My daughter, the refugee

I heard a ringtone today that I hadn’t for over six months. Mahna-mahna…sang my phone and I picked-up immediately because I knew it was my daughter Clara newly home from Japan. She had flown off back in early September 2010 excited to be embarking on a year-long sojourn as part of the University of Washington’s study abroad program. She was gone for two semesters at Keio University, Japan’s oldest private university, and eleven months on her own in the world’s largest metropolis. Total immersion to finish out her senior year as a Japanese Language and Linguistics major, take the JLPT in July and return home in triumph with one quarter left to complete her second bachelor’s degree. (Can you tell I’m a proud chichi?)

Clara adjusted to life in Japan quicker than I had expected and she soon had good friends with whom to share the downtime between classes and study. Skype and Facebook kept us connected in a way that somehow felt stronger than when she was in Seattle living cross-town. Catching her for a video call was just more meaningful with her 17 time zones away. I could browse her and her friends’ photo albums on Facebook and not feel like I was a helicopter parent hovering. I had a good reason to be that attentive as she needed the support. And I knew this would be a pivotal once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I did not anticipate that this experience could suddenly mutate beyond recognition. 

But it did.

Clara turned 21 (in a country where the drinking age is 20) in February during the long semester break and in early March planned a trip to Kyoto with friends. I was happy to see her get out of Tokyo and travel a bit. They took the overnight bus and stayed in a hostel for several days, had a great time and were to return on a Friday evening on another overnight bus. Not. It was Friday, March 11.

That Thursday evening in Seattle I was going fallow for a while grazing my DVR and dropped back into cable just in time to see the first reports of the 8.8 (soon updated to an 8.9, later a 9.0) earthquake off the NE coast of Japan. What good fortune Clara had gone south to Kyoto and not north to Sendai! I alternated between checking her Facebook status and watching the horror unfold as the tsunami broke over the coast televised in near real-time. Thankfully soon I saw this on her status update:

Clara Nadja Lawryniuk

for anyone who heard about the Tokyo earthquake, dont worry about me, I am in Kyoto. I hope everything is ok back in Hiyoshi

March 10 at 10:21pm via Mobile Web

Ironically, she had not felt the earthquake at all in Kyoto and only learned of it from passers-by. Once back at the hostel we got to chat on Facebook and I updated her on all the news I had absorbed, the start of a week-long consult that grew more complex over time as the situation with the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant evolved. That first night after the quake most transport was not functioning; all of Tokyo’s metro was shut down as were the highways, which are mostly elevated and required inspection. Clara returned to her dorm in Hiyoshi a day late and to an uncertain situation. Would there be food? Power? Water even?

Before she had left for Japan I had let the thought pass through my mind that the potential for her experiencing an earthquake while in Tokyo was pretty high, but then so is the potential here at home. It never crossed my mind that she might experience a once-in-a-millennium event. Clara mostly took it all in stride and was determined to stay the course and finish her second semester at Keio. We researched factual news to counter the hysteria that seemed to pervade most media and that invaded her home in the form of freaked-out students fleeing for their homes abroad and hell-bent on ensuring that all around them felt the full force of their panic. Midweek we decided that it would be prudent to have her wait out the Fukushima drama with a friend in Osaka, so she took the shinkansen south, met-up with her friend from Seattle and woke-up to a crushing and wholly unexpected blow.

The UW had canceled their entire study abroad program in Japan. No choice, no options, unilaterally. I replied to the email Clara forwarded me on the 17^th:

My daughter is in Japan on a 2-semester program at Keio University and intends to graduate from the UW after Fall 2011. She is extremely upset that her program is cancelled. Your action takes away her one chance to have this immersive experience and accelerate her Japanese language skills. There will be no way to replace this lost experience.

We have been closely monitoring the situation in Japan and realize that the time may come where leaving Japan is the prudent thing to do. But that time is not now. The situation could resolve favorably in the next week.  We were willing to wait and see how this resolves; this decree takes that decision entirely out of our hands. We protest.

But protest all you want, it makes no difference. Clara was devastated. And now she is home. Today is the first day of Spring quarter at the UW but she has no motivation to start. She will take the time off and let her grief work its way out. 

I know compared to the thousands who lost their lives or were directly impacted by the Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami this is small beans. But on that scale most everything is. Still, lives are impacted in many ways and Clara’s grief for her lost opportunity and for the premature leaving behind of good friends (made closer by shared adversity) is no less real. It is her experience. And mine, vicariously.

