So this is the new year

I ended 2009–the year of my emotionally devastating return from Japan, subsequent wandering in the (literal and figurative) wilderness, and final settling in an unexpectedly wonderful job and housing situation–with a Duraflame fire and a box of frozen ranch-flavored chicken fingers.

In the company of my girlfriend, Jillian.

Many of you will long since have divined that my life has not, of late, been quite free of romantic entanglement. Now it becomes a matter of public record. Why it was secret or semi-secret before is a long and boring and occasionally sad story involving, among other things, the third point of a tra-la-la-la triangle to whom I almost feel I owe an apology, though I didn’t knowingly do any wrong.

How long a story? There are a few points we might consider to have been the real beginning of the relationship, but even counting from the latest of those would make it a year that we’ve been, in some sense or another, together.

We met in Japan, studying tea. We had what we both assumed was an overseas fling. And then the fling followed us home. We’ve been in close touch since she returned to the east coast and I to the west. We met once in late summer, and now again over the holidays.

Things between us just keep getting better, the fact that a continent still separates us notwithstanding. I’m not making any bets on the future, but I think that there will be more to this story.

And that’s all I’ll say about that for the moment. Truth be told, I’m finding it a little difficult to write about Jillian after so much practice not writing about her. But I imagine that she’ll earn mentions here with some regularity from now on, at least until she gets uncomfortable and asks me to cut it out.

So New Year’s Eve and the week that followed were happy days of vacation and overeating, short shifts at work followed by evenings with the best of company, and much motoring in and out of the valley on my scooter, which is a whole lot of fun to ride with a pretty girl on the back of it.

Now it’s business as usual: Jillian back to the east, and me back to work.

Today I was to have resumed, at long last, my tea study. It very nearly happened. I went to the the place in Little Tokyo, and I met certain members of the Urasenke group there, and I had a bowl of tea and a sweet while trying to explain absolutely everything in about twenty minutes to a group of visitors. But after the demonstration was over and the visitors left, things got quiet and a little awkward. Lots of conversation in Japanese that I didn’t understand. Seemed that people believed the teacher to be on her way, but nobody was quite sure. An hour and a half after practice was to have started, I apologized and left. Not a particularly auspicious beginning to my tea life in Los Angeles–but I’ll go back. Of course.

Also not auspicious was discovering, last night, that the first tea bowl I every bought, a cheap but attractive and functional little kyō-yaki number from the dōgu shop across the street from the women’s dorm, got chipped at some point in the not too distant past.

And while I’m whining about tea stuff: last night I followed a link to an album of Facebook photos by a student who just finished her first semester in Midorikai. It was awful. All the familiar places and and activities and clothes and teachers, but starring a crowd of strangers. It felt like my memories had been tampered with, like someone had stolen my past and pencilled me out of it.

Enough, enough. I had my time, and it was good, and life is good now.

Yeah. Life is good now.