I'm the Most Not Crazy Person I Know

12/5/08

The experience of moving to Japan has been said by some of my colleges as “transforming” – a word I normally reserve for use with the cartoons I used to watch as a child. Much like Transformers, we uproot ourselves from lives and existences (that we love) and volunteer to do something different. Living from day to day as metaphorical minivans, RVs, standard sedans with minimal features, and the occasional muscle car, we’re all seeking some kind of transformation; just hopefully not into laser wielding weapons of planet rocking destruction. – Ahh, where have all the good cartoons gone anyway? But I digress. At this place in our lives, we all find ourselves closest to our primordial ooze… far away from the things that shaped our identity and surrounded by things that seek to change how we interpret the world around us.

As most of you know, I’m a home-owner. I had a fabulous job with an amazing company, a family that loved and accepted me, beautiful furniture, and surrounded by friends that the average man would be insanely jealous of. I quit my relatively stable and prestigious job during a time of economic crisis and rented my house to a stranger. As I was attending my good-bye parties and selling off all my belongings for a fraction of what I paid for them, there was a word that was used by only my closest and truest friends. “crazy!” The wonderful part about having people in your life who you can let your guard down with, is that the definition of words begins to blur. Instead of thinking about what a word means, you perform a certain mental calculus on a rough meaning of the word. Factor in that person’s personality, divide by the number of times you’ve called this person out for their own foibles, and end up with a result that isn’t easily translated. It’s like trying to translate the words “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn,” without the other two hours of context that came before it.

They have a point. I couldn’t have been better supported if I wanted to be… but it is sorta nuts. We find ourselves in midst of the holidays, extremely homesick and surrounded by cold weather. Did you know that before now, my co-worker has never seen a day below 70F in her life? It’s not the biggest of problems, but there is contextual importance. Now is the time we need to be thinking about whether or not we will renew our stay in the land of the rising sun. We have to ask ourselves some very important questions. Most notably, “Is Japan fulfilling the expectations we had before we came?” Good question, I don’t know a single JET that really has that answer nailed down solidly. Why am I here?

Believe it or not, we do things other than ponder the meaning of the universe around here. So for Thanksgiving, we summoned our very closest friends, and put on a show. What better way to deal with being a little homesick than to eat until you pass out from exhaustion?! Thanksgiving was particularly great because we got to share the tradition with other JETs who were not American and had never done the holiday that revolves around marathon eating. Honestly, it turned out to be one of the best holidays I’ve ever experienced. Who knew I knew how to cook a turkey on a grill? I even got to be the Dad again this year. I got to cook for people I cared for, set things on fire, and stand around the grill with my thumbs in my pockets while Eleanor and some of the other girls were actually working in the kitchen. (I took mental notes growing up, thanks Dad!) More importantly, I found myself extremely grateful for a lot of things. It’s a very good, and often times too fleeting a sensation to have, anywhere. I think this was the first holiday I’ve really felt that. It was a change I wasn’t expecting, and no matter how you slice it, it’s a gift to be able to care for people.

Ok, so time to bring this all full circle. I have a tendency to give my readers “whiplash” by changing topics too quickly. It’s a poignant critique from a former writing teacher that still reverberates with me. ;) So where else would the circle end, however, if not on Ugly Betty? Yes, the TV show. Yes, there is deeper meaning to that show. No, I’m not kidding. Keep reading… In the midst of cheering for Willamina (it’s my secret dream to replace Mark on that show) Betty told Daniel that she had looked up the definition of crazy, and that crazy was when “A person repeats the same actions and yet expects the result of those actions to change.” Wow. Is that the medical definition? I don’t know, but I can tell you as a scientist who firmly believes in the scientific method, you do have to change your variables with each iteration if you expect to learn anything much less obtain the desired result. Studying theory will only get you so far. There’s an empirical component to research that simply can’t be ignored. The rest, as my WoW friends would tell you, is “theory-craft”.

The common thread among us, and I think why we have gotten so close so quickly, is change. For me, there’s some component of my existence that I don’t or perhaps didn’t like and maybe even a result that I haven’t quite derived. JET for many of us represents the empirical change to our existence in the experiments of our “life-adventure.” (kinda granola, sorry) Perhaps, however, the actual life-calculus is what it’s all about. I have friends in every age range, and I have yet to see any one of them have some kind of definitive answer. In fact, the happiest people and those with the most successful relationships haven’t stagnated, but rather changed and developed with the tides. The rough edges of the stone have been smoothed and yet still haven’t gotten lost in the waves. Furthermore, the folks that seem unhappiest are the ones who have it figured out. Leading their lives with some rough definition of the way things are. I hear it all the time, “Oh, gay men are like this, Christians are like that, relationships are always… , republicans are bad because…” I mean, it must be nice to have it all figured out, but I still think they're fun-suckers.

So if the desire to reach some kind of Shangri-la is indeed folly, then perhaps this really is a good working definition for crazy. Not changing the way you approach people, relationships, your job, politics, etc really is kinda nuts. You’ll have no avenue to change that what it is you do not like, and no context to appreciate the things which you do.

That’s enough to drive anyone crazy.



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