Kiss the Rain

I know, I know!  This song as a title really dates myself but I couldn't help myself.  This song got stuck in my head today because of the week long rainstorm that has been my life lately.  People in Taiwan are quite peculiar when it comes to rain.  They fear it for some reason.  I can't think of how many times that it has just been sprinkling outside so I decided to not use an umbrella and people look at me like I'm crazy.  If there is any big activity (outside or inside) that is being put on by the community, school or church, and it rains, it is then seen as too much of a nuisance to go outside so it is then canceled.  I've seen it happen so many times.  

I myself don't mind the rain.  In fact rain can have such a cleansing and new effect.  What I don't like is when said rain continues to come down for a whole week.  Then the rain switches from cleansing to just a wet shower that lasts for days.  Plus once you are wet you stay that way.  I have no deep meaning to this post, just that I probably will miss how wet and green this country is once I am back in the desert of Arizona.  I guess the grass is always greener.

The long road home

     So I guess the worst thing that you can do as a blogger is write a really frustrating post about how your life is not going anywhere, that nobody loves you, and you feel like giving up and then never post again.  It probably looked like I committed internet social suicide and I apologize for the shock and causing any worries for my physical emotional safety.  There's been lots of stuff that has happened since then that has been very uplifting and I feel terrible that I haven't been posting about them.  I was just video chatting with a fellow blogger (Yay for video chatting with good friends from long ago!) and it inspired me to take back up the pen and continue writing so here goes with continuing telling you about my very interesting journey.

     I titled this post "The long road home" because this returning back to America thing that I'm preparing to do has been quite a painful trudging process even though I am returning to loved ones and to the country that I know and love.  Don't get me wrong, and please try to understand that I am really excited to be returning home and this in no way means that I'm thinking of staying.  I was recently talking to a close family member about how hard it is going to be to leave and I think I made this person feel like they were not important to me and I don't want to give that impression.  This experience being here in Taiwan for the past two years has just become so much more than a temporary spot to wait out the economy.  For starters, I always want big decisions and major changes in my life to be progressing in the "better and better" category and I might have outdone myself moving to Taiwan.  I mean when you move to a tropical island out in the pacific ocean that speaks a foreign language and eats foreign things like cow stomach and ducks blood, how do you get better than that by moving back to America (other than moving to New Orleans)?  But the real thing that is upsetting me is that once I had made the decision a while back that I was not going to be staying for another year I endeavored myself to finish seeing all of the things that I still hadn't seen, and saying the things that I wanted to say to the people that mean the most to me, and doing the things that I wanted to do with those people, and I've realized that I don't have enough time to do everything.  I have also realized that I really haven't enjoyed this endeavor as much as I thought I would because with each thing checked off the list and words said to people that I care about have driven the painful stake of leaving this experience deeper and deeper into my soul.  For a person that likes to keep moving in order to keep life interesting, I kind of hate moving.  It really sucks!  There are moments that I've had and memories that I have made that have changed my life forever but I'm afraid that, much like my mission, since I have made these great memories in a place so far away from home and the norm of living in America that these experiences will be so easily forgotten and seem like a they didn't happen and these people didn't exist.  To me and my life, relationships are a very important thing to me and I try very hard to grapple onto the people who mean the most to me and I don't want Taiwan to fall out of my grasp because of distance.

     Recently I have been watching the missionaries and how they keep a hold of their memories and carry around a bye-bye book which is a collection of people's thoughts, memories, and words of love and encouragement that is put together in a sketch book.  The people of Taiwan really grab onto this tradition and make their personal page very creatively interesting by drawing funny cartoons of memories or posting crazy pictures of themselves and even making a scrap book kind of thing.  It is so great to see how Taiwanese people love being creative and they really take advantage when given the chance.  I wish I could collect all of my memories here into a bye-bye book like them and have something that I could look back on and always remember.  I think I will start a bye-bye book of my own.  I know that it won't be able to fit everything that I want to remember but it could contain some.

     I will say this, I AM very excited to be coming home and I look forward to the many amazing and life changing experiences that I am to have with all of you coming up.

Fear and discouragement!

