We don't need tickets

My absolute favourite line from Gossip Girl is this:
"We don't need tickets; I'm Chuck Bass."　

I have always wanted to say something even half as cool.

I've mentioned a few times that I have no money right now. I've quite gotten used to being constantly broke at a level that only a constantly broke person could understand. But, being broke has caused me to realise that pretty amazing things happen to me, and they are completely independent of cash flow.

Having just got back from Nigeria, it occurs to me that the majority of the coolest places I've been on have been paid for by someone else or heavily subsidised. Jamaica, Colombia, Japan - all not me. Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, Morocco, Bermuda, Montreal, 11 US states - I actually got paid to see them.

Even apart from crazy travel experiences, there are a lot of other ways in which things just fall into my lap. I am the sort of person who gets jobs first and applies for them after. Who gets amazing opportunities to meet really famous/ really inspiring people like Maya Angelou without going out of her way. The sort of person who finds herself in positions people work really hard to be in, without putting in the effort and purely on a fluke.

And even outside the big things, there are little things that the 'having of no money' usually prevents that I still have access to. But my amazing support system of family friends makes it possible for me not to be a complete recluse. Thank you. (Or as they say in Yoruba "ẹ se" - eh sheh)

And I say all this not to boast, but to be appreciative of the good things that come my way. My new Yoruba name, Oluwayemisi, loosely translates to "God honours me."

Fo sheezy.

So while I may not have enough money to be sure of all the things that should be bought or paid for are actually bought or paid for, I do have a list a mile long of amazing blessings. So much so that I'm able to match Chuck Bass. If only in reverse.

I don't need money; I am Claire Dawn Oluwayemisi.

àṣẹ (asheh)
(Yoruba for Let it be so.)

Moments - Monday on my Mind

I went home for Christmas. Well, I actually went for a wedding. My brother and his fiancee were also in the island for a different wedding. Barring being on two different coasts of North America in August, it was the first time in 6 years or more that my brother and I have been in the same country. Then randomly, my foster sister re-appeared. And close Canadian friends were also in. So my mother decided to have a gathering at our house. It was quite literally a group of people that had never been in the same place together.

I had a really great time. Reconnecting with my sister and meeting her family. Joking with my cousins. Showing off my banana bread - which came out even awesomer than usual having been baked in an oven and not a microwave with an semi-oven-function. I six-loved my Dad for the first time ever in dominoes. (Won six games to his none.) This is a really big thing because my Dad is a domino-aholic, he's been playing for years and has even managed the National Team!

Only the next day, did my mother point out that noone had remembered to take any photos. Seriously, an unprecented event and no pics. In the Facebook age of "pics-or-it-didn't-happen" this is pure, unadultered blasphemy.

For a while, I was quite disappointed. I mean, I'm 32 and my brother is 28, and I don't think there are any pictures of us together as adults. And I don't think there are any pictures of me and my sister in existence. So, it hit me hard for a minute that I hadn't thought to take pictures.

But then, it dawned on me why I don't have any pictures of that night. I was having way too much fun. It was one of the most amazing nights of my life. I was so full of love and happiness that I felt like I might burst. I'm still disappointed there are no pictures, but nothing compares to a moment that big.


As soon as I realised that, I could help wishing for more moments. Moments so mesmerising that I don't remember to take myself out of them to preserve them. Moments so deep all the oceans in the world can't hold them. Moments so big, they pierce the sky.

Because life - it isn't really about years or months or even days. It's about moments.

How a 5 hour trip turned into 24

So my shrinksie-poo is in Sendai. That's the capital of Miyagi prefecture, the prefecture south of mine (Iwate) and pretty much the capital of the entire Northeast. It's about 300 km from here, but I make the trek because while I'm decent in Japanese and will be happy to do most things in my 5th language, I'd rather commune with my psychiatrist in English.

Anyhow, this results in me either taking a "cheap" train ride - a serious of 3 or 4 trains - that will last about 5 hours, or the expensive ride on the shinkanesen (bullet train), an hour and a half and about $40 US more expensive. And that's only one way. As I make the trip once a month, I choose to save money over saving time.Yesterday, the joke was on me.

Heading back yesterday, I take a 4.02pm train to Kogota, and promptly fall asleep. I mean, what else is there to do on 5 hours of train? I wake to find the train going slowly. Miyagi is one of rare places in Japan that isn't really that mountainous, so the winds just whip across it in Spring and Fall. We crawl into Matsushima station, and there, they break the news: we weren't going anywhere until the wind stopped.

