From the Happiness Project on Slate.com

Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you've find very helpful?
I tell myself that happiness is not about making good choices or having success; it's about being resilient when we mess up.

Hina Matsuri

Hina Matsuri aka Girl's day aka the Japanese Doll Festival is celebrated every year on March 3rd. Usually, this entails displaying dolls representing royalty on pedestals in your home. According to one of my friends, if you don't remove the dolls by a certain point your daughter will not get married. Thank god there's no such rule about Christmas trees!
I decided to make Hina dolls in my ceramics class. However, my dolls are a bit different. They are beetles. I was inspired by a book of Japanese ceramics that my teacher showed me, in particular a sculpture of a beetle resting on a mushroom.
The other women in my class told me they are 'so original,' which at first worried me because originality isn't exactly a value in Japanese society. I felt better when they took pictures of my dolls on their cellphones. They wouldn't take pictures of them if they were really odd, right?
Also, here are a couple of cups I made in class.

Interesting Article

I've heard of Temple Grandin, but don't know much about Meg Daley Olmert. For me, this article sums up the difficulty I had when I was researching my thesis. A lot of the research being done about our relationship with animals is level-headed and scientific, as I have found Grandin's to be. But there's a great deal of work out there that's romantic, whimsical - whatever you want to call it - and not really useful if you want to make a good argument.

My latest addiction

It is now strawberry season in Japan (actually, it seems strawberries might be on their way out and cherries on their way in, if my assessment of candy flavor trends is accurate), and that means that confronting me every time I enter the grocery store is a huge display full of strawberries. I think that strawberries here are too expensive, so I don't buy them. I am, however, enticed by what's sold next to the strawberries - little tubes of sweetened condensed milk. I can't really remember why I first bought one, but at 158 yen, they're difficult to resist (that's about $1.50). There's something unbelievably comforting about sitting in front of the TV, eating this stuff with a spoon. After I came home one day and ate a whole tube, I decided to find out just how bad for me it was. And look what I turned up!

Finally updated Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/30807472@N08/

Not too much there, just some photos I never uploaded from the fall.

The swim team

As some of you already know, I have inadvertently joined a swim team. This is how it happened:

I began swimming at my local pool (Maki Akshi) in December, but I didn't really go regularly until January. Now, this pool is odd (to me, at least) because the only open swim hours are from 8pm-ish to 9:30pm, when the gym closes. This means that anyone who wants to free swim has to go at that time. This would be chaos, if it wasn't for the fact that most of the people who swim at the pool do so in the form of 'lessons,' which I'll talk about later.

So, I began going to the open swim time on Tuesdays and Thursdays. One evening, I was getting into my usual lane to do some laps, when one of the women in the lane next to me gestured that I should get into their lane. I wasn't really sure what was going on, but I joined them and soon found myself doing a workout, consisting mostly of 25's and 50's. I managed to introduce myself to them during the resting periods, and found out some of their names.

From then on, everytime I came to the pool I noticed that the same women would be in a lane together, and they always asked me to join them. One night they mentioned a 'swim challenge' and asked if I would join them. I knew it was 1500m, but couldn't figure out much else. I agreed, and we planned to meet at the pool at 12pm on Sunday, February 1st.

As I later found out, the 'swim challenge' was basically a personal challenge at a pool near Niigata city. About 20 people came out to swim either a 500, 1000, or 1500 time trial. On the way to the pool (5 of us went in one of the women's really nice cars - it had a video showing the back of the car when it was in reverse, GPS, and lots of room) the woman who talks with me the most showed me a piece of paper with everyone's name and occupation written on it. She's a Japanese dressmaker, and the other women are a school nurse and an elementary school librarian (and I don't remember the rest...). She had also made egg salad sandwiches, and one of the other women had brought homemade mochi with a whole strawberry inside.

Even though my Japanese is terrible, and they know very little English, the camarederie of going to a pool together was wonderful. We cheered each other on and waited eagerly for each person to finish so that we could congratulate them on their time. I was surprised to find that I swam the 1500 in under 25 minutes (23.46), and a little embarassed that I beat my new friend by 10 seconds. Luckily, she didn't seem to care. One of the 'challengers' who works at the pool swam in the same heat as her father, and she made a new pool record (21 something).

I'm continuing to swim and just last night joined one of the pool's 'lessons.' My friend had left a note for me at the front desk explaining that she'd like me to join the lesson (her attempts at English impressed me and made me laugh out loud) and I decided to give it a try. It turns out that the 'lesson' is basically a workout (last night's was 1650m) guided by one of the pool's staff. It was fun to do a workout with a large group of people, but as I left the pool I found out that I have to pay an extra 2000yen if I want to keep going, so I'm undecided.

I've also agreed to take part in a prefecture-wide swim meet that will take place at my pool in April. Three of the women I've met and I will swim a relay, and I have to do at least one other individual event. I'll be doing butterfly in the relay, and I think I might do a middle-distance freestyle event for my other race.

For now, I'm really enjoying being part of the 'swim team.' The people at the pool know me now and I feel like I'm part of the community. While it is a lot of time (I go Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays), I think it's worth it, both for my personal health and the insight into Japanese life that it gives me.

Sapporo, land of beer

As always, my photos are backwards.