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A Tribute

Here's one, final post-homecoming post to express my sincerest gratitude that Japan is full of otherworldly bakers who've all studied the art of heartbreakingly wonderful breadmaking in France, the world capital of fine cooking.

Just missed my flight!

I'm at the airport for 24 hours. Anybody got any recommendations for me?

Totoro!

I love the way the dialogue fades out of a scene like these. It's like you're being carried out of the real world, into one where words don't belong.

You pass a lot of this sort of not-exactly-farmland on the trains here. It makes me wonder what it's like to live there.

To Uniformity!

from The Weekender.

On the other hand, there are plenty of subcultures that each idolize a different image. But a plurality of standards is not the same as individuality.

Broom Duster Kan

A regular installment at Inokashira Park in Kichijoji.

They say it's good for the soul.

For as long as I can remember, my grandmother has had these calluses on the soles of her feet. They're big, thick, and yellow, and I remember watching her carve off big chunks of them with a razor blade when I was a kid—the big ones were on her heels and the pads of her feet. There were smaller ones on the outsides of her big toes, and probably others she didn't bother with.

Stepping out of this house in the morning is a daunting task. Once we're out that door (and, quite literally, on the street), we're usually not due back 'til pretty late at night, and most of that time inbetween gets spent on our feet. We very rarely leave the house with any objective beyond passing the time outside and finding a place to wet our whistles, and the aimlessness and the open air and that quiet that gets your thoughts wandering really jars you into a clarity you don't get when you've got things to do and people to see. I get tired of it, too, of course: around midnight tonight, I was taking a train home from a walk that led me three stations away, and I nearly didn't get off at my stop because the seat was so comfortable. But Kyoto was an amazing city to walk around, where the mountainsides and temples and old Imperial Palace were all engulfed in a living, breathing urban core.

After a week of near-constant walking in stiff, leather dress shoes, I have, for the first time ever, the makings of my very own foot calluses forming on the soles of my feet. I don't suppose I will walk nearly as much in my lifetime as my grandmother did in hers.