Hidemi's Rambling No.203

It’s the middle of the rainy season in Japan. Even without sunshine, daytime highs are around 86 degrees every day. The worst thing is unbearable humidity. It easily exceeds 90%. We are virtually walking around inside a sauna. Maybe because of the horrible conditions, I haven’t been well lately. I’ve felt tired and had a mild headache all the time. Of course I use air conditioning, but the huge difference between inside and outside somehow makes me sick. That has deprived me of a party although we’ve just published on Kindle our second book, ‘Hidemi’s Rambling Volume Two’. I really had to do something for my poor condition and bought an ‘unagi’ bowl at a supermarket. An ‘unagi’ bowl is a Japanese dish that has a slice of a grilled eel over rice and is poured with sweet sauce made by soy sauce. It’s usually expensive, but I got one using a cheaper Chinese eel, also at half price. Eating an eel is supposed to be effective to get physical strength in Japan and people are having it in summer. I counted on an eel this time too. But while I’m explaining an ‘unagi’ bowl, it sounds more and more grotesque. I eat a strange thing…

Hidemi's Rambling No.202

After the mix down of our new song, I couldn’t manage to get it to the suitable volume. Instead of taking it to a recording studio to adjust it at the mastering, I decided to do the mastering by installing Cubase AI on my different computer, recording the song to it and increasing the volume. The other night, I had a dream in which I took the song to a studio engineer for the mastering. I listened to the finished sound by the engineer and screamed in despair, ‘No! This isn’t what I wanted at all! This is too muffled!’ And I woke up. It seems that I think the sound of our new song isn’t crisp enough. Now that my dream told me so, I will use the equalizer again on the mastering. Thus, our new song is in a final burst. Well, I’ve been saying this for over six months now…

Hidemi's Rambling No.201

Where I grew up wasn’t a good neighborhood. To my mother, seeing her child go to a public junior high school was out of the question. To get in a privileged private junior high, she made me go to a supplementary private school after the classes of elementary school. But even to get in the supplementary school, there was an entrance examination because it was for selective kids. As the public elementary school I attended was low at the educational level, my score of the exam was bad although I was the smartest at school. But the exam included an IQ test, which I had never taken before. In a three-way interview between the examiner, my mother and me after the exam, the examiner told us that he had never seen this high IQ before. I was supposed to fail the exam due to the low marks, but they let me pass as an exception considering my high IQ. Since then, I’ve leaning on my IQ for my life. My IQ is the only source of my confidence in my pathetic life but it’s the reason of my suffering as well. I’ve been unable to accept each and every failure of mine because I don’t understand why my high IQ couldn’t avoid it. Why do I fail in so many things? Why am I unsuccessful? Will I end my life without making use of my IQ? My partner compares me to a Formula One car. Although it runs faster than any other cars on a circuit, it’s completely useless on a regular street. I’m looking for a circuit for me but unfortunately, roads in the real world are all rugged with various obstacles…

Hidemi's Rambling No.200

When I was little, my mother constantly said bad things about others. She believed that, even when someone was kind to her, there must have been some plot behind the nice gesture. To sum up what she talked about every day, there are only evil people in this world. In kindergarten, mothers would fix a lunchbox for their kids and the kids would have it with their classmates and their teacher. At one lunchtime, when I was opening a lid of my lunchbox, I inadvertently dropped it to the floor without having a single bite and it overturned there. I lost my lunch. While other kids laughed at me, my teacher, who had been trying so hard to make me play with other kids, cleaned up the mess for me and took me to a small candy store outside the kindergarten. She told me to pick any bread I liked. I picked one timidly, feeling afraid what kind of trap this would be, as I didn’t have any money. She suggested one more. I couldn’t figure out what was going on and shook my head. She picked one more piece of bread by herself, took out money from her own wallet, and gave all the bread to me. I was stunned. She bought me lunch. It was the first time that someone unrelated to me was so kind to me. Since then, I had started talking to her. Even after I finished kindergarten, I had kept exchanging letters with her and I still send her a Christmas card every year. She was the first person who destroyed my mother’s theory of the evil world and taught me that there were some good people in this world…

Hidemi's Rambling No.199

I spent two years in kindergarten playing alone. The first year was quite peaceful because no one, including my teacher, cared that I didn’t play nor talk with anybody. But in the second year, the peace was broken by the teacher who took charge of my class. She did care and worried about my withdrawn attitude. One day, she suggested me to play with her outside at recess. She held my hand and took me outside. The biggest attraction was a trampoline at the playground. Kids would wait in line for their turn at recess. My teacher joined the line with me, saying to other kids ‘Let’s play with Hidemi! Make friends with her!’ They looked at me dubiously but reluctantly agreed because it was their teacher who told them to do. While I was waiting in line, I got more and more unbearable to be among others, standing so close to them. I observed the trampoline too, and it seemed impossible for me to reach the center of it by avoiding fall through gaps between the round frame and the mat. I began to search the way to escape from this deadlock but my hand was tightly held by my teacher’s. As my turn became imminent, I felt desperate. Then, the teacher said to me ‘Your turn is next. Now that you have this many friends, you can play without me, can’t you?’ and saying to other kids ‘Be nice to Hidemi!’ she returned inside. All at once, I ran away from the kids and the trampoline. I ran to the far edge of the playground and stood there. Kids were playing as if nothing had happened. I secured the enough distance from others and felt safe. Ironically, nothing has changed since then, as I’m still distant from the society…

Hidemi's Rambling No.198

I don’t get along with people generally and it had been so back in kindergarten already. I hated everything there. Other kids seemed too stupid and childish to me. The activities in the class were relentlessly silly. The teachers treated us like a bunch of fools. But seeing other kids do, I always thought they were actually a bunch of fools. I wished they grew up and got smarter fast. Soon after I got in the kindergarten, going there every day became a torture to me. Sleeplessness on weekdays was my norm. I got fed up with the whole stupidities there and stopped talking with anybody. Some kids even believed that I was mute. They played outside at recess but I had never joined them. I spent the recess alone in the classroom, rounding the clay into balls and rolling it into strings. I didn’t make them to form something by them. Balls and strings were the finished products. When I used up the whole chunk of my clay, I reversed the balls and strings to a wad and started making them all over again. I spent two years just doing that everyday while I was disgusted by other kids playing, jumping, and screaming outside childishly…

Hidemi's Rambling No.197

I don’t have a child and probably won’t have one all my life. But in my dreams, I’ve cuddled my baby for several times. It’s a boy and always the same baby, and I firmly believe I have a child in a different dimension. One day, in my dream, or in that dimension, I saw him in his twenties. It was the future. He lived in a secluded village and was devoted to an unfamiliar future sport. He didn’t notice me as I was watching him from somewhere far. I was so happy to see my baby have grown up and see him not working at an office as a businessman. An elderly man passed by me and I asked him about the sport my son was practicing intently. My question was if the sport was some kind of official, recognized, or popular, which was somehow a possible way to make money. He told me that this sport was completely unknown to the public and there was no event or competition, thus it never brought money whatsoever, not a cent. I burst into tears for joy. Not only he didn’t become an office worker for a steady income, but also he chose the profession that was totally unrelated to money or fame. He wasn’t interested in them. His only interest was the sport. I couldn’t stop crying for joy, thinking how ideally he had grown up and what a perfect son he was to me. I felt thoroughly proud of him and grateful for him to become as he was. Since I saw that dream, I’ve felt more confident of myself, because I’ve raised an honorable child in the other dimension…