I pull out my Kindle, and Matthew Quick's BOY21. (AMAZING, btw, how does he do this thing with mixing characters from extremely different backgrounds so well?) I read the entire book. And then I remember that last time I was stranded on a train in the middle of the night, I started The Hunger Games. And I begin to wonder if reading books in stranded trains makes them brilliant. And then I realise we've been sitting there for 4 hours! At that I get a little worried. I don't want to get stuck in Matsushima, an area that was almost flattened by the tsunami. What if there's a quake? (There are still quakes almost daily, mostly weak though.) Finally, the wind (and rain, which had also started up) chill out enough for us to crawl to Kogota. I realise that I'm not making it home. It's almost 10. This was only the first of my 4 train rides and my last train on the Dinkville Express is at 9.44, and 3 hours away in good conditions. I decided to hope to make it to my capital, Morioka.  

I start KNOCKED OUT BY MY NUNGA-NUNGAS by Louise Rennison (who I keep promising not to read in public, because I look crazy when I start shaking with laughter) in the waiting room. The Japan Rail (JR) guys say the train for Ichinoseki (my next stop) has not yet left Sendai (where I started). I figure if it took us 6 hours and some to get to Kogota, there's no way in ice cream heaven we were seeing a train that night. No worries. See, I'm the world's worst traveller. Crazy shizbipple always happens to me, and I can't do anything about it. I stopped worrying a long time ago. 

Eventually the JR guys gave up and put us all on a bus, with a driver who apparently has never driven to train stations before, because the people in the bus had to give him directions. I consider it my scenic tour of North Miyagi. I have one friend who lives in one of the towns, but I've only seen that one town. That's when I discover that there's nothing to see in North Miyagi.

We're only two stops out from Ichinoseki when I decide I should put all the crazy stuff that happend to me in a non-fiction book, because I could never write it as fiction. Who would believe it? Like that time they found a human toe on the train track and it got declared a crime scene and the train couldn't run. (Yeps, that happened.)  I'm sketching out the book in my mind, when the bus crosses an intersection. I think we were supposed to turn left, but what do I know? I've never been on these roads before. Then the road ends suddenly and we are, literally, in an empty rice field. It takes all my willpower not to laugh out loud.  It's 9 HOURS into a 95 MINUTE TRAIN ride, and I'm in a BUS in a RICE FIELD. A little too ridiculous to contemplate.

The driver backs out and we make it to Ichinoseki (nicknamed The Sexy) a little after one. I'm glad to finally be back in Iwate, if not in my own town. I figure it doesn't make sense checking into a hotel for 4 hours, so I wander around the station area, looking for a restaurant. They're all closing at 3, but that will give me 2 hours of shelter. The first restaurant is "Thousand Year Place" which makes me think all the food will spoiled. Nopes. The second is Ichinoseki Hormone. Hormone is guts. The national Saturday pasttime of Barbados is eating pudding and souse. Pudding is potato dipped in pig blood and stuffed in pig intestine. I have NEVER eaten it. I figure if I left Barbados not eating guts, why come to Japan and eat it? Nopes.
  
The next restaurant is called Ton-chan, "Little Pig." I wonder in, and buy some strips of the second most expensive beef in Japan, which happens to come from a few stops from The Sexy, in a town named Maesawa. Then I have me some horse strips. And an aloe drink. And a Dragon Fruit Sherbet, which is sooooo good that I think, as I swallow my first mouthful, it was worth 9 hours for this.

 Dragon Fruit Sherbet, also known as Ecstasy in Purple.

I read my Kindle and eat slowly. I don't want this meal to finish a second before 3 o' clock. Because at 3, it's out in the wind - the cold is not so bad, my house is probably colder.

The little old lady working in the restaurant asks me if I'm sight-seeing. I'm tempted to tell her, yes, I'm sight-seeing in The nothing-to-see Sexy at 2 am, but sarcasm gets totally lost in Japanese. So I tell her I'm stranded, thanks to wind-cancellations. At 3, when I pay, she stops me and declares that I am SLEEPING AT HERS! I try arguing, but it's no use arguing with a Japanese person whose trying to do you a favour. So, we walk to her place, and she's like, you go on, and sleep, I'll watch tv and wake you at 5. I try to insist that she sleep, because there's no way someone who worked from 5 pm to 3 am isn't ready to sleep, but she refuses, and shuts me in the bedroom. I amuse myself thinking how if this were any other country, she'd be an axe-murderer. I don't think I'll fall asleep, but then it's 5, and she's tapping me. She tells me I can sleep longer if I want to, the tv says it's still high winds. But I've put her out too much already, so I say no, get up, use the loo (yay for reading British books!) and head out. She insists on walking me out to show me the way, even though it's a straight shot, and I can see the tracks from her apartment. I thank her profusely, and she insists I come back and say hi sometime. I've never been to The Sexy before, but I'm defs going to try to go now!

 AJR train next to the Dinkville Express, properly known as IGR - Iwate Galaxy Railroad.

When I get to the station, it turns out the tv was right. No trains all morning. I explore the 4 shops in the station. I find a new type of bread from my town's bread company, and a folder with the 5 Iwate mascots - all bowls with different kinds of food in them. And I buy myself breakfast, and then lunch, and then Cherry Blossom Rice Cake gelato (soooo yum). And then take a nap. When I ask, the station attendant tells me it's not just the high-winds now, there's apparently a power cut between The Sexy and Morioka. I just go back to my nap. At 12.20, they finally get a train running.

