Ideally, a good parent would be someone who teaches you the principles of how to navigate life and is there to guide you without suffocating you. A good parent will know when to let go and let you gain your own independence. That’s different for different children.
Japan’s ageing population is always spoken about with a certain sense of doom. I don’t think it should be that way. The senior citizens have all the knowledge, all the experience, and all the time in the world to mentor the younger generations. We should be tapping into that wisdom and all that it can offer.
People stare at me all the time. They make comments on my appearance. On my clothes. On my behaviour. On the food that’s in my bento. About how I hold my chopsticks the Chinese way. ALL DAY LONG, I have to hear how everything about me is not Japanese. Yet – when I open my mouth, people are surprised by my near perfect imitation of the Kanto accent. I AM SO SICK OF HEARING – nihongo wa jyozu des ne. Your Japanese is so good. Can you please ask me a real question?
Career or family. What would you choose? It’s a question asked of every woman in our modern world. Can we have it all? The current consensus seems to be a loud and resolute HELL NO. We can’t have it all. Something has to give. We have to compromise. If you don’t want to – too bad. You must. For some bizarre reason, no one seems to ask men to choose.
Obama was evidence that the world was becoming more globalized, or that race was being transcended as a construct. For others, he was evidence that the U.S. presidency had been infiltrated by someone who was an “other.”
What I’ve learned from it is how quickly people want to put each other in easily-categorized boxes. Coming to conclusions is a shorthand that everyone uses, and I think some of the conclusions people jumped to regarding Obama showed how far we still have to go as a nation in terms of accepting interracial relationships and religions other than Christianity.
I woke up one morning unable to move. Fatigue had left its mark on every inch of me. I was burnt out. Exhausted. Tired as hell. I wanted to keep going. I just couldn’t. Some of us live lives where we are always giving. We give our jobs. We give our partners. We give our children. We give, give, give. And at the end of the day, we have nothing left to give ourselves.
“I believe that you can find soulmates in friends. It’s hard to know whether a person is a soulmate because circumstances or priorities may change. Ultimately, old friends are dependable, around and you can navigate life with them.”
Charmaine’s answer makes me smile. I hadn’t expected her to say that.
