Happy New Year, Sort Of

The year of the rabbit has finally hopped along. Of course, as the consummate procrastinator, I have not chosen to mark this occasion till about the 19th of January. This is due in part to the fact that I'm still in slight disbelief that it is, in truth, 2011. It also has to do with the realization that I am just about coming up to my two year anniversary in Japan. So it was with a smirk of doubt and a bit befuddlement that I greeted 2011.

Japan, of course, is celebrating with strawberries. I wish I could tell you definitively why. I always connect strawberries with summer, but then again, we don't grow them in hothouses in the States. But Japan has been whipped into January strawberry fervor, and the ichigo has been popping up everywhere. In desserts and baked items, or as the flavoring for snacks of candies. Even all by their lonesome in the produce aisle in nice, compact 800 yen packages.

I have chosen not to celebrate the new year with overpriced fragaria, but by working six days a week.

The inactivity of this blog the past few months was due to work of a furious nature on graduate school applications. I did this all while working full time, and just when I was about to pull my hair out in frustration, the applications were due and I headed off for a much needed week long winter vacation in Hokkaido.

But applications and trips through the wintry wonderland that is Northern Japan are expensive. So I will be making up the difference by picking up some extremely lucrative overtime work.

This means I will only have one day off for a bit of time. But it also means that I am no longer writing essays and writing samples and will, finally, have time to write for myself. I also will not be frantic and stressed and waking in the middle of the night remembering one more thing I have to do And when the next few weeks are over, debts will be payed and I will even have a nice bit of extra cash in my pockets.

I have always been a generally positive person, and so it is with this attitude that I go into this new year. And though this week was long and exhausting, I still found time to find joy in a few simple things. Here is what I loved this week:

1. Cheap Mikan More commonly known as satsuma in the west, and unlike the strawberries, were super cheap this week. I saw three separate sales at three separate grocery stores for mikan, and I took full advantage each time. My fridge is now packed with the orange fruit, and just like the strawberries, I have no idea why the drastic change in price occurred. But unlike the strawberries, I have no desire to question why. Cheap fruit is so rare here, I worry any investigation will cause it to disappear like a beautiful fever dream.

2. Udo Kier's interview with The A.V. Club Who, you ask, is Udo Kier? Up until this week, I had no idea. Well, I did, but I only knew him as "that German guy in every movie." Take a moment to think of him. Picture his face? That's Udo Kier.

Well he gave an interview this week to the A.V. Club about his long and interesting career, and it is about as delightfully insane as I would expect it to be. I actually laughed out loud when reading through his answers. I nearly lost it completely when he compared auditioning to cleaning furniture in a department store, an analogy I still don't understand. It is just so amazingly bizarre it transcends the print. I would pay good money to have heard the audio. Just read it for yourself.

3. Angela Carter Specifically, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. I reread the collection of short stories this week, and ugh, my heart. I will cop immediately to loving fairy tales. I loved the sanitized versions as a tyke, and as a teenager, I discovered the originals in very large tomes hidden in random shelves at my local library. The ones with all the murder, incest, pecked out eyes and lopped off toes; every last dark psychological undertone and subconscious archetype left intact.

To call Carter's writing "adult fairy tales" diminishes what they truly are. It as if she stripped the stories to the core, extracted what makes them both scary and unfailingly relatable, and reworked them.

And on top of that, her prose is just achingly beautiful in places. It is the kind of writing that makes me both insanely jealous and weak in the knees. My favorite in the collection was probably The Company of Wolves, her retelling of Little Red Riding Hood (for if there was ever a tale ripe for Jungian analysis and feminist critique, it's the story of Red.) When Carter describes the Red Riding Hood character:

She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrance to which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing.

And when she writes of the wolves themselves:

That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some inherent sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition. There is a vast melancholy in the canticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter and yet that ghastly sadness, that mourning for their own, irremediable appetites, can never move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not come to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half welcomes the knife that despatches him.

Like I said, my heart. The collection is far from perfect, but truly fantastic. Highly recommended, of course.

And that is what is making me happy in the new year. Simple joys in January to ring 2011 in right. Here's to hoping everyone out there has a fantastic 2011 as well.