Ash from Sakurajima

January 2010

It’s been a really long time since I’ve written. You’d think I’d be bursting with new information, but no. As of now, I have nothing in particular happening in my life.

Our volcano, Sakurajima, has been spewing more ash than usual into the air for a while now. It turns the streets grey. Today it rained and as I walked to school, my laces splashed in the puddles of ashy water and got the hem of my khaki-colored pants stained an awful drippy black. The weird thing was that once my pants dried off the ash just fell away, restoring the color, as if nothing was wrong in the first place. Weird, no?

The ash falls onto my balcony. I’ve been sweeping it weekly lately. Even so, by next Saturday a layer of grey soot has formed. I sweep it up and it completely fills my dustpan. Sometimes I can taste it at the edge of my teeth or feel it like grit in my eye.

With so much ash in the air, it’s no wonder I kept getting sick this fall. I still get a little bit hacking/ gagging in the mornings, but not nearly so bad as in October, November, December. I think it’s gotten better since I finished my test. I took the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), 2nd level, this December. I’d been studying like crazy for it. Now that it’s over, and now that the holidays are over as well, I’m a little more relaxed. I’ve been studying Japanese by translating museum signs into English.

I spent my holidays cleaning my house and trying to ignore the germ of loneliness growing in me. The holidays are the worst: everyone is away or busy and the whole community turns into a ghost town. For my 25th birthday, I wanted to have a party, but in the end, only one person could come. We had fun talking, but it isn’t quite a party. It’s not just that. It’s coming home and having no one to talk to, no one to cook for, no one to take care of or take care of me. When I first got my own place, I was so excited about having my own space and my own rules. But I kind of miss having people around.

That’s how I know I have to come home. The papers are signed; I’ll leave in August. There’s a conference for “Returning JETs” in Yokohama to help us deal with adjusting to life outside of Japan and write resumes and things like that. I want to go. I do want to attend this conference, but I also want to visit Yokohama (a city near Tokyo, one of the 5 largest in Japan) and, more importantly, Kamakura. Kamakura is near Yokohama. It was the capital of the really, really old Japanese Shogunate. It has one of the two famous “Big Buddha” statues in Japan .

School is going fine. I’m teaching the kids about rhyming. I’m getting better at preparing lessons. Not perfect, but better. The odd thing is that the more I understand what it means to be a teacher, the less appealing it becomes to me. I love to teach students who love to learn. But I hate trying to control noisy classes, motivate students who don’t want to learn, and grade papers. And that seems to be most of what being a teacher is. Honestly, I’d rather be a student; or better yet, just give me my own work and I’ll do it happily.