ago, but she hasn't lived here for almost 20 years.
She used this "natsukashii" phrase when she saw three yakuza dudes walking down the street. I thought that was a bit weird.
She also let out a "natsukashii" when the bus pulled into Shinjuku station. This was quickly followed by "I want to go shopping." Eating a good bowl of ramen is her other request.
My Groups
-
Asian Updated: Yesterday
-
Love where you live Updated: Yesterday
-
Save The Hoe's Updated: Yesterday
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
