richord pryor live on the sunset strip

while this article is almost six years old, it's still interesting. i'm reading invisible man again. i saw it on a friend's bookshelf and so it made its way back into my consciousness. i hadn't thought about it again until last week. i was driving around oxford thinking about things. i spend a lot of time thinking about my time in japan, but in a much different way than when i first returned to americatown. at first it was all nostalgia and desire, but not too long ago my thoughts shifted to one of experience and insight.

i was thinking about what it was that i liked so much about being in japan. there are many different answers to this questions including friends, culture, language, environment, etc., but those are all external things that affected me. i was looking for more of an inward answer. comparatively, life here is very different for me, and after some hard thought i had a bit of a personal revelation. i'm not sure what it says about me. it may be bad, it may be good. but it's true. to me that is the only important thing.

i don't know why, but coming back, i felt very exposed in some way. i still do, actually. i can't explain it too well but it has something to do with community and race. that may sound obvious, but what i'm getting at isn't so perceptible. i feel some sort of unspoken expectation to participate in life in general here. in japan it was always optional. sometimes it was good and sometimes it was bad, but overall, i really enjoyed having that option. of course the novelty of other wore of quickly and was replaced by feelings of resentment and paranoia, but i always had the option to turn off the outside world. no one bothered me and i bothered no one. it was great. at will, i could essentially become an invisible man.

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two things
1) i feel like im just scratching the surface on this subject. i hope to get into it more deeply, time permiting. but thats not right now. richard is on fire and my sparks can is almost empty. the subject deserves my full attention and sparks isn't going to help.
2) i've put off posting about the job situation on purpose. im waiting for limbo to end before i write anything down. i find re-reading less depressing that way.