After a long road, three months that felt more like three years in a good way, I am back to the slower and chiller island life. I’ve taken a break from both research and barista work to really focus on getting some serious writerly things done.

Among those things are getting some eBooks formatted and on the market, preparing to attend a really important workshop with the Writers of the Coast in Oregon, and honing my professional relationships and habits.

Focus. That’s the key these next few months. Getting back into patterns. Establishing the things I need and want to accomplish over the next year.

Also, getting physically in shape. Biking and swimming, running possibly, hopefully muay thai kickboxing. And a good healthy dose of veg after all that sugar and junk in Japan and Korea. (Seriously, your awesome bakeries! Just stop. Because I can’t!)

I’m hoping, even, to get back on a blogging schedule. It’s been years since I had some regularity. But it’s kind of part of the overall scheme to take myself a little more seriously every year. So, here we go.

In silly personal news, I finally was able to master the hula hoop. And by “master” I mean “accomplish”. It was a big moment, not in that the hula hoop is very important. But rather, in this sense.

I stood there with my failed attempts and kept repeating to myself: “I just don’t get it. What am I doing wrong? I don’t understand.”

Then, it clicked. That mentality, right there, was the problem. So, I stopped telling myself I couldn’t understand, picked up the hula hoop, said, “Rei. You know what the problem is. You know how this works. It’s simple. Speed and timing and the right kind of motion. You got this. Now, go!”

And there it went. Round and round and round, until I chose to stop. And it felt good. Because I hadn’t just swung a silly plastic hoop around my waist. But I’d learned that if I stop putting myself down — I can do things. Just about anything, I bet.

And that, my friends, is 2017 in my eyes.

Time for flight. Time to try.

Time to stop telling ourselves we can’t.

Because we can.

I know it now.

So, grab your symbolic hula hoops, my good old friends, pick your chin up, and go!

<3 RR

Today, I walked for the first time alone in Busan. And I remembered how foolish I feel when I have no words. And I recalled how strange it is to see people preparing to go off to war. And I experienced a mixture of strange stares and unimaginable patience.

This note was several days ago. In the midst of just getting my feet wet and just remembering how to say the simplest of phrases, I am now preparing to jet set off to Vietnam for less days than I’ll know what to do with, then back for a brief moment. Maybe by then, Busan will feel familiar. Wouldn’t that be a breath of fresh air.

Tokyo, you wait for me. You and your words and your culture that I comprehend. You and your kanji that I can read and your trains I know by memory. You and your beauty.

I will leave you, too, soon. And I am so sad.

I cannot believe it is less than two weeks.

But I will be in Hawaii, the tropical bastian of my birth and the beginning of my dreams and the spark of my world.

I am a mixture of excitement and sorrrow. As always.

I have been wroking behind the scenes for a while now, sorting out just how I’ll express the content of this site. It has felt like such a huge step, getting the site live, that I wanted everything to be perfect.

Which mean, naturally, I drug my heels. And drug my heels. And really dug in and hesitated some more.

Until finally, I woke up in Tokyo one morning and it just felt like…Time. You know that feeling? When all of a sudden, the things you’ve been putting off snap into a specific alignment and you stretch your arms as you get out of bed, yawn, and tell yourself: today is the day.

Well, let’s be honest. That was two days ago. But then life did what it always does and crammed itself in between me and my resolve to do that thing that needed doing today because it was TIME.

So, now, today. It really is time. And I am going to stuff all of my fears behind me, put both feet on the ledge, and just jump. I am certain that there will be things I didn’t anticipate. Mistakes that, once made, seem obvious in retrospect (doesn’t everything?). I am certain I will flounder and falter and spell things wrong even though spell-check is on. I will have awkward posts that have links to nowhere and posts that show up on the wrong page headliner and photos that don’t load so instead you get that weird {IMAGE DID NOT LOAD MSG Q4410J} or what have you. You know what I mean, that splashscreen that the programmers decided should load into the background when an image fails? The one that makes it impossible to get anything done on the site at all?

Yeah, that kind of stuff. It’ll happen. No doubt.

How can I be so sure?
Because, we all fuck it up. We try our best, miss the mark, get up and try again. We all think we’ve got all the ducks in a neat little row, and then just as we’re setting out, one crops up out of the shrubby undergrowth and trips the whole deal up. It’ll happen, and when it does, I’ll apologize for the inconvenience. And, like adults, we’ll all move along.

So. Without further ado. This is my new playground. Have a look around. If you run into black holes or obstructing error messages or links to nowhere or (gasp) links that aren’t even links yet :

I’m sorry. I apologize for the inconvenience. Know that I am both deeply embarrassed.

But, I am doing my best. Or, as they say here in Tokyo: 頑張ります！

Now, onward into the world of fiction, being an artist in the modern world, traveling the world, and making the best of the one life we’ve got.

Cheers and カンパイ！

<3 RR (零)