Home! Socks, Driving, Ceremony.

Yes, it's true, I'm back in the USSR. I mean, Seattle. (Anyone get the Beatles reference? By the way, did you know that the LT can't stand the Beatles? I'm dating a man who doesn't like the Beatles and prefers peanut butter cookies over chocolate chip, not that he's the devil or anything.)

ANYWAY.

So far I have paid all my bills and returned my way-overdue library books, shockingly enough, and Titan and I are getting reacquainted. A few thoughts on returning:

1. Being able to understand overheard conversations is actually not that interesting. Most people don't have casually interesting conversations, except of course T-Town and myself, and we are FASCINATING. I sort of miss being able to tune out the chatter because I can't understand it anyway.

2. If T-Town and I never open up our bikini coffee stand in Whistler, we are opening a sock company in Japan. I've never seen so many socks in my life. Japanese girls do not, under any circumstances, go barefoot. Or bare-legged. If they wear shorts or skirts, they wear pantyhose or thigh highs. (I saw a ton of thigh-highs. With very spiky sandals. At first, the girls I saw looked very tarted-up, and then I realized that to them, bare legs would have looked way more inappropriate than I found their thigh-highs to be.) Because not only are bare legs inappropriate in Japan, but because no one wears shoes indoors, you have to have socks on or else you'll be going around in bare feet, so the style was to have special lacy socks that were meant to peek out from your stiletto heels. Some socks even had straps on them to add visual dimension to your spiky heels. Weird.

3. Umbrellas. Coming from Seattle, where no one uses umbrellas, it was a shock to see rainy streets COVERED in umbrellas. EVERYONE has one, and they don't fold up--they're the old-fashioned kind that look like a cane when furled, no actual collapsing. You can buy clear furled ones, with white trim, at any gas station for three bucks. There's umbrella stands at all doors, at all shops, everywhere, and no one takes your umbrella when you leave it there, and in fancier stores there's an attendant waiting at the doorway with a special plastic bag for your umbrella, with which he or she politely encases your umbrella and then hands it back to you with a bow. Even a three dollar umbrella.

4. Speaking of attendants, for a country so obsessed with automation, Japan employs thousands and thousands of people. Every subway has two conductors, every ticket window is staffed, every store has six people working each small floor, there's a guy who encases your umbrella and a guy who hands you a shopping cart. Their labor charges must be enormous. At ten at night, in a huge camera store, there might be fifteen workers for every customer. No one goes home, no one acts bored. The minute you come in the store they treat you like royalty and don't stop until you leave. I had reason to go in a bank, and the Js and I were bowed at by ten people and ushered around by fifteen more. On the way to the rest room alone.

5. Ceremony. In a country known for mass-production, the Japanese still treat every purchase, every object, like it is uniquely valuable. A four dollar comb is picked up carefully with both hands, shown to you, held while the price tags are gently scraped off, carefully wrapped, and presented to you with both hands. And a bow. I bought a ten-yen stamp--less than ten cents--and the hotel clerk brought out a special book that is only meant to hold stamps, arranged in neat little rows of plastic holders. I picked one out, and the hotel clerk handed it to me...with both hands. And he barely had space for both sets of fingers on that tiny piece of paper.

6. Disorientation. I flew in from Tokyo on Monday morning, and I met T-Town for lunch that same day, and I was surprised about how helpless I felt, driving to meet her and then driving somewhere else, in a town that I had grown up in, for 16 years. I was in a slightly unfamiliar area, but that's not a big enough reason as to why I felt it necessary to write down her directions to the freeway and obsess about how to get to the restaurant. More importantly, I was jet-lagged and disoriented, and most importantly, I was unused to driving. When you're on foot, you can change direction at a moment's notice, you can just stop on the sidewalk or in the subway, you can call people or decide to pop into a computer store or spend half an hour reading a map while foot traffic flows around you. Taking the car, I felt that I had to have a specific plan and it couldn't change. If I wanted to go somewhere else, where would I park? How would I get there? What if I got lost? On foot I felt more secure, and even safer; I don't know why.