A celebration and good-bye

In Okinawa, we have a great tradition called the Olympics. No, this does not involve javelins or lap pools, balance beams or 50-meter dashes. But it’s definitely NOT a spectator sport. The Olympics is the whirlwind of events preceding a PSC (Permanent Change of Station) that usually involves trips to as many Okinawan hot spots as you can squeeze into a 2-week period. Said PCS-er determines what restaurants, hikes, scuba spots, and tourist destinations they absolutely must see before they leave the island for good, and then all their friends make it happen.

Ironically, I believe the term Olympics found its origin because one particularly popular girl had about 12 going away dinners and someone compared it to the real Olympic ceremonies that, well, never seem to end. But now we cherish our Olympics. It’s our last chance to bid our friend farewell, and to get in our seasonal trips to Okuma beach, the Okinawa Aquarium, and Pizza in the Sky. During PSC season, it becomes an absolute marathon of activities, exhausting even the most energetic participants.

Today, we climbed Hiji Falls for the Becca Olympics. It was a beautiful May day, just cool enough to be able to breath without an inhaler. Becca is a flight nurse who has been on this island longer than any of us and most of her close friends have already gone. She was here when we arrived, and made us feel at home.

We’ve come to find military life (well, so far – this is only our first assignment) to be like college life. (Sometimes a little too much like college.) You arrive on the island, not knowing anyone, or what the heck all those darned acronyms mean.
Then, some kindly upperclassmen will take you out to lunch, show you the ropes. Tell you that the cafeteria food sucks, but happy hour at the local pub is a great time. You will feel part of the group – this amazing group of people that have been happily living in a foreign country and sucking the marrow from it. With each new year, a few more of those upperclassmen leave, and before you know it, you are the Seniors, ready to take on your final year. Senior year is great, but it’s never quite as good as those freshman days, when college life seemed never ending, and there was not where to go but up.

This is why it’s important to participate in the Olympics. It’s a proper send off to those who came before, who trekked through the jungle to find the best hikes, who ate at all the bad sushi restaurants so you could eat at the best. It’s a thank you for making this island so welcoming.

Good Friends, Good Bagels

What a beautiful day. It is starting to push the limits of my heat tolerability index, but sitting in my favorite shady cafe, reading a travel memoir, is just about the best way I can think of to offset the humidity. We have an amazing bagel shop here in Okinawa, called Cactus Eatrip. The interior is lovely and odd - wide, cool, cement floors, white stucco benches with scattered pops of brightly-colored pillows. It is staffed (and owned?) by three young Japanese - two men and one woman. They speak almost no english, but since I order the same bagel sandwich every time, it's never been an issue. The bagels are PHENOMenal. They boil them in a wok and then toast them in a pizza oven. They are never more than 1/2 hour old, and so incredibly soft. Could it be possible that the best bagel in the world is made by Okinawan hands? Think of the consequences of that....

I had lunch with a schoolmate of mine - a guy who's been in the Navy for 9 years. He did his undergraduate and graduate work since he's been in, very impressive. He's one of those wicked smart people that knows a little about everything. Definitely a good meal companion. Then I ran into another workout buddy of mine. This whole life here is so interesting - these are people I would have never met had we not taken this adventure. I'm not generally the type that seeks out new people, that's more John's department (although I reap the rewards). It's so easy, past a certain age, to stop making new friends. My closest friends are the ones I met in college - but I had just stopped there. That was 9 years ago! I find myself incredibly lucky to be surrounded by these fantastic new people. Some sadly moving along - we lost Cortney to the plains of New Mexico last month. Some to leave soon, Lauren's heading off to Los Angeles (JEALOUS!) Most sticking around. I am a lucky duck.

John is acting out his "ahoy matey!" fantasy right now as he is participating in a lawyer exchange with the Navy. Somehow I think that sleeping in a foldout bunk with 3000 other dudes is not quite as romantic as his 2001 voyage across the Atlantic on a 4 person sailboat. But John will make the best of it, he always does.

Happy Spring Welcome Summer!

You know you're a blogging disappointment when your blogging partner won't return your emails (at my other online home), your grandmother enlists your father's influence to get you to post more, and your sister says "oh you still write that internet thingy?"  Yes, I get the point.  I'm a bad bad girl.

The thing is, and I've stated this before, I have only so much capacity, and I generally put all efforts towards one project at a time.  This wouldn't be so bad if I didn't come up with a new project every day. I just finished my latest quarter of school work. My last paper was an examination of American unconditional foreign policy support for Israel and the resulting consequences...(I know you're begging me to post it cause you're DYING to read something so intriguing, but trust me on this.  I'm sparing you.)  