Today and most of this week I have been trying to take advantage of the time I have off to get a head-start on my near-future plans. Since lately I have been kind of living life about a month in advance, this process of "future planning" has been very slow, lacking in motivation, but most of all almost staggeringly horrifying. What?! HORRIFYING?! This is coming from the guy who signed up to teach EFY on a whim 3 months before it started and left to work the whole summer without a car and not-knowing how he was going to get to all 9 sessions that he was assigned. This is coming from the missionary who had no previous relatives to lean on for experience, who had to pioneer the whole "preparing for a mission" period without empathetic family members and then after was called to a small island half-way around the world and had to leave for said mission the day after the 9/11 terrorist attack. This is coming from a performer who relishes in the thrill of solo A Cappella performance opportunities and aspires to be a Choral teacher where he will need to do weird and very emasculating things in front of teenagers daily. I seem to have no problem putting myself into any of these risky and what other people might see as "horrifying" situations. In fact, I live for situations like these! But apparently ask me to sit down and make an accounting of what experiences that I have had, put these experiences in words and plan my life out for more than a month in advance and all of a sudden I start sweating bullets and practicing avoidance behaviors like mad. When did I start being such a wussy pants? I guess I have always known that I detest making plans for a future that I cannot see any clearly than a Kaleidoscope of possibilities. There's just too many opportunities for me to choose the wrong thing so why not just continue to choose the right things that I am choosing now and not worry about anything else? Then comes the knowledge that after awhile continuing to drive yourself into a rut and not progressing is another wrong choice. So now we come to where I'm at right now, a wrong choice at my back and millions of other choices in front of me. I know probably, like you, a lot of scripture references now come to mind like Paul stating "If ye are prepared ye shall not fear." or "Faith is not to have a perfect knowledge of things." but these scriptures don't really give much comfort besides the fact to tell me that these feelings are natural. I just kind of wish I had someone here to tell me that who had arms to hold me instead of pages to inspire me. Sometimes inspiration doesn't have the benefit of a tactile experience.

Tactile experiences are very important to me. This is why I love dance and hiking and being outside so much is because you get to touch stuff. Anyways, to avoid getting too mushy I guess this time of reflection and planning has reminded me of things that I need in my life. This can get discouraging but if I have learned anything over the years is that discouragement only stays as long as it is welcome. It is a very polite guest and knows when it has overstayed it's welcome. Even though I may fear planning for my future, I also anticipate what the future holds and am excited for the learning and growth that it will bring. So for now my mantra is "Carpe Propositum!"

Funny happenings in the country of the rising sun

So I’ve been trying to remember all of the funny things that have happened on our little excursion here in Japan so I could share some of them with you. I really am not familiar at all with Japan and was going on this trip purely because I haven’t been here before and I like to experience other cultures. Well, right from the get-go our group of Taiwan English teachers realized that we had picked up some bad habits whilst being in Taiwan. We’ve been whistled down a couple of times by policemen when we’ve crossed the road when there were no cars coming but not when the crosswalk said walk. All of us (even me!) have accidentally said our little “xiexie”s and our “buhaoyisi”s realizing immediately afterwards that we were speaking the wrong foreign language. I think the funniest moment of Taiwan faux-pas was when we were going to take a bus to the Imperial Palace. In Taiwan when a bus stops that is where you load so if it stops a long ways off because there are many buses already stopped you have to race to the place where it is unloading so that you can get on before it takes off again. So when the bus that we needed stopped a little before the bus stop because there was a bus that hadn’t left the loading place yet all of our party started to quickly move in the general direction of the bus which immediately drew stares of bewilderment from the long line of Japanese people waiting patiently at the loading area. That kind of stopped us in our tracks and embarrassingly we realized that the bus would probably be nicer than the buses in Taiwan and actually pick up passengers at the designated bus stop area. Japanese people apparently do things by the rule book.

In the hostel we were staying at there was another very unique experience that I found fascinating. I kind of am a fan of hostels now. They are such an interesting atmosphere of different cultures, ages and travelers that are put in a space without much room and privacy and yet have an immediate camaraderie that you just can’t get anywhere else. We met three girls who were staying there from Taiwan who were thrilled to meet Americans who were teaching in Taiwan. I also met some guys from America there working for their vacation (they were studying in Mainland China) and also a group of vacation workers from Australia. I think the Australian accent is pretty much the most attractive accent out there. I was talking to an Australian while doing laundry and I swear I could have made out with her on the spot! The most interesting guy I met was a dude from Turkey. Who would have thought you would meet a guy in Japan from Turkey? He spoke the language pretty easily it seems and he was a pretty interesting fellow. We talked a lot about how I don’t know much about that part of the world and how that was a shame and he told me about how where he lives there really wasn’t much hostility towards America at all as far as he could tell. I found that heartening, but also depressing that the media paints such a bias and untrue picture of the middle-east.

