Meet Yourself Coming (And Be Grateful)

I usually go to the gym after work, but lately I've been quite lazy. I've been waking up, going to work, coming home and eating my own weight in chips and chocolate, getting a few hours of sleep and starting the whole cycle all over again. My only only respite from this dull routine has been a night or two of drinking a week.

Honto ni, I'm counting down all kinds of days: The days until the weekend. The days until Golden Week and nine days of vacation. The days until I leave Tokyo, which are the saddest days of all. The days until I am back on American soil. Some weeks I count the days until I see my favorite students: Monday is the young man who recently returned from Germany and so who speaks English with a charming and dizzying accent that is one-fifth Japanese and four-fifths German. Wednesday is the absolutely drop-dead gorgeous twenty-eight-year-old woman who oozes tradition out of her pores and who the boy-wonder manager calls one of my "groupies." Friday is the Handsome Businessman.

Ah, yes--him. He's still around and in a "mustard gas and roses" moment (TM Kurt Vonnegut), I emailed him and his reply was from China, where he has been at a conference. He assured me that he would see me this Friday.

Wait. None of that has anything to do with what I sat down to write about, which is having met myself at the gym tonight.

Okay. Yes, I had to go to the gym tonight because tomorrow night (Tuesday) I'm going out drinking with a former part-time teacher and the gym is closed on Wednesday. Thursday I'll go again and Friday I'll stay out until last train--and possibly all night--with the Handsome Businessman.

Okay. The Brain is refusing to focus. Focus!

Meet Yourself Coming

At the gym, Yasuko-san greets me and goads the gym boys into greeting me in English. They use the very formal English they have learned in school. ("How are you? Good evening. I am fine. How are you?") They joke about how they haven't seen me in a while (this is true) and attribute it to my drinking. (Also true.) I laugh and go into the locker room (after taking off my shoes, of course), change clothes and go down the stairs to the weight room. (Konami takes up three stories of a perhaps eight story building. The reception desk and locker rooms are on the third story, the studios (where the classes are held) on the fourth story, and the weight room on the second story. (Don't ask what's on the first floor of the building, because I have no idea. There's an elevator that I ride up to the third story anyway.)

Right.

Before working out, I always warm up on one of the elliptical trainers, doing perhaps ten minutes or so of some cardio just to get the blood moving. There are three elliptical trainers and tonight the two on the ends were taken so I took the one in the middle. I began programming the timer and so on and as I did so, I looked over to my left and there I was. I say there I was because there on the elliptical trainer there was a young woman, one of the first truly fat Japanese women that I have seen. Ever. (Yes, I know you read the word fat and the immediate response is something negative (for most people anyway) but as a fat chick (now and forever, having paid my dues), I feel perfectly within my rights to act to reclaim the word and strip it of its negative connotations by doing so.) So, yeah, she was fat, and she was on the elliptical trainer and I wanted to climb over and give her a big kiss for being the fat chick brave enough to walk into the gym because God knows (and I do too) how much courage that takes.

So there I was on my left. And I looked over to my right, and there I was again.

The woman on my left was so skinny that it was easy to see that skinny was what she was. That was her goal and that was what she devoted herself to and that's what she was was skinny. She wasn't to the point where she had to wear the thickest sweats to keep warm because she was absolutely stripped of body fat, but you could see that a certain amount of her time was devoted to not eating. She was skinny. She was skinny the way I was when I was living on a thousand calories a day and working out three hours a day, burning off six hundred (no joke) of those calories. She wasn't as skinny as I was when it hurt to walk barefoot because the padding of fat on the bottom of my feet was gone. And she wasn't as skinny as I was when I had to ride around in long sleeved shirts and a jacket with the windows rolled up in the car in the middle of August because I was cold all the time. She wasn't that skinny, but she was skinny.

And there I was, on the continuum of this curve, right in the middle, not wanting to be either one, but still having to decide to be me.

That never changes.

It's Always Later Than You Think

In fact, it's quite late now. I didn't leave the gym until almost one a.m. and I have no idea what time it is now. (The computer clock is still on US time, as I never changed it.) Ah, it must be close to 3:30...

I'm going to bed now.

But, of course, there's always time for gratitude.

I Am Grateful

I am grateful for this time and this day and this moment. I am grateful for everyone who remembers me, for David and Kelly and Judi and Kevin and Paul and Cooper and Lewie and Groucho, Binky and Alberdine. I am grateful for Yuko, Ken and Aki. I am grateful for Takuya and Akira. I am grateful. I am grateful for Akutagawa Ruynosuke. I am grateful. I am grateful for kabocha and Pepsi Nex and chocolate. I am grateful. I am grateful for Mayumi and Kyoko and Kuni and Ai. I am grateful for Masakazu and Kano and Mitch and Matthew and Akemi. I am grateful. I am grateful. I am grateful for coffee and Annie Dillard. I am grateful for Maurice Sendak. I am grateful. I am grateful for my mother and father and brothers and aunts and uncles and everyone whose life touches mine. I am grateful and through my gratitude hope to learn humility. I am grateful and through my gratitude hope to learn how to let go. I am grateful. I will always be so.

Good night.