Where The Wild Thoughts Roam

Five years ago, a few hours away from my thirtieth birthday,  I was seated on the couch in my living room in Nagano, typing out a farewell to my twenties and my hopes and expectations of what my thirties would look like.  Now, I'm about to turn 35. The halfway point between then and forty. I think it's a good time to take stock of what the last five years have been like, and start to dream about what the next five years will look like.  It's definitely been a whirlwind.  I was feeling stuck in a little town, in the middle of a pandemic, absolutely miserable about celebrating my birthday in my apartment alone and having to rush singing "Happy Birthday" to myself while eating a tiny (but delicious) chocolate cake. Later that year I would have a lightbulb moment about moving away, and it felt so right. I'm glad I was brave enough to make that move because these last few years in Osaka have been some of the best I've ever had.  I've tried dating here and t...

I'm dabbling somewhat in the strength of manifestations taking form in the rituals of witchcraft. Nothing crazy, just harmless motions like stirring a cup of tea clockwise with your intentions, or saying a prayer to Sister Moon to hear what is in your heart. I am also learning to connect with my intuition through my tarot practice, though I need to be more consistent about it.  Today I'd like to try out something new: I want to manifest my husband by writing down the kind of vows that I would like him to read out on our wedding day. I have a near-perfect vision of what the wedding and dress will look like (Queen Anne neckline, ceremony before cocktail hour and a kickass band) but I haven't much thought of the groom. Not in the sense that I haven't thought of what my husband would be like, since I was just focused on finding "Mr Right" or a "partner".  It is more of highlighting what kind of qualities I would imagine my husband to be attracted to, and...

I tend to write things down when I'm feeling introspective or had a monumental paradigm shift. This is definitely one of those moments.  I spent a weekend with someone lovely, a Marine from Florida. Let's call him N. We spent the last few days completely immersed in each other. We slept together, showed, got dressed, and went out together. We weren't apart for too long, at any given point in time.  It wasn't cloying or claustrophobic. There was no invasion of space, even if we were mashed up against each other. It was like this for three days and there wasn't a moment where I felt sick of his company.  This whole weekend, and all the hilarity and aching intimacy it contained, made me realize a few things: 

It is with a glow in my heart that I write this down: the bump is gone! After barely three weeks of treatment with the imiquimod, the bump has completely disappeared and flattened out. The doctor had a look this morning, took note of the blisters, and mentioned that the blisters were a side effect of the medication. I also double-checked that the thing I thought was a mole was actually a mole. He said it was okay, and that everything was all right.  I am extremely lucky that my immune system is so strong. I think the effort of sleeping well, eating properly and getting regular exercise helped a lot. I should also not undermine this progress I've been making by smoking again. Smoking has been linked to cervical cancer, and I need to be sure that I minimise my chances of getting that. My last pap smear came back negative (huzzah!) so I am very grateful for that.  For now, I should just maintain vigilance. I should continue to check down there and continue to use condoms. I shoul...

It has been barely over three weeks of starting imiquimod treatment. I am very VERY happy to report that I am responding extremely well to the treatment. Granted, I was constantly checking to see how things were, and there were days where I thought that nothing had changed. The bump is flat now and is now just a little wound that needs to heal. I actually thought I had contracted herpes initially because I was blistering all over the damn show where skin had cracked after being scraped against my underwear. But it turns out that it was just a side effect of the cream, which apparently shows up as blisters in the third week of treatment. The timeline was also wrong for herpes thank fuck.  Everything is going well, and I am finding a better sense of self-esteem from this whole experience. I wanted to hook up with as many people as I could because I thought I owed myself six years of good sex to make up for the time spent having awful sex. Well, I got my time in and I can honestly say...

