January 24, 2006: A Room with a view...and so much more!

After a month long absence, I admit it is high time I get my writing into full swing and once again return to blogging. My holiday season was filled with warm wishes and wonderful family reunions as I traversed the world over to meet friends and family back in Rapid City, South Dakota. The season is never complete without passing away the hours with my mother cooking sugar cookies and cheesecakes, going to the quaint church my grandparents founded, checking out the latest happy hour specials in local, po-dunk bars with high school friends and simply remembering how blessed we all are for the opportunities we are given.

I sit here reminiscing over these warm tithes, of memories filled with beautiful, blinking Christmas lights, mugs of hot chocolate, and the brilliant white snows that graced the Black Hills while I was home. Rapid City will always be my home, and my mother said to me once I returned to Osaka, “Kristin, I am slowly learning that I need to let my children grow their wings. I can’t be your mother forever.” What an honest realization. For so long, I have thought that my life would be found within the memories encapsulated in South Dakota. I used to feel like Romeo, desperately proclaiming, “there is no world without Verona walls” when I thought of leaving my nest. Now, however, I have found the world to be flat, just as Thomas Friedman claims. Japan is really not so far from America is from France is from India, etc, etc, etc.

Of course, this bold realization also came with the arrival of my LSAT score, several days before Christmas. Sometimes, one wishes that Santa really would forget addresses, or not visit homes without chimneys, because the big guy upstairs was obviously not concerned for my Christmas wishes when I opened up my inbox and was filled with mixed reactions to my disappointing LSAT score.

Alas, my friends and family were right by my side to alleviate my woes with their support and I have now decided, much like Lucy Honeychurch, in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, that I have my whole life ahead of me to determine my course. I have now signed up for the Foreign Service exam should I want to pursue diplomacy as my friends at the American Consulate in Osaka have suggested. The GRE is another item on my To-Do list, considering I always wanted to obtain my Master’s in Public Policy. I might even spend next year teaching in China or writing in France. Who knows? The wonderful thing about life is that it is glorious and difficult all at the same time, as Forster wrote. We learn the instruments as we go along, and this is one heroine who has many things to check off her life’s To-Do list.

Ciao!