Victory. This morning I made four large onigiri, filled them with fish, wrapped them with seaweed, and then (hours later) ate them for lunch. They were yummy. I'd been meaning to make onigiri almost since I got here, and my one previous attempt was so gross by the time I ate it that it doesn't count.

(Onigiri don't refrigerate well, btw.)

I feel like onigiri making is something that I'll use after I've left Japan, which is nice because most things here feel like they're going to fade away as soon as I turn my back. Aside from the enormous number of enormous people and the faint grimness to everything, it was easy to slip back into USA mode when I was there a couple of weeks ago. When I move back for probably permanent in March, I think it'll be almost like I was never gone, except that a year or whenever down the road when I'm living in Seattle or Texas or wherever I'll occasionally make onigiri.

The thing is, I look back on the past several years and the years since BYU feel like they've lacked momentous things.

Whatyousay?! What about the cross country roadtrips, the foreign countries, the weird and awkward little jobs, the cool people?

I can't imagine what my life would be like if I hadn't gone to BYU. Going to a different college? No idea how that would have turned out. Not going to college at all? Unfathomable. And after graduating BYU, well, I remember the experiences and the places and the people, but I can also imagine my life had they not been in it. Port Townsend was great, and I still write to several of the lovely people I met there, but at the same time nothing picked me up by the shoulders and shook me till my fillings rattled.

I wonder, was my BYU experience so intense that it's ruined me for what comes next? I think of Brave New  World: "Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand." My time at BYU was fully of misery and it's over-compensations. It was extremely unstable. Whether I was in a "Yay Mormonism!" mode or a "Woe is me" mode, I continually felt like I was fighting against misfortune. Ooooh did I struggle with temptation. And of course, all three years at BYU were a long, drawn out and "fatal" overthrow by doubt.

The thing I got from BNW was that, like the savage, I also claimed the right to be unhappy. And I am sometimes, yeah, but it's a tame unhappiness, not an epic one. Without my grand masochistic rock-and-a-hard-place of the LDS church / BYU and homosexuality, everything's kinda plain. I want my life to be spectacular, glamorous, picturesque, and grand, but right now victory means the successful construction of a riceball.


I wonder if perhaps it's the search for an antagonist (or at least a challenge) that keeps me popping back into Mormon chapels. Maybe what I need is another fatal overthrow.