In April (seems like only days ago) my good friend Masumi and her boyfriend Scot came to visit.  I met them up in Tokyo and then they flew down to see our life here in Okinawa. 

It was a glorious spring in the capital city.

Here's a lovely one of Scot and Masumi.

Scot and Mas are rapacious foodies, much like myself. Scot came armed with a culinary itinerary that included Kyubei, what is considered the most famous sushi restaurant in Tokyo. They served the nigiri at room temperature which was surprisingly delightful and the subtle flavors were well worth the insane journey to actually find the place (the kindness of Tokyan strangers is not to be underestimated).

The Benito, with a subtle garlic, ginger flavoring was truly out of this world.  

Overall, it was a marvelous trip.


The day my friends left, I had a glance at my calendar and realized that from that moment until, oh about 2 hours ago, I had only barely enough time to finish all my papers and finals. So, in a nut shell, that's where I've been.

Now summer is upon us (the humidity fairy has struck) and I'm looking forward to enjoying our last summer in Japan!

Namaste

I love a good rant...why is that?  What else is dinner conversation for? Religion and politics, of course. I wonder where I got it...it's not like my parents are especially opinionated. Ha, yeah right. Have you met them?

Good grief, no wonder no one wants to dine with me.

MAN there is a lot to rant about these days. But, sometimes it's good to just take a breaaaath.  I think it's time to offer a nice appreciative "Namaste" to the lovely little life we've created for ourselves here.

John's been gone for three weeks and thankfully returns tomorrow evening, as I was starting to speak cat.  Gunner's a faithful companion and all, but I think I'm starting to get on his nerves. John's return gives me a reason to do the dishes, and really, they need to be done.

Met lots of good new friends this week, some just arrived on island, some just about to leave. Went to the Kadena wine festival last night and talked extensively with someone who happens to know a lot about grass-fed cows and the perils of ethanol, which is, interestingly enough, what I'm reading about right now.  Then we went off to the Kadena Officer's Club where I took tons of video footage of men in onsies (pilots) dancing the electric slide (although the kids today call it the Cuban Shuffle). Really, it's like Saturday Night Fever, disco balls and all.  Even got out in the dance floor a bit myself, and managed to keep from falling off the stage like I did last week. Home at a reasonable hour, listened to the storm all night.  What an island.

Tonight I joined some new friends at their lovely beach-front home, watched the sunset from their porch and ate delicious food and enjoyed sparkling conversation.  People in the military can be one-dimensional if that's all you think they are.  Or they can be witty and hilarious and generous and remind you of your best friends from home if you just open yourselves up to them. Guess that's true of most situations.

John gets back tomorrow and Gunner and I are beside ourselves.  Classes start on Tuesday and although I only got about a book and a half of "pleasure" reading done in the interim, I'm happy to be back on heavy diet of dense political reading. Yep, I'm a big geek.  Give me a highlighter and a deadline and I'm happy as a clam. Oh, I'll rant the whole semester.  But inside, I'm beaming.

Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts

Thomas Friedman put into words in Sunday's NYT exactly what I've been mulling over for about 6 months now.  Basically this:

Our economy is in large part based upon stuff we don't need. Entire industries are floating on the fact that we are obsessive over-consumers. A different pair of sneakers for walking, hanging out, hiking, cross-training, etc. Baby-wipe warmers (saw that one at a baby shower today). Wine tags so you don't drink the wrong glass of wine at a party (I mean, it's not like I have cooties, geez).  

Basically, the way you can draw money out of the system, provide for you family, etc., is to come up with something no one else has thought of, and market it to the point where no one would consider living without it. Hiking up a mountain in walking shoes? (no traction!  no balance! no ankle support! no way!) And so we buy our 4 pairs of specialized sneakers.  We know deep down that young women in China are getting paid next to nothing to make them. 90% of goods in Walmart are made in China. 90%! It's a buzz-kill to talk about but it's the truth.

I'm reading Omnivore's Dilemma right now.  The author spends a great amount of time on corn - just how pervasive it is in the American diet.  Food companies have twisted and mixed and chemically altered corn into pretty much everything we eat.  Marketers sit around and try to come up with new products made from corn all the time - breakfast cereals, chicken nuggets, energy drinks, you name it.  Why do they do this?  Because corn is what we have.  It's cheap (though nutritionally vapid) and it grows like wildfire in this country.  So even though our diet certainly could do without high-fructose corn syrup (1 in 5 Americans being obese and all), that's what we get.  It's not what's good for us, it's what's good for shareholders in General Mills. Hmmm....bad for our health, good for the market, that's a poignant dichotomy.

