Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in turnaroundboy's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 11th, 2006
12:01 pm	If you comment on this post 1. I’ll respond with something random about you. 2. I’ll challenge you to try something. 3. I’ll pick a color that I associate with you. 4. I’ll tell you something I like about you. 5. I’ll tell you my first/clearest memory of you. 6. I’ll tell you what animal you remind me of. 7. I’ll ask you something I’ve always wanted to ask you. 8. If I do this for you, you must post this on yours. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 14th, 2006
11:18 pm	so yup Skipped work, hip hip horray. It was actually fun for a while until tonight when talking with Marv it hits home how ridiculously weak the substitution of a phone call is. Get angry and depressed and weak feeling and want to fucking lacerate myself with self incriminations. Why oh why does it suck all that much more after you hide from everything so you and suck your thumb and pretend its not going on? Its not even in my control, so little of it is it seems. There is nothing for sure except right now. This moment. Huh. Look at that. I actually feel better. It's just like that damn Krishna guy said. You can get caught up in imaginary futures and pasts and wishes, but that just leads to getting recycled and reincarnated again. Not that thats what I am espoucing here, but there is a bit of release in coming back to the fucking eternal Holy Moment. Not that its always fun, happy, peaceful, or positive, but just that it IS. This is my life. Clouds just lifted. I am lighter and there is less dark, heavy, suffocating clouds weighing me down. Lightning quick realizations. Sensing what IS. What can not be made up by my own mind, but the present moment around me. The Holiness and Purity and Truth and Unthinking Reality. The process of writing to create and change how one feels, remarkable. I had tears down my face 20 minutes ago, now I feel like nothing has changed but i am outside of the trap which made it so painful. How can you yearn and cry for something that can not come and will come until its own time, which in effect doesnt exist right now? Marv exists he is sharing this Holy Moment too. So is Katie, so is everyone. We are all RIGHT NOW living in the same moment. No I am not high. Its beautiful. Current Mood: touched (Comment on this)
Monday, June 5th, 2006
11:00 pm	language acclimation despite how you may or may not spell acclimation, i have some interesting thoughts about learning another language while emmersed in it. interesting to me at least. japanese specifically has after nearly a year of being here become somewhat familiar to me and in many way I am able to grasp certain margins of the living language that occurs around me. being as ambiguous as it can be i have found that in many of my interactions i am often understanding what is being told me through gestures, context, and inflection rather than from words and phrases. If i can pick up negative or positive connotations then add that with the context and thier expressions I typically can understand (or at least make an educated guess) about what's going on. Of course most of my interations deal with customer service in some way so the ideas being expressed are not that complex. Its as if while being here i haven't been studying japanese so much as I have been learning to read peoples non-verbal communication. Huh. Its true too. Even on the telephone (which is inflection and vocab and context) I listen, take it all in then draw my conclusions and answer appropriatly. sometimes i am right sometimes i am wrong. more and more I am right. This facinates me because it makes me wonder how much of what is said all the time is actually needed. Granted, the phone calls can be murder...and if it is complicated I ask them to get an english speaker. All in all, I don't know the language, but I have studied some and I have been immersed in the culture--this is the point--immersion has upped my proficiency in personal communication because I am more adept at reading context, norms, social expectations, and the like. Immersion gives you the innate ability to "half listen" and respond as if you understood it all. Cuz how often do I not listen wholeheartedly to what folks are saying, but keep one ear open while I think about other things? Here and now, if I listen for anything I can understand, take in the context, and non-verbal ques I can get a rough approximation of whats going on, what the meat of the info being expressed is. Its a strange fuzzy sort of comprehension that fails a lot, but now the static has some moments of clarity. Heh, its a shame I dont want to stay for a few more years, the channel would just grow clearer and clearer. No, its not a shame. I am done with japan, my life isn't here, Marvin and my family and my future career is in America. One year has been awesome. I am so glad to be here, so glad to be leaving, so glad to have had the experience, so glad Marv and I have this shared experience, so glad to have the newly formed perspectives about the States, so glad to have had a hands on chance to really live some cultural differences. And there are a lot of cultural differences. Boggling really that people think so often that trasnlated works are the same...so much truely is lost. Culure and social backdrop and context are so goddamn important for understanding. I have only scratched the surface of this place, these people, this language, and I am happy with the peak I have. Without a doubt I will be sad to leave, but I am ready. I am ready. :-) (this was all written quickly without proofing...) Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 4th, 2006
