Spring Pics

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AP House 1 and the bridge to campus

Campus

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Day out at Lake Shidaka

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What's the one thing the Japanese love to do when spring comes? The answer is "hanami" or "flower viewing". Crowds of people flock to parks or other famous sightseeing places to enjoy the colorful flowers in full bloom. But it's the sakura that steals the show. This is my first "hanami". We didn't have that kind of thing back at home. So, I didn't really get what all this hype was about watching those flower blossoms. I mean, how beautiful can they be? As it turned out, very beautiful indeed. Breathtakingly so. I love spring in Japan. It's a very nice change from the cold drab winter days. The sakura blossoms don't last long. So before they all fall to the ground, I had to go see them. (And upload photos on facebook and instagram. :D) So, last weekend, I went to a place called Lake Shidaka. It's a camping site. When the lake came into view, it was like I had stepped straight into a postcard. It was that beautiful. Now, ...
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To the Girl Who Never Cries

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People look at you and see something that needs to be fixed. You are a broken radio, never in tune with the emotional wavelengths of others. You swing like a pendulum between two states of being - incomprehensible static and awkward silence. Some nights, you think of dismantling your own heart under the moonlight. You want to find out what is broken just so that you might have an answer to questions that are left unspoken. “Don’t you feel anything?” “Why are you like this?” “Do you even have a heart?” Sometimes you just want to fit in. You are sick of standing at the sidelines, watching other people cry. You imagine their hearts full of emotion, spilling out into the world and making a statement, “Look at us, we are human”. To have the courage to be vulnerable and to be able to find comfort in other people who share your feelings. If their tears don’t drown you, you think your jealousy might. Once or twice, you try to fake it. You pinch yourself hard enough to bruise. You t...
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Lessons from My Mother (#1 Swimming Lessons)

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           The summer I turned 12, my mother took me to the pool for swimming lessons. On the third week, while I was kicking my legs and trying to stay afloat, my instructor picked me up and suddenly threw me into the middle of the pool. I swallowed a lungful of water and discovered for myself that fear indeed tasted bitter. That day, I told my mother I wasn’t going back to the pool. I was half-expecting her to march up to the instructor and blame him for trying to drown her daughter. But to my indignant cries of “I could’ve drowned!” my mother just smiled and said, “That’s how you learn to swim, sweetie.” The next day, she took me back to the swimming pool and I went back to kicking my legs in water.             Many years later, in the summers that followed, I came to realize that it was not only my instructor who liked to catch me unawares and throw me into the deep end. Life a...
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