The Obligatory "About Me"

I realize I should have done this back when I started writing , and even though nobody's asked yet, I'm going to jump the gun and offer a few words on the blog title, if I may...I hope someone cares. Otherwise this is really just a waste of perfectly good cyberspace where I could be blogging about something really important, like Ranbir Kapoor's butt in Saawariya.

ANYWAY.

Back in my college lit classes* we zoned in on Meena Alexander, a writer and poet who once paralleled the idea of a decentralized identity** to that of sitting in an airport transit lounge, for life. I quite liked the analogy, and it stayed with me and actually helped make sense out of the emotional train-wreck that is post-graduation. Just one month after a poorly prepped professor had congratulated me, "Eritrea Juh-very-a" (so much for phonetically spelling out my name on a note-card), on a crowded podium, I found myself at a small arts-oriented non-profit in New York City. The director whimsically drifted in and out at her convenience, leaving me all alone to perform the mundane duties of an administrative assistant. I think the third consecutive week of not talking to anybody for 7 hours a day, unless you count the Staples customer service dude, finally got to me, and I contemplated going home to Japan, knowing that my chances of returning to the US upon the death of my student visa would be absolutely abysmal.

I constantly compared New York to my home city of Kobe--the trains were far filthier, people didn't bow nearly as enough, let alone say hello, and the sushi? Don't even get me started. I was homesick, underpaid and, as one of my best friends Jess Simon says, "transitional": a really grim combination. But somehow, like the thousands of other '06 graduates, I trudged along, allowed myself to fall in love with the city of all cities, found a small but special studio in Astoria, Queens, and stuck it out for a while.

Approximately a year later, I was saying a very reluctant goodbye to a city that had gotten under my skin and a cluster of people who had become close to family. Thanks to an unsuccessful battle with the immigration gods, the wish I had hastily made last summer, and reversed a few months later, was, in fact, coming true. I was going home. It's been six months, and I'm headed back again for grad school in a few weeks. Needless to say I'm nervous. What does this have to do with Ms. Alexander, you ask? For half a year now, the channel in my brain's been tuned to all things Japanese. I beat around the bush (politely) to get a point across, I know to take my shoes off before walking into someone's home and don't bat an eyelid at a vending machine full of beer. Come January, it'll be time to change the culture channel, as I make my way back, with some trepidation, to New York. It's only recently I've accepted that my life, like Alexander's, and possibly scores of others caught in the delightfully messy web of globalization, will always be in flux. Which, I hope, explains the blog so far. Watching the Cosby Show in Bombay, spotlighting the controversial H-4 visa, and being enamored by an up-and-coming funk band that sings about illegal alien ancestry may seem like scattered anecdotes, but to me, they are all consistent with being in transit.

Keep reading :)

*when it was all "identity, identity, identity"
**told ya.