Three or four people have pinged me from a gay Mormon networking / dating site this past week, the sweeties. Makes me notice how I don't date. Sometimes we have long conversations about nothing or about drama or about the church and it feels familiar and comfortable and a little bit behind me. It's weird to think that guys might be over eighteen and still too young for me.

I was thinking about the toast I'll give at Scott's wedding next October. We've known each other forever. Things have stayed the same, things have changed. There are memories. With age relationships stop suffering from embarrassment a little maybe.

I guess it feels a little like Japan isn't real life. BYU felt that way too, and those years in between. I guess life hasn't felt real since I came out. I'm always waiting for what's next, always planning the end of this and the beginning of that and thinking, when this is over and that's begun, then I'll really be alive. Things will click. My whole soul will come flaring up inside me like a geyser of meaning that infuses everything and makes me think that at last what I'm doing matters.

What I want to say is, I can finally imagine settling down with a husband and raising children, and as that works its way into my thought process I think life will look more real. More lasting. More worthwhile.

**********

I did not visit the church.

After boxing this evening I ran into the Mormon missionaries. This was the third time since coming to Japan and the first of those three times when I wasn't running to catch a train. They were in my train station's bakery, which was where I wanted to buy dinner. (Curry rolls.)

Long story short: When they gave me a little map to the church I felt wanted by a decent looking American man within a couple of years of my age, which was strange and wonderful and then depressing. I miss tall, clean-cut white boys. Missionaries are even better because they come in pairs and without women. No offense, women. Unfortunately, they don't want me to come to their church because they like me; they want me to come because they believe a theology that I don't.

Gosh I felt sad after that. Not too sad—boxing endorphins—but sad. Probably I'll never stop being sad, at least a little, not about these particular men but about the Mormon life I didn't lead. Like the best storybooks, that Mormon life was so beautiful that it hurts that I can't believe it's true.

I'm pretty sure I'll visit the church sometime soon, maybe even this weekend. I'm such a sucker.


**********

There were cutie-patootie eight year olds at the boxing gym today. They asked me my name, and where I was from, and how old I was. One kept going "Pchiew!" and fake punching toward me. One kept showing off on the climbing rope, calling me over to make sure I was watching.

Today I think I'd have to sit by you quietly for a while before saying anything. I'm listening to "Alejate" by Josh Groban, which just now is the most beautiful and heartbreaking song I know of. I'm not heartbroken, but I just finished a book that involved an opera singer and Spanish, so it's appropriate.

I broke up with my ikebana teacher today. I have a bad habit of making people think I'm interested in things I'm not interested in, or I'm bad at communicating when my interest wanes. In this case it waned two months ago, but she kept doing nice things for me and smiling and talking like we'd be together forever and I didn't know how to end it. But I did, today, over coffee at Starbucks, after a flower exhibition in Tokyo. It was awkward and ugly to me although she probably is just irritated I didn't tell her sooner. She had just introduced me to three of her fellow teachers, and I could see the pride ooze out of her when she said, "Yes, this is my American student. He comes all the way from Kanagawa (two hours away by train)." I was burning up with embarrassment as she said this because I'd already planned to tell her today that, yeah, two hours each way is really too much and I'm not coming anymore.

There's more to it, but the story bores me, so I imagine you're not enthralled either.

My students had a chorus festival yesterday, and when the first group of third graders (U.S. high school freshmen) began singing a Capella, I got big time shivers. They were spectacular. I watched from the teachers' row of chairs, and I tell you what, when I was in college I couldn't have imagined myself watching these awkwardly adolescent people belt out these shocking notes. It makes me think that there's absolutely no point in planning more than a year or so into the future. In the past few months, I've been seriously considering joining the Navy when I finish up here, now that DADT isn't there anymore. I'd never contemplated that before, just like I'd never contemplated the vigor of a fourteen year old conductor leading his class through a set of ominous and slightly anime-sounding vibrations. I guess my vision is broken.

Yeah, the Navy. As a cryptology officer. It's safe to assume that I'll be trilingual by the time I finish up here. I can see myself translating, and I can't see myself doing much else. But it's just an idea, and there are eighteen months between then and now. I have one other goal I'm requiring of myself before I apply, too: I want to finish massage school. That idea's been dogging me for too long (since I was seventeen) and if I keep putting it off I'll always wonder why it keeps popping into my mind and whether I would have taken to the reality as readily as the idea.