 Let's not mince words. I have an STI. I caught HPV. Specifically, the kind that causes warts.  It was rough facing this conclusion, and writing it down and giving it form. I suppose that in the big scale of things, the situation is really not that bad. HPV, as it turns out, is one of the most common STDs out there, and it is primarily caused by skin-to-skin contact. Most people will clear infections on their own, while others will never show or develop symptoms. I just happen to have one of the two strains that cause visible warts.  It gets better. The strain that I have is not linked to the ones that develop into cancer. I also only have two little ones, located on skin and not on mucous surfaces. I am responding well to imiquimod, and I have a vaccine course set up next week and over the next six months.  It was extremely difficult to come to grips with this. I don't think I was surprised, given the almost reckless way I had been sleeping with everyone. I had alwa...

Tanabata, or the Star Festival, is a Japanese traditional holiday held every year on the seventh of July. It is a festival related to wishes and dreams for the future, as well as a hope for better things to come. The actual tradition of it stems from a tale of two lovers who were only allowed to meet each other once a year.  I've always written wishes and hung them on the trees. They weren't really wishes I'd take seriously, just something to write on a piece of paper. This year though, I wasn't able to hang a wish on a tree. I still want to put something to words, since I do believe in the power of putting form to your thoughts.  Like the hardworking princess in the story, I want to find love. I want to meet my husband soon, whether it be through an unforgettable meet cute or by an online date that went surprisingly well. I think my time with A has shown me that I am no longer so vehemently opposed to the idea of a relationship. If you had asked me six months ago how I...

So there are a few things that I feel like I should be ashamed of, but somehow lack the capacity to be ashamed. One of them is the fact that I like sex. I enjoy having it, I enjoy the pursuit of it, and even when it's not great it's still a story I can tell. There are a few good ones. The ones that weren't so good make for a fantastic story though. Like that micropenis. Or when a circus guy told me that I should let him eat me out because he was a Sagittarius and it would be amazing. I do wish I'd started having penetrative sex earlier. I don't know why I was so adamant to hold on for a special someone as the first, considering that I no longer speak to them. But that's going to change. I'm going to (reasonably) play the single girl now, and enjoy it damn it!  Here's a map of the different nationalities I've had sex with/messed around with. Granted, I met a good amount of them when I was living in New Zealand, but I'm slowly meeting more people l...

  This is the in between.  There are about five weeks left before I move to Osaka. This time last year, I remember being in a miserable relationship, thinking of the best possible way to end it. I remember telling myself that I would not see another Christmas at the same company after the one that was coming.  But it is also poignant to think of where I am right now in relation to where I am going. I am still too far off to think of saying goodbye to the people I've met here. But it seems there isn't nearly enough time to get things ready.  It's been a whirlwind to think about how much has happened since I decided to start job hunting. The entire process, from start to finish, took about three months. I knew it would be a good time to start looking because of the hit to recruiting the pandemic has caused. At the same time, it is still rather breathtaking to think about the circumstances that have led me to this job.  There was the interview at the other PLS scho...

A few months ago I wrote about the kind of job I would like to be working at by next year. So far things have been falling into place so that this can happen, and so here I would like to write about the kind of partner I would like to have.  Part of the reason I am moving out of Nagano is because I would like to position myself to meet my husband. For all the largeness of Nagano, there really isn't much going for it in terms of people. Don't get me wrong, Nagano will always be special because it was my first home in Japan and it opened up all kinds of new opportunities in terms of learning how to be a good teacher. But dating? Not quite. It's kind of a hole. I chalk it up to the cold weather, but people here are quite distant and extremely conservative. Even the foreign community here is quite set in their ways, and to someone like me, it can be a little discouraging to see how slim the pickings are here.  Dating apps are only really good for setting up hookups. Considering...

This bloom has taught me something valuable this year, though the story has to go back quite some time.  I was playing with the idea of moving away from Nagano next year in the spring, thinking of beginning the job hunt at the end of the summer. At that point, it was still a fanciful idea, a little spark that settled into a warm glow in my chest. At that time too, I was growing these beautiful purple and white carnations, which I tended to assiduously. I would panic a little after being away, desperate to see if my plants had survived.  When I was in the hospital in May this year, I didn't think they would die out, especially since I had left them for two weeks at a time every time I went home for Christmas. What I wasn't expecting, was that a much bigger plant would take over, and here begins our story.  As I wrote about some time ago, I was getting ready to chuck out the whole plant when I realised that there was something growing at the bottom of all the dead crap. I q...

