"Hither, ye lucky few"

Winter.

Most of my classmates have come down with H1N1. Those who haven't are participating in a college-wide blind date night. It's just me and Orange Pekoe in here right now.

A year has come and gone since my trip to Japan. Unfortunately, my attempt at chronicling it in my diary became less reliable with every month. Slowly, I reconstruct bits and pieces. I seem to remember spending a good amount of time living with an irritable anthropology professor. There's the strange memory of sneaking around in a construction site--twice--getting arrested the second time. Where did my summer go? I believe that aspect of my life was robbed from me, and this time for good. There'll be no more summers from now on.

My senior thesis is on State Shinto's relationship to the Western "religious-secular" dialectic. Earlier in this blog, I made a statement that Shinto was a religion with no system of ethics that was hijacked by the government during the Meiji period. I'd like to retract that now. I'll be writing about that subject on this blog if anyone's interested, but that's not why I've decided to start writing again.

There's a good variety of interesting things sitting in front of me. A bag full of potpourri. An out-of-print book on an alleged 1st century history text of unknown provenance. Ambedkar's The Buddha and His Dhamma. And here's something interesting-- a brochure for the JET program, and a half-finished JET application in an envelope.

Yes, this is where we left off, isn't it?