Musings of a Drunken Monk: Individual Entry Archive

Today I was walking back from one of my classes, marveling (not really) at the fact that the halls were frigidly on-par with the outside temperature. At least, as of December, they're allowed to turn the heaters on in classrooms. My thoughts wandered, as they often do, to the lack of insulation in buildings in this part of Japan. For some reason I thought back to living through winter in my own high school days. Thanks to the much colder climate in Massachusetts, schools are insulated and have much better (in theory) heating systems.

What stopped me was that I suddenly realized I had been thinking about my Massachusetts high school classrooms in a Japanese context; all of the rooms had sliding doors and kerosene heaters. It meant to me that I've been here long enough so that my life here has started to color my perceptions, even in small ways, of things elsewhere. I wondered how many of my other memories I had unwittingly altered simply by living here for the time that I have.

I think everyone's memories are certainly colored by their current outlook, but have you ever had a moment of such overt alteration?

In other news, this is the 400th post since the inception of Musings of a Drunken Monk, back in May of 2003 when it was hosted on a computer sitting in the living room of my apartment in Somerville, MA. This also marks the second almost-consecutive month that my site has moved over a gigabyte of bandwidth. Thank you photo gallery (and my awesomely few ... fewly awesome ... whatever ... readers)!!