Dear Meg,  How are we doing? It is about 10.20 on a Thursday evening. You've just come home after a double whammy at Nisseki, plus your regular classes. Things went well, as they usually do on Thursdays. No big dramas happened, and Cody made a delicious chocolate cake with cum frosting. I kid, it's called ermine frosting but apparently it looked like cum before he blended in the butter.  I'm writing to put these thoughts down on paper. Writing things down substantiates thoughts, gives them weight and volume and form. You read recently that instead of being afraid of things going wrong, we should be excited for the possibility that things could go right. I mean, yes it does sound like the inspirational drabble that makes up Tumblr, but today you felt the truth of it ring in your bones.  This is what went down. You were in the gym on the third floor helping your students review for their speaking test next week. You had a fleeting thought that this would be the last time th...

Today I was shown something amazing.  Bit of back story: In early 2018 I was doing an event at Yamabiko dome with the school, and the booth close by was selling 泥だんご studded with random seeds. You split it in half and planted the halves in two pots. The other pot has long since broken, but one survived and managed to sprout a great hulking thing that bloomed the loveliest purple and white flowers. I took the best care of it, watering it and speaking kind and encouraging words to help it grow. I would always rush to water it when I come back from holiday, often fearing when I left that it would be the last time I would see it alive and healthy. It always managed to pick up immediately after watering, and all would be well. I had a fairly emotional attachment to this plant. How could you not, when I celebrated each bloom, telling it nice things and telling the other buds that they were beautiful too?   Earlier last month I managed to land myself in the hospital for...

As I come into the final hour of my twenties, I guess now would be a good a time as any to think back at the first decade of my life that REALLY mattered. As in, it mattered in the sense that it would actually set the tone for what the rest of my life would look like.  Of course I wanted to throw myself a big to-do over this particular birthday. I had envisioned a posh hotel in Tokyo, champagne at midnight wearing a pretty cocktail dress and killer shoes, maybe with a date who would take me back to the room for a proper celebration. The theatre maybe? Definitely would have gone through with my furisode photo shoot beforehand.  But hey, 31 is still a good birthday to do that to. I remember twenty feeling like hope and excitement. I was happy not to be a "teen" anymore, and firmly guaranteed a seat at the adults' table. I was a young thing in New Zealand, happy to just be away from home and not be under the constant scrutiny of my parents, peers and teachers. I...

These are strange and unusual times we are living in. I thought I would document this, so if I ever have to look back there is tangible proof that I pulled through this relatively unscathed. I am not so naive as to think that there will be resolution in the next week or two. I know how people are starving because they have lost the wages they would have earned as a day labourer. I know the scores of people who face unemployment because their jobs could not provide a job for them. I know how incredibly lucky I am to still have employment when so many others are unsure. I have seen the news reports from back home that detail how people walk hundreds of kilometres to their hometowns because the lockdowns have included public transportation. We are unsure of so much, so hesitant to plan beyond the next two weeks lest things change again. Everyday on the news it seems like there is a new issue to contend with. Words like recession, collapse, poverty and economic downfall are the ne...

I am about a week in to a lifestyle change that I've decided to try, after hearing lots of good things about it. I'm doing intermittent fasting, where you have an eight-hour eating window and a 16-hour fasted window. It is supposedly good for regulating metabolism, kickstarting the autophagy process in your body and managing appetite.  I had just gotten back from California, where I had stuffed my face with lots of good things as I usually do on trips overseas. I knew I had to make a change because suddenly my pants were starting to fit a little too snugly , if you know what I mean. My face was also turning into an M&M, which if you know me, I absolutely adore but do not want to look like.  Besides, I'm turning thirty in about six months. Time for a change. I want to look younger in my new passport photo (which I will apply for in about six months as well) and I want to start the new decade looking better than I did in my twenties. I am going to motivate myse...