hong kong phooey

The awful thing about having a blog, for me at least, is the nagging problem of sporadically updating the damn thing. It's like cardio. Working out don't mean a thang, honey, if you only do it ... and now I'm too lazy to complete the simile in ghetto. Sometimes I really don't have anything to share, sometimes I have a lot to share but I'd rather not divulge what I have to say into a public forum, sometimes girl just don't wanna write, yo'. 

My cousin Jasmine told me about the "runner's wall." She hates running but she ran for an hour up a mountain one time and it was just marvelous after she hit the "runner's wall," you see. She said, yeah, running sucks and is tiring, but like after 30 minutes of just pure running you hit a "wall" where you're no longer tired and then you're running on autopilot, liberated from the tediousness and labor of running and you're kinda just in the moment and blissed out. Maybe there's a blogger's wall. 

So it's a brand new year. I celebrated the last stretch of 2008 in Hong Kong with some family and it really was the hap-happiest season of all. Sure the presents were nice, and the food was beyond satisfying, and yeah, true to my nature, I drank and offended strangers and should have been/was close to being arrested/heavily fined, and I brought some great reading material back to Japan that I cannot wait to finish, BUT....I realize more than ever that after this trip there is nothing more in this world that I value more than my family. I think I've been too busy in Japan or wrapped up in myself to realize that I miss my mom and my sister so much, and how my aunts and my cousins are so brave and strong after everything they have gone through, and I'm genuinely happy that everyone is healthy and doing well in life. GongGong and PoPo would be so happy if they were here to see how everything has worked out. I'm getting teary-eyed just thinking of them. I love that even though we're countries apart, we're so close it's annoying. What other family has an e-mail tree 15 members long? I can call any one of my cousins a sister or a brother or any one of my aunts a mother. And I can no doubt tell you that the feeling is mutual among any of the 15.       

We are so cute. In Macau with auntie Connie, sister, mother, me, Jasmine.

Back to the grind...yeah right, back to my incredibly simple "job" of "teaching English" to Japanese children. Here's to 2009 and another awesome year.