Home is where the Hard Drive is

I first got into blogs big time about a year ago (though it took a few more months for the water to break on this one). I'd started by reading a martial arts blog, "Give Your Meat" a long while, and by following link to link, I was off and running barefoot thru the minds of my fellow expats. I was attracted to anything that was funny and/or well written.
But my interest is on the wane. I've been trying to spend less time online, missing the feel of dead trees between the fingers, the ring of laughter in real time. So, I've been slowly cutting down on my blog reading. It's been like saying goodbye to friends. This process has in fact been parallel to the whole expatriate experience. Broken promises to those who weren't here long, finding in time that you didn't have as much in common as you thought, aside from shared geography. And those inevitable friends you lose to parenthood, whose sentences inevitably contain the personal pronoun of their offspring. (Hey, I can understand, having been a parent myself.) Those connections that thrive are the ones that, while based in Japan, rarely dwell on that fact. They blog about the things they'd be doing and thinking no matter where they were living. This is I think the key point about friendship between long term expats: you never mention it, forgetting sometimes that you're in Japan at all.


On the turntable: The Coral, "Invisible Invasion"
On the nighttable: Neeli Cherkovski, "Bukowski: A Life"