Home Sweet Home

When I moved back to Toronto last summer, I was originally determined to make some changes in my bedroom. My room seemed perpetually stuck in the year 2002, with a few 2009 (now 2010) calendars reminding me I was no longer 18. I hadn't changed anything since I was in high school - there were the same pictures on the walls (including a very faded cut out ad from the newspaper of my favourite movie when I was 15 : You've Got Mail) and the same glow in the dark stars on the ceiling above my pillow.

S. told me the last time I saw him in Austin a year ago that he only likes staying at his parents' place in Baltimore for at most a few weeks at a time, because because being there makes him feel like a kid. "I still have my childhood bed" he told me somewhat sheepishly. Then last September I read an interview with Gwen Stefani who talked about how crazy it was to come back to her parents' house at age 26 after a year of touring with No Doubt to find all this fan mail. She said she lay in bed at night in her little single bed, totally surprised by how popular the band had become. She also made fun of herself for still living at home at age 26.

Well, I'm 26, I'm living at home, I still sleep every night in the bed I've had since I was 6, and I totally don't feel sheepish! (I think it may help that I love my bed (and have loved it since I was 6!) as it's high and has bed posts which are super cool.) Maybe it's because I didn't live at home from age 18-25 and so I know I can get by and be happy away from home, but I've loved living at home this year. It's been very stress free. I also love all the windows and my bath tub (I will forever & ever love that bath tub) so much. My bedroom is also a corner room - which are my favourite types of rooms. I realized the other day that probably my love of corner rooms stems from the fact that my bedroom at home is a corner room. It's interesting how certain likes or dislikes become so ingrained that we don't realize where they come from. I lived in and benefited from windows on two sides for the majority of my life, so it's no wonder that that's the type of room to which I'm most drawn.

Usually I love putting up pictures and making a room my own, but I actually barely made any changes to my old bedroom this year. Maybe it was because I had slept here for so many years before, but it just felt so comfortable exactly the way it was. So I still fall asleep each night under my glow in the dark stars, and they still make me happy like they did when I first put them up when I was 13. I have to admit that I am looking forward to living alone again in the fall; but I will miss my bedroom, and my house, and my parents very much. I won't be putting up glow in the dark stars in my new apt, but I like that my bedroom in Toronto will always stay - and feel - the same to me whenever I come home.

Strawberries & Skyscrapers

Before I went to Japan, I had so many ideas and images of the place in my head. I had wanted to go there for so long, but I was a bit worried that it wouldn't live up to what I had imagined. When I was in high school, my next-door neighbour moved to Japan to teach English and I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Over recent years, my imaginings of Japan grew bigger and more varied. Classical paintings of Mount Fuji or of majestic blue ocean waves juxtaposed with Tokyo's bright lights and skyscrapers from Lost in Translation. When I read Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood in the first (cold, snowy) days of January 2006, I couldn't put it down for many reasons, but I especially liked when the main character(s) would take long walks around Tokyo. That city seemed like somewhere I desperately needed to visit.

Before leaving Berkeley four years ago, I was loading up on supplies at (my favourite store) Avant Card, and came across this really striking card of a Japanese woman with long black hair and a peace sign necklace. For me, this woman, in ways I couldn't and still can't quite express, represented another facet of why I wanted to go to Japan so badly. She seemed so confident, and alluring, and the peace sign necklace came across as totally genuine - and added another layer to her 'personality' - instead of being cheesy or tacky. As much as you can say/know this about a picture, she was someone I wanted to be friends with.

Sometimes we anticipate something for so long or build something up so high that it almost seems inevitable it won't be what we hoped; that reality will be much less cheerful than what we expected. Fortunately this time for me, Japan in general, and Tokyo in particular, surpassed all my expectations. The country has gorgeous (green at this time of year) scenery, and genuinely cheerful, friendly, and helpful people. I was so happy to be in Tokyo. It is a city I would definitely live in, and a city I could see myself being very happy in. I loved the skyscrapers and bright lights I expected, but also the things I hadn't expected: the smaller streets with their little shops, the parks, the way the trains run right next to parks with tall trees whose branches and leaves lean over the tracks, the stationery stores that had better collections than I could have ever imagined, the outfits (both men's and women's), the French patisseries whose selection of cakes and tarts in the windows would give any Parisian patisserie a run for its money, and the preponderance of strawberries. I have long loved berries (raspberries the most, but strawberries are second) and the Japanese love strawberries. I found (and of course bought) some very sweet strawberry stationery, and I indulged in quite a few pieces of strawberry shortcake while there. If I really did live in Tokyo, I think I'd want to spend an hour (or more) each week, staring out the window at the city and the skyscrapers before me, while writing letters on my strawberry patterned paper and eating some strawberry shortcake.