Of course, when I finally pull into Morioka, it's during the Dinkville siesta - my private train line has almost 2 hours in the middle of the day where they just don't run any trains. I wander off to the bookstore, and buy a copy of Gregory Maguire's WICKED. I get tempted to watch a movie, but I don't want to push my luck. I return to the station in time for the next train. I get home at 4.23 pm. 

My 5 hour train trip, turned into 24 hours and 21 minutes, involved a bus in a rice field, dragon fruit sherbet, cherry blossom rice cake ice cream, Maesawa beef, 2 books in English , 1 in French (Les Miserables), and 1 in Spanish (Como Agua Para Chocolate), and crashing at an old lady I'd never seen before in my life. What can I say? When you're the self-affirmed world's worst traveller, there's never a dull moment.

Sibling Rivalry

I talked to my brother a couple nights ago. This is rare. We have managed not to be in the same country at the same time for 4 years. Unless you count the 24 hours where I was in Toronto and he was in Vancouver, but being on opposite ends of Canada doesn't do much for seeing one another.

The thing is, we're not close. And the only reason we saw each other growing up was because we lived in the same house. Obviously, since we make no effort whatsoever to see one another now. Although, that might be the whole different hemispheres thing.

I don't know if you could call what goes down between me and my brother sibling rivalry. In fact, comparing my brother and me, is like comparing apples and oranges. Shiny, spotless, bright red apples and oranges that fell out of the tree and got stampeded by buffalo.

My brother inherited just about every "good" trait from my parents. He's got Mummy's musical talent (she was in a band) and he's the stable, hardworking one. He's tall and thin, an athlete. Seriously, my brother is all literary crush material. My friends used to joke that if he was older... Thank God he isn't. (He's 4 years younger.)

On the other hand, there's me. I inherited my father's musical talent. So while my brother plays sax and clarinet and can carry a tune, my singing (and playing) might just inspire the neighbours to call the vet and have the dying penguin next door put out of it's misery. I'm fat like Mummy. Well, not like Mummy, but fat nonetheless. And it has nothing to do with what I eat, or how much I do. I've never been an overeater, as a kid I didn't like sweets (my friends still think I'm crazy because I can't stomach cheesecake or chocolate, and hardly ever eat ice cream on purpose!), and I've always been active.

And while lil bro is a studier, I'm a natural. Not to blow my own horn, but I hardly study. School for me went like this:

Month 1: Study hard, read everything, hand in assignments early.
After: Sleep on books, claiming that I will learn by osmosis; listen in class, because I'm never lifting a finger outside it; turn in assignments with seconds to spare or not at all.

Seriously, the only reason I got through school is because I was good at it. And subjects that required a little more effort than sheer brilliance, got failed, ignored and dropped the minute they'd let me drop them. The grand irony in all this is that my parents thought I would be a good student, because I ate books for dinner as a kid. And because I did really well in the national exam and got into the top school. My brother had a lot of trouble reading and he ended up at the no. 3 school. The lessons to be learned here:

1. Reading does not equal studying.
2. Being naturally good at something does not equal success.

My brother's academic career was almost as successful as mine. His hard work nearly cancelled out my smarts.

I also inherited my father's fascination for shiny new stuff. Growing up, I remember my Dad having 4 jobs. He was the full-time IT manager for the biggest department store on the island. He was also a Captain in the army, a teacher at the polytechnic and something else that I can't call to mind right now. lol. Money was not tight. We were a solidly middle class, 2 car, 1-trip-a-year family. As far as I can tell, he did these things because he felt like. On top of that, he was the manager of the Army Rifle team, and the National Domino team. Yeah, clearly my attention span is genetic.

My brother and I are on the opposite end of the spectrum for just about everything. He's living in Canada, surrounded by my Mom's side of the family, working for a big name computer company, doing design. Meanwhile, I'm in Japan. The closest person from my country is 600 km away, and my closest family is in Australia. I'm winging it on this teaching thing and writing in my spare time.

I made the mistake of telling my brother that I'm a writer in that convo. His reply:

"No, you're a teacher."

Just in case I had forgotten that we have nothing in common and are better off not talking.

As a YA writer, I think about siblings a lot. Sibling and parent relationships can be just as important to a teen as friends. Growing up all my friends pretty much either despised or adored their parents and siblings.

I don't have a problem with Mr. Perfect- er, my little brother. I can't say he feels the same about me. I think he thinks I should (wo)man up and be more responsible instead of gallivanting the world. Maybe some day. But for now I know that there are some people who like to know they've woken up on the same soil they woke up on yesterday, last week and last year. And then there are people like me.

How about you? Did you have siblings? Were you close? Are you now? Did you imagine better siblings for yourself? lol.