11:27 pm	progression when these weeks apart first started I would cry, feel torn apart (this i still do), be unbelievably sad. now, i get angrier and angerier, more and more tense... four days til you (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 25th, 2006
3:56 pm	Grandma Bea Yesterday morning due to complications with a heart bypass my grandmother on my fathers side died. Grandma Bea. A tough ol lady. Always poor, always working hard, married an alcoholic how passed 25 years prior to her. Her death was a release from a lot of suffering and limitations put on by the 82 years, but I still find myself hurting and yearning for it not to be. As per other encounters with loved ones dying I feel more than ever that the grieving process is a selfish endeavor. A loss of mine, not hers. A loss of our family's matriarch that pulled her offspring back for holidays. In all likelyhood we will lose touch with the rest of my uncles and cousins on that side. They never were very close or emotional. Hell, she didnt hug. In the last few years the best part about her wasnt her company (as bad as this sounds) but a reason for us to squish into a car and drive. We would see her, talk a bit, listen to her straight up answers to what the hell we are doing with our life. Get informed about all the other people in the family, who made their annual journey to her home each year, at least once. We were in family time mode for a greater purpose...purpose being to give company for an elderly mother/grandmother/greatgrandmother. We became a single unit, my parents being shrunk down closer to our status...with her reigning from her chair. She couldnt walk very well, she couldnt see very well, she couldnt hear very well...but the woman had a brain that ticked just as fine as ever. Sharp she was. Sharp in her comments too. Heh, as practical as they come. Suppose thats due to a hard life working on a farm, bearing and raising 5 sons, and being a widow for as long as being a wife. Strong Catholic lady with Jesus adorning the walls, never believed in drinking, despite having lived with a man who did that far too much. My childhood was rather uneventful, and in many ways because of this very happy. One of the constants and one of the the largest events was the summer (or occasional christmas) trip to Herford, TX to see Grandma Bea. The panhandle in the summer was dry and blessedly cool. We took loong walks together for something to do. We saw my father in the context of his childhood backdrop and how he treated his mother. We heard stories of farm equipment accidents and chased praire dogs down their tunnels. We threw darts, rode bikes, Dad and Steve caught rattlesnakes, we pestered my uncle to use the YMCA he managed. There is an abandoned house we walked to and explored every year, finding something new each time. Caught skinks that lost thier tails in the process. Found ourselves in the middle of nowhere basically, with only ourselves for company. Sometimes it was really boring, sometimes it was really intense. Each one of these weeks was the most travel I did all through my childhood. (except for one exception to Carlsbad Caverns) All to see the Knabe matriarch. That generation is now extinct. My parents are now the grandparents and I am an adult. And time keeps moving. And things keep changing. And a part of the family will never be back except in memories that aren't enough to instill the obligatory journey to Herford. And I am very sad. Think I will stop there. Can thing of many positive things to say that are true and pertinent, but thats not what this is about. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 7th, 2006
12:19 pm	japanese birthday Officially by date alone I am now 24...listening to the scratching of our kitten, U2, and discussing travel arrangements with Marv so I can travel to Tokyo overnight friday, slumbering towards him under the influence of seroquil. The world is good. Current Mood: happy (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 6th, 2006
8:09 pm	dum dum dum some sort of awful joke that the end of a vacation actually arrives... one week closer to returning to the states, and right now I am really really looking forward to that "bussom" (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
3:28 pm	yup with the help of my astute fiance i have just sent off my completed resume with an inquiry about jobby job job went to universal studios in japan to find that we'd take astroworld over it any day, but it was a good one time experience friends are friends until they stop talking to each other (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
2:38 pm	our kitten is really cute job hunting is an elusive and fickle business now it seems like a marathon to get to saterday universal studios japan here we come (Comment on this)
Monday, April 17th, 2006
1:14 pm	single parents so for the moment i am flying solo as a kitty father. whats funny is that yesterday after an emergency vet visit (which was instigated from strange pus coming out of his pecker) we are suprised to learn that our boy kitten is actually a girl! For a fucking month we have been confusing her and us. Comically we were SO certain it was a boy, we even claimed to see testes! Ahh, the mirth of our folly. Marv is trucking around Tokyo now...the absence is profound and sad, but the opportunity and the joy I have while I am at work knowing he is too, knowing he is being challenged and stretched and brought face to face with more and more things, is emmense. Just wish we could come together after our respective days at the office and tell our stories cuddled up on the couch or while we walk to the gym or ect. I like my new school, the teachers are young and there are two potentially cool guy friends. Miss you katie, and yesterday we needed your pagan info. What was Easter initally? Was it May Day's predecessor? (Comment on this)
