I did sit outside this afternoon and read Kate Williamson's "A Year in Japan" (2006)... Very lovely little watercolour sketch journal of a year she spent in Kyoto after graduating Harvard. It's something I do want to recommend to Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo and to both Marina at prettyuniverse and Meredith at thelittleriddle. I think the original recommendation was from Lissy at emigree a couple of years ago. She recommended Lucy Knisley's "French Milk" to me at the same time, I think. Lissy always had art skills--- her own sketching and watercolour skills are really good ---and I did (and do) appreciate the recommendations. Anyway--- go look for "A Year in Japan". It's a gentle and rather heartfelt appreciation of a year in Kyoto. It ends with the O-bon festival--- a ritual I've always admired.

Kate Williamson writes about Japanese schoolchildren folding paper cranes--- which of course links to the paper cranes at the Peace Museum in Hiroshima. Just for the record: back when I was a very petite little Small Long-Eared Desert Hedgehog, I did cry when I read "Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes". I cried when I watched "Grave of the Fireflies", too.

Halloween tonight, and a major home football game. Tailgaters out in the parking lots by the university gates even at eight this morning. The espresso machine at the coffeeshop was on the fritz--- no steamed milk, so no skim chai latte. Chocolate-chip muffin and dark-roast Vienna coffee. Co-eds in tiny shorts and silk print minis and Frye boots. I sat and read Robt. Kaplan's "Mediterranean Winter" and tried to imagine myself Far Away.

Kaplan writes about quitting his job at a Vermont newspaper and going off to Marseilles and Tunis back in 1975. He had, he says, $US 1000 in traveler's cheques and no return ticket. $US 1000 in 1975. I'm trying to figure out what that would be in Year Nine dollars. My own scholarship package at New Haven gave me $222.22 a month plus tuition and room/board. Roughly a thousand dollars a semester as actual money. Later than Kaplan, yes, but not all that many years. Running off to Tunis in the Year Nine or the Year Ten--- not on a thousand dollars. When my siblings and I sold my father's house, I should've...what? Taken my share, left my job, and run away to Dushanbe or Ulan Bataar or Fez? Maybe. Probably.

I was going through old e-mails and found e-mails from little Eva-Grace. I haven't heard from her in...almost two years. Still at university in Ohio, I suspect. Still writing poetry, I hope. But I do miss her. I miss her tiny walrus stuffling Jamie, too. I even remember the Little Eva-Grace Song from the Year Six: "Little Eva-Grace, o little Eva-Grace/Tiny Arctic fox kit, little Eva-Grace." I do miss her sense of surreal fun.

Pico Iyer went to Kyoto and rented a room in a monastery. I wonder if one can still do that at any kind of reasonable rate. A place to put a futon, noodle stalls down the street, a bath/shower. What else do I need? Just a keitai. I have notebooks and the Tare Panda Laptop. (I so need a 15-inch MacBook Pro in black)

I do wonder what Miss Ginny thinks of the idea of just taking her new doctorate and her notebooks and just buying a one-way ticket to Far Away. I know she thought of going off to Vancouver for a year, but where would she go in the Far Away Lands? If Miss Ginny at ginny_mccoo went Far Foreign, where would she go? Tallinn, Marrakech, Barcelona, Dharamsala?

Robt. Kaplan writes about reading Flaubert's "Salammbo" in Tunis. Damn it, I've never read "Salammbo". I've looked at it in bookstores and libraries, but I've never sat and read it. Something I should remedy.

Lissy at emigree could be at the TaxLo Halloween at Club Sonar in Baltimore, but I expect she's spending her first Halloween on the Skinny Island at parties in Chelsea or the Village. I just wonder what kind of costume she'll be wearing.

The Small Pika will be in Brooklyn tonight--- I wonder if she'll be wearing her tanuki costume or her Max suit from "Where the Wild Things Are" in Williamsburg...

Next O-bon... Next O-bon I will send out little paper boats with candles in memory of both Beckett Darwin Puppy Kat and the Small Pika's little long-haired dachshund Alfie. The Bad Badger and little Alfie both need to be remembered. They're both much-missed little friends.

Eve of All Hallows... No parties for me. No costumes. No flirting with lovely girls in slutwear. No kisses tonight flavoured with pot and party drinks. No kisses at all. I'll order in Chinese takee-outee, then watch DVDs and drink. It's an FML Halloween. Last Halloween night my hot water heater blew up--- but at least lovely wicked clever girls were calling to flirt. No Voices on the Aether tonight. And I'm looking at an upcoming week at work that'll be nightmarish, humiliating, and demonstrate how incompetent I am at my job.

Let's not even talk about driving home with Golden Arches fast food and discovering that my fries were missing and, despite repeated descriptions of what I wanted and (more to the point) didn't want, there was cheese on my quarter-pounders. That was my lunch experience. Nothing is going to get any better over the next...two months? The rest of my so-called life?

I have a passport. I should just walk away from everything and live in a tiny room in a half-empty monastery in Kyoto. Or Carinthia. Sometimes I think it's either that or a long walk off a short pier. Not, alas, the piers near the Ikea at Red Hook.

I will stare at my phones all night. I suppose there is the desperate hope that some lovely wicked clever girl will call. But there's less chance of that than of a lovely girl kissing me on a Halloween night...or even of any Halloween or birthday or New Years or Valentine's or Christmas Eve being as good for me as for the girls I know on the Skinny Island or in London or Berlin or Montreal.