Keeping up

I don't have enough time in a day, do you? I have work-related lists of things to do as well as keeping the home livable. I have a long list of topics I continue to explore (this alone could take all day). Then there's the reading/viewing for fun. O, and being social too. I used to think that I would just reduce my sleep time (you can sleep when you are dead, right?) but then I realized A) I never want to be dead, and B) lack of sleep has been shown to accelerate the death process. OK, I let myself sleep more now.

A little sleep digression: When I was an undergrad at the UW (WA) I hung-out in the physiological psychology department as a respite from my premed curriculum in chemistry and biology. My adviser over there was Steve Woods, a fascinating guy who has had a great career. Steve tackled the sleep issue head-on by his extremely disciplined program (too disciplined for me thanks) of compressing his REM cycles by going to sleep at the same time every night but waking up a minute earlier every day until he was down to less than four hours nightly. The notion was that if you decrease sleep time gradually the REM cycles adjust and the "wasted" time in between is gradually deleted leaving the REM sleep intact. The trick was to never vary, even on weekends. Obviously Steve wasn't a party animal either. He also had an odd metabolism which made him super-sensitive to caffeine, unlike me who could drink coffee late at night and still do a face plant into my textbook. He said he had some coffee once and it kept him up for like two days straight...

Anyway, I don't know how long Steve kept that schedule or if it had any health effects. I heard he has been suffering from some sort of neurological disorder, maybe MS, don't know. Connection? I'm not going to find out. Plenty of D3, melatonin and sleep for this guy.

So, time. I can't wait until we begin to merge with AIs or even basic data interfaces that would allow me to download a day's (year's?) worth of information overnight or near-instantly. Who knows? Eventually it will be. But for now my serial processing of words is too slow by many orders of magnitude. Sigh.

The lost is found!

I couldn't remember where I had left this old blog that I started and promptly forgot about! Good thing I still had the old email account I used for this so I could reclaim it. Has it really been seven years?

Regarding my archived posts:
1) I've learned to stabilize my mood through proper nutrition. I was long into life extension ideas but since 2004 I have discovered the value of Omega-3s, D3 and lotsa B to keep them old brain cell membranes in peak form. Phosphatidylserine and choline help too.
2) I've got one old bottle of wine left, a 1969 Gevrey Chambertin. They were all interesting to drink but none of them blew my mind. I guess I'm over my old wine mania for now. I think it was driven by the collection gene I suffer from that unchecked leads to incapacitating pack-rat syndrome.

After reading my daughter's recent blog post (My Life in Japan) I am inspired to attempt this writing exercise in full view of the dozens who will see this. ;-)

A sad wine story...

I've been concerned that some of my cellared wines might be getting past their prime, so I struck a deal with a friend of mine to cook an appropriate meal and I would bring the wine. I'm telling him I've got this 1973 DRC Eschezeaux, but when I set it on the counter he looks it over and points out it's a 1975. How did I get it stuck in my head it was a '73? It had been sitting out in plain view at my place for two weeks since I dragged it out of my cellar (at my ex-wife's house, but that's a story in itself...) Perception is voluntary, I guess.

After driving over bracing the bottle with one hand so it wouldn't get shook-up (sediment, after all) and bragging that this bottle had an auction history of selling in the $200-400 range (the '73 did; I need to look-up the '75), I carefully remove the foil top and clean the gunk that always collects under and gently extract the cork...

Now, you're probably thinking I'm going to say the wine had turned to vinegar and was utter crap. But no, it wasn't spoilt. It had transcended winehood. But into what we couldn't tell. I poured some into the great goblets and was awed by the color--not a trace of actual red left in that liquid! No, it came out the color of strong tea! We sniffed and decided we actually liked the nose, which tended to the dried fruit end of the spectrum. There was complexity there... No fruit or any real body though. It tasted oxidized (duh!) but not unpleasantly so, actually lighter than a sherry...

So, hey! We drank it with dinner.

Looks like this is the year to finish drinking all my '70's vintages...

Well, got a blog, gotta post...

I'm sure nobody will ever read this, but if you do, post me some encouragement. Today slipped away in a totally different fashion than yesterday. Seattle yesterday lived up to its reputation. Gloomy and cold. My mood seemed to mirror the skies. Today started in gloom and now has gone blue and bright. My mood follows. Why do we have moods?

Some people I know don't seem to have moods. Always the same. Rock steady. Boring? Maybe, especially when compared with the bi-polars I know. Although that creates a different challenge altogether...

Have you ever had the experience of being with someone and realizing you had the exact same conversation with them the last time you were with them? Maybe that should be comforting. Consistency. I tend to enjoy novelty more. Even something as mundane as finding out what someone does for a living is interesting to me the first time around. Of course I never get tired of some things... ;-)