Monday, April 10th, 2006
10:55 am	why japan is great Yesterday we rented Donnie Darko together and as a promotion gig the clerk gave BOTH of us a beer. (technically a Lemon Chuhai Highball.) On a bittersweet note: it appears a certain brilliant doctor of mathmatics will be leaving on sunday for an internship in tokyo. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 6th, 2006
2:02 pm	jokester today getting on the bus to my new school a sharply dressed japanese guy comes up and asks if i am Mr. kevin. He is vaguely familiar and it turns out he was this really cool friendly elementary student teacher i met on one of my trips to the land of little little japanese students. He just got transfered to my new school as well. !! Didn't recongnize him in his suit, b/c at elementary schools you don't dress up. When I did visit the elementary school we bullshitted for a while and I remember thinking that it was a shame we didn't have the setting or chance to become friends. (God this was sweet, he said it was his dream to get to know me---jeez the japanese can be so funny. Reminded me of an 18 year old we met who was amazed to have gotten a smile in a bar from a white guy.) So cool, his english is good and like many japanese he is eager to make friends with gaishin. We have a drinking buddy in the works I do believe. Someone up stairs is a jokester. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 5th, 2006
11:54 pm	easy as it goes Smooth day in Kyoto sight seeing with Linda. "Took in" the permanent collection at the municipal museum of art...some really great stuff. Lots of crappy modern art that seems to say "look at me, i'm weird, that means i am special and talented." It was a very small selection, but nice. Found a gigantic garden with wonderful ponds and cherry trees blossoming. Snuck onto the Limited Express line for half the train ride back. Back to school tomorrow...whoohoo, though i do need to prepare some lessons for next week. ok, really i don't have much to say here. Every see American Gothic? A tv series from '95? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 4th, 2006
12:32 am	sore throats Linda, aka Mom, aka future-mother-in-law, aka Mrs. Decker has arrived. The kitten got violated by japanese do gooder veternarians because I played the part of the over reactive, over protective parent who can't relax until patted on the head and told that everything is going to be ok. Just so everyone is clear: one full day of not taking a poo is not reason enough to rush a kitten to the doc. And speaking of docs. Not knowing kanji makes if very difficult to distinguish the piadiatric office which is next door to the veternarian office. I sat outside waiting for the "vet" to open for an hour. Five minutes before the time I notice the shutters have been drawn and now people move about inside. An unsuccessfull attempt to enter the premises provides me with a man in a white coat who tells me my box with a baby kitten has nothing to do with his line of work. In fact I had been sitting outside for no real reason, the vet was next door and full of helpful attendants. Fucking idiot gaishen. Kleenex box number 1 was killed today. I managed to infect marv with the "allergies" I am victim to lately. We are dosing, hoping to sleep and breath some day without the constant reminder that underlying all of our bodily processes are slippery things that make it all work. Its better somehow when all those slippery things aren't clogging your head pipes and making suprise exits through nasal routes during a laugh. Its the chance of the decade for marvy to bond with mommy dearest...what will happen? Hmmm, i want to know more about the childhood marv personally. He has already been regailed with "cute" stories of my peckish days, its my turn I do believe. Back on the floor again. Parents are different visitors than like aged family. First night went well, little weird and nervous, all too normal though. Keep you posted, sounds like a draining but good week once more. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 31st, 2006
9:14 am	last day sitting at my japanese place of employment on the morning of the end to it. everything is always shiny at the end of things isn't it? you get to become heartbreakingly myopic to all the positives. though today isn't exactly heartbreaking, but it is happy and fun. got a good day hike in kyoto planned for tomorrow, we will soon discover the secrets of the dark tunnel.... things happen quickly and changes occur even faster sometimes. lots of times these days my life seems so RICH. the potency of it all has dramatically risen with marv in the picture. and i dare say the taste is one i never want to do without. its all a bit of a flurry sometimes, and soon we will be separated again...for a "short" time. it will be good in many ways though, marv gets to work and live with some natives and see first hand everyday the global center he's been wanting to see for so long. Tokyo. we don't know how or what we will do after japan exactly, but the end geographical note seems to be targeting Austin. close to family, far enough away from someone elses family, not in b/cs, job opportunities, friends close, familiarity, texan liberal attitudes. angie made a quick offer to save us tons of money and just carry a baby for us if we paid