All in all I have really enjoyed being here in Japan. It has been a very liberating and fascinating trip. The culture here is so much like Taiwan, and yet it also has its own little corner in the world and really is its own entity. I would really like to come back to Kyoto to visit again. There was so much that we didn’t get to see. Maybe someday.

New Years!!

This week my post is a video! Hope you enjoy it.

The night before Christmas

Short post today because I am really trying to enjoy myself during this season. Well, it took a lot of Christmas music, lots of church videos and preparing to give a talk on Christmas day to get me through it but I think that I'm doing just fine this year. Yes, this is the second year in a row that I have not been able to be home for Christmas; something that hasn't happened since I went on my mission ten years ago. The only difference between now and then is that I was crazy busy every day doing the work of the Lord and now I'm only crazy busy doing the work of the Lord part-time and kind of sucking at it as of late. But there has been something special about this Christmas. Again I have felt the love of the Lord pulling me through not being able to be with my family, which feels so terrible, but this year I have started to feel a reliance on the Lord that I haven't felt in a while. One thing I learned on my mission was reliance on the Lord because if you didn't have that, well you just about went crazy. But ever since being back I guess I didn't feel so much like it was just me and the Lord in the world and I started putting my trust in others, not forgetting about the Lord of course; at first. You know if there is one thing that I really put forth a big effort in doing in my life is keeping in contact with the people who I've become friends with whether or not it has been in the past or the present. Now I'm not the best at it but I really try stay in contact with people that I care about and try not to miss important dates and things. Staying in touch with the Lord shouldn't be as hard as staying in contact with people but sometimes it just is. Through this Christmas season I have had to rely on something other than the relationships that I've had and the relationships that I have now. I've had to rely more on myself, more than I ever had before and whenever I do that I realize how terribly short I fall. That is when I remember my primary and Sunday School lessons which has taught me that whenever I fall short that I always have somewhere to turn to. That's why I've made a resolution this year that I'm going to make sure that I come home for Christmas every year. Now I might not be able to come to my earthly home with my brother's and sister and my Mom and Dad but I can come home to the place that I know that I will be always welcome no matter what I do or who I am. I know that I am always welcome in the arms of the Lord. Just as the prodigal son, if I return to him then I know that every time he will come running to the rescue. This has never failed me in my life and has been the only constant in this unreliable world. I love the Lord and the things he has done for me. Merry Christmas everybody.

Yes ladies and gentleman, It's time for another Good Idea, Bad Idea

Good Idea: rewarding yourself for a long eventful and productive day by eating a piece of pizza. Bad Idea: trying to make up for a long day of not eating and staying in bed because you felt sick to your stomach by eating a whole medium size pizza along with garlic bread and three spicy drumsticks. The End, at least I wished. I have realized that the more I stay in this country that has little to no meals based on anything dairy, the more I become intolerant to lactose. Eating all that food was definitely not the satisfying end to a hard day that I wanted. The happy ending is that I did actually get to sleep eventually and woke up feeling loads better.

I've gotten a lot better at staying on top of things and keeping myself busy with little projects this week. I'm getting really excited for Christmas not because I'm doing anything special for Christmas but for the observance of the holiday. Living in a country that doesn't have all the Christmas hullabaloo during this time of year, you really have to wait until Christmastime to see anybody getting into the holiday at all. I find myself going to American stores like Costco so I can see the tree and feel a little bit of it's magic. I remember Christmases when I was going to BYU. When I was coming home for Christmas during my first year at BYU I was driving on the cold and snowy road that I had driven down so many times before but there was a new excitement this time. I was listening to the radio to catch the Christmas tunes to put me in the Christmas mood and I remember one song came on that brought tears to my eyes. I know it's a kind of sappy memory but bear with me. It was Kenny Loggins "Celebrate me home." I've always loved soulful songs where you can make up your own melodies to sing in the background with a gospel choir to back you up and this just gave me an excuse to start singing at the top of my lungs. Ever since that Christmas it has been a tradition of mine to play that song whenever I am traveling home for Christmas and even though last Christmas and this Christmas I have not been able to get home I love listening to the music of this season because it inspires us and brings back the memories that make this season so magical. I feel that among the many lessons and principles that this season teaches there lies one that rings a special tune, and that one is of remembrance. Not only remembrance of Christmases past, of family togetherness and memories of dear friends and family who have left this world, but also of the way the first Christmas was passed and the incredible gift of love that was brought to this earth that night. I hope that everyone really does have a great Christmas this year and is able to spend it with the people that they love because it is the people in this life that make it sweet.

Ok, preachy sappy post is now over. I shall now get down from my proverbial soap box.