Which takes us back to this economy. Friedman says "the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: 'No more.'"

I don't think it was in anyone's plans to have half the world working for a pittance just so the industrialized West would be able to afford 4 pairs of $60 sneakers per person.  We refuse to work for less than $10/hour, yet we won't pay more than a dollar or so for the labor of making those sneakers (most of that ticket price going to marketing). It's an unequal equation. Someone takes the hit. I think we'd all be happy to pay $200 a pair if we knew that the girl making them could afford a pair too. But we weren't asked to make that sacrifice, and so we'll just avert our eyes. Perhaps that's the underlying picture behind this economic chaos.  We've all been living like mini-Madoffs, knowing we were getting wealthy (and tons of cheap stuff) off the backs of others.  Maybe this is mother nature's way of righting the balance.

It's 2009 already??

Where does the time go??  School is going well.  Knee deep in the Vietnam war. I had never been that aware of France's colonial involvement at the genesis of that quagmire. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in school, but my history classes never really went into it. Interesting....

Speaking of those pesky French, I just finished my little research paper, and realized that my vocab could use some work. When a professor asks you for 6000 words, there are only so many times you can write "Becuase, you know, like, France is like, totally anti-hegemonic."  Ugh. Happily moving on....

...In case anyone was wondering, my husband has one of the coolest jobs ever.  When he's not taking a field trip to the Supreme Court....

Or jumping out of black hawks...


He's backseating in an F-15 plane.

Truth be told, I wasn't all that excited about it.  The prospect of vomiting in the back of a $30 million rollercoaster is just not one of the things I look forward to in life. But when I showed up in the F-15 parking lot to take photos of him upon arrival, I have to say it was a pretty amazing feeling.  And I didn't even make it into the air!!

So yeah, go to law school kids...see how much fun it is to be a lawyer??

John is back in the states for 3 weeks so Gunner and I will be spending a lot of quality time together, cleaning the guest room as we prepare for Masumi and Scott to get here in April. He's promised to clean up all the mini-Gunner dust bunnies as long as I give him hourly rubs.

ADHD and one too many projects

Turns out I have massive Adult Onset ADHD.  This is self-diagnosis, of course, as I'm not going to waste the air force's medical resources just for them to tell me that yes, I bounce around a lot and need to learn to concentrate. On one project. At a time.  Clearly they don't know me at all.

I just completed a final on GeoStrategy that kicked my behind. What is geostrategy, you ask? Well since the entire class was only NINE DAYS LONG (two 16-hour weekends and 1000 pages of reading), I stored all the info needed for my test in my short term memory compartment, which I promptly dumped all over an US Weekly the minute class was over. (US Weekly is the girl version of beer, just dumbs you down in a really comforting way.) So - sorry, you're going to have to go to Wikipedia for the definition because I can barely muster the word. 

So now I just need to write the paper for that class, but I swear, I cannot summon the intellect. I tend to stick with subjects I understand (hence that dramatic hole where math and science should be on my transcript) but this class was just a little too much.

Anyway the point was (see how I drift?) that I have been a horrible blogger lately because of other commitments.  Actually that's not true, I've been blogging, just not here. I guess I never really mentioned it, but last year my friend Judi and I started another blog - Creme de la Mode - with an eye towards fashion and design. It's gradually getting more readership in the design-field which is great.  I think with the demise of certain magazines, like the recent shut down of Domino, there is an opportunity for taste-makers in the blogosphere.  Anyhoo, if you are so inclined, you can read it here:  thecreme.wordpress.com

Other than that, I have another midterm tonight. (But instead of studying, I'm writing a blog.) Just heard confirmation that my friend Masumi and her BF are coming to visit us in April.  Astonished by this news as even my family has made no mention of visiting prospects.  Oh and John and I are heading to Kyoto next week for a much deserved mini-honeymoon.  I will be sure to take lots of photos.  Jewelry designs due in the states March 1....other jewelry designs due in Tokyo mid-february...John has a mini-trial set for mid-february....it's a busy little factory over here at the Preston-Tomans! 

Oh and BTW, it's about 80 degrees without a cloud in the sky.  Don't you wish you were coming to Okinawa?