her half the lowest price we found. perhaps 20 grand will be worth the morning sickness, weight gain, stretch marks, and awkward explanations. (oh cuz the most recent price was 40 grand marv found) having angie carry a whelp would be easiest by far seeing as the eggs wouldn't need to be removed and injected into anyone. my dad is going to be ok. the day will come when that is not the case, but monday-thursday was a viciously potent message of how much I care about him, and what family means. never cried so much in my life. it seems a bit odd to me sometimes that i am so excited about the idea of children and family with marv and being a dad. like all of a sudden i have this passion for something most don't want for years more. i attribute it to the ressurected nature of its very possibility. so many more options when life is faced by a team rather than alone. seems the year in japan will be finished, dad could use some company during his biweekly hospital stays and chemo induced illness, but he has that. I will see him when that is all done and hopefully its all run its course, brain growth vaporized and dad on the rebound. jesus that was close. shiny new career option? hmmm, looking into actual teaching. ha. kinda enjoy it and it would be a real novelty to actually communicate freely with the students and see them every day versus once a week. we shall see. a teacher friend here is impatiently awaiting retirement in 4 years. she began teaching 30 years ago and really enjoyed it. her goal was to be a famous artist...children who now seem like her pride and joy took away that time, i didn't sense regret. she is impatient because it seems that over the course of her career japanese public officials including teachers have come under public scruitiny and power. Like america parents weild far more control over the teaching practices than necessary. rules are more strict, the freedom of the teacher is restricted. and on top of it all the workload has increased each year for jp teachers as a whole, and she predicts is only going to get worse. wonder what the future of american teachers is? Current Mood: cheerful (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 28th, 2006
9:51 pm	so quick ugh, all the damn cliche things you hear about death and dying and illness about loved ones are so damn ... almost true. I find myself whispering words into marv's sodden shoulder that are so damn overdone! it hurts. it wastn't supposed to happen so soon. i am meladramatic, this could be all ok. thank god for marv. don't think he expected to deal with this either. well thats dumb, course not. he's more than i can believe God has blessed me with. growing up sucks cuz it means those who brought you up are getting old. (Comment on this)
3:08 pm	bad news and good people I suppose it has begun to sink in. I am not crying uncontrollably ever hour or so today...thats an improvement. A decision to leave Japan together if a worse case scenario happens has been made. Two more days before the family knows any more specific prognosis. Neko-chan, our dumpster dove kitten took his first shit today, ha somehow that is really good news. Albiet stinky and messy. I take it as a good sign that his little overactive metabolism is working full time. They grow 10 grams a day one site said. He can be really really cute btw. Current Mood: content (Comment on this)
Monday, March 27th, 2006
1:29 pm	wonder upon wonders lymphoma of the brain, brain cancer, a tumor in the head. My dad has one. Found out this morning, the last in the family to know due to an older generations reticence to inform others of weakness and a glitch in email. He sounds good on the phone, a bit sleepless due to sterioids that have helped eliminate the initial symptoms of an inability to verbalize correct words and sentences and loss of fine motor control of hands for writing. He goes into the hospital wednesday for the complete results of the quick biopsy they did. My dad has brain cancer and could die. He could live and be a vegetable. He could live and be well...positivity and pragmatism are my parents mode now. I don't know. I am laughing at it and using the oh so welcome and practiced tool of sarcasm as a defense mechanism. Its coming in waves, tears not totally unshed, but possibly premature anyway. Its a scary thing, but in the end whatever may happen my father is happy with the life he has made I believe and faces this as "just one of those things". oh happy day Current Mood: numb (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 4th, 2006
7:22 pm	HOW MUCH??!! Wanna know the typical cost of creating a person? 115,000 - 140,000 smackaroos My mirth and laughter to the financial number is really all I can do. Over a hundred grand before the kid actually sees the light of day...this is surrogate compensation, medical fees, legal fees, egg harvesting, and in vitro fertilization all wrapped up into one tidy little figure. California has a law that legally determines parents before birth so if the baby is born in California the birth certificate can have two men's name on it. The process usually take 12-18 months. My sister's eggs will start to get wrinkled in 8 years. It sounds insane really. My jaw is dropped and my mind can't really take it in. There are cheaper places, but this is the biggest and oldest agency owned and opperated by gay folks with surrogate inspired families, obviously geared to work for other gay couples. ... I am still laughing. Current Mood: shocked (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 28th, 2006
2:12 pm	two strikes, one phone call well now I feel really bad about it all (Comment on this)