Probably I should focus more on life here and now instead of projecting. I will. I'll work harder on here and now. Now that ikebana's not in the way.

Well, hugs. It's bedtime.

--

We laid there for an hour watching the sky. Yellowcard in my head, and on my lips too because you know how I am about singing. She played Mae on her iPhone. We watched the sky.

What should have been the north star (it was the brightest) was actually Jupiter, she said.

Oh, I said. I faked my way through astronomy at boy scout camp.

The clouds moved in to stay. We packed up the blankets and walked away along the river.

***

It's time to condense and focus. I'm stopping my ikebana classes at the end of this month. I'm going to a couple of kendo matches so I can get a feel for how they're run—the plan is that I'll compete in the city tournament next July. The plan is that I'll join in with my schools' practices once I understand enough Japanese. The plan is that I'll make my teacher smile again like he did last Saturday when I pulled off the rapid head strike six times in a row.

Boxing will continue. I should have picked that up earlier in life but if I had I probably wouldn't have liked it much because, whether you believe it or not, I was timid. Haha, not now. No, not now.

Two more months of loan payments. A few months of credit card bills. Then freedom and wealth beyond my wildest dreams, if I had a dream transplant with a child from Mongolia.

Look, it's not that I don't like you. It's just . . . this is what I'm doing now. There are hopes and dreams but they don't feel right now. This feels right now.

We're hang gliders. Life is wind.

Blog hug. Email hug. Skype hug.

There was a boy in my capstone course at BYU who had a depressive disorder. He wouldn't show up to class for a couple of weeks and we'd think he'd dropped and then he'd show up again. The teacher was understanding. He was in my group for one assignment. He never made it to our group meetings.

I don't want to not be able to get out of bed. That's why I cram as many things into my schedule as I can. More things to do means more reasons to get up. Not exactly more things to look forward to. More like more people I'd let down if I stayed in bed all day.

This week I rescheduled my Japanese class so I could lay in bed all evening. I was halfway to the bus stop in the rain and my pants felt weird and clammy on my legs and I stopped and called my teacher and went home. I don't know what I would have done today if it hadn't been "chorus festival," which required me to do nothing more than sit in a dark auditorium for three hours at one in the afternoon.

Naw, I know. I woulda gone to work and taught my classes.

Sometimes I think it's just a matter of time until I stop getting out of bed at all and sometimes I think I'm just trying to fob my laziness off on my brain chemicals.

Every Saturday I dread going to kendo. It looms at the end of my day, full of misunderstandings and sweat.

I usually end up going anyway, for various reasons. Sometimes it's because I told my Japanese teacher I would definitely see here there. Sometimes it's because I asked the assistant teacher to make a list of kendo terms for me to study and I already ducked out so I'd feel like a real heel if I did it again. Sometimes it's because I spent far too much money on the armor to let it sit in my closet in it's useless shiny immaculateness.

I never regret going. I feel elated at the end, and for the rest of the evening, and sometimes into the next day. Today I understood another word that the teacher used. ("Twist." I understood this because last week we taught "What's the matter? I have a fever/cold/sore throat" and the teacher wanted to also teach "I hurt my shoulder" and "I twisted my ankle," even though I don't think these things really go together in a grammar sort of way and it sort of confused the students.) I got that list of kendo terms from the assistant teacher, and, bonus, my Japanese teacher's mother was there again. She was there for the first time just after I started, about five months ago. She was extremely impressed by how much Japanese I can speak now, and even though it's not much and the Japanese are infamous for overpraising foreigners' language and chopstick skills, I was thrilled.

I don't know why that doesn't turn it into something I look forward to, but it doesn't. Probably it would be easier if I didn't still have those two herniated disks in my spine, but those bad boys will need surgery--and incidentally, now that I have decent health insurance and a job that pays pretty well for a single guy, I'm looking in to that again. From what I've read recently, the corrective surgeries have advanced enough that they don't carry six-month-bedrest price tags anymore.

Probably it would also be easier if I understood more of what people were saying, but duh.

I dunno.

Anyway. I climbed a mountain yesterday. I'm pretty beat. Tomorrow will be a hurts-so-good day all over me. I'm doin' okay.