The kids and I went to Tokyo for a week at the end of July. It was a whirlwind, and when people ask me, “What did you guys do?” I find a hard time summing it all up in a few sentences. We did what we usually do, we ate food and walked around. We mostly ate at 7-Eleven, and we thought we were masters of the microwaves, coffee dispensers, and really state-of-the-art smoothie makers until Geoffrey put his smoothie cup in without taking the lid off, and broke the machine. Luckily there’s a 7-Eleven on every corner, so we just avoided that one for the rest of our trip.
I told my friend about the 7-Eleven, and she asked, “I wonder why we don’t have these smoothie machines in our 7-Elevens?” And I confidently replied, “Because someone here would use it as a urinal.”
My favorite day was our first full day in the city because we went on a guided tour in a bus, so there was not any logistical thinking, just get on and off, and be satisfied with the 15 tourist hotspots we hit because it would have taken us two weeks to get through those destinations by using the subway.
On the last day, I had to Zoom into a class I’m taking, and then we packed up and got on a shuttle bus to the airport. As we drove away, I realized we were right next to Shinjuku Train station, and had we just walked one block further on one of our nights wondering around we would have come across a really cool neighborhood that I walked through when I was in Tokyo exactly six years earlier. My Eat, Love, Pray trip I crammed into a week after I got divorced.
I’ve taken the kids on epic plane rides before and know that I have to be on high alert, there’s never a moment to close my eyes because their exhaustion makes them unpredictable. Everything can be fine one moment, and then a Coke will get spilled in their lap, Geoffrey will tell Kingsley she has a penis, and Kingsley will scream at the top of her lungs, “I DO NOT HAVE A PENIS.” Or something like that.
I pulled my book out but just watched movies on the seat-back TV. I watched a documentary narrated by Kate Winslet called Eating Ourselves to Extinction that had me convinced I would go vegetarian but have not really implemented it yet. Then I watched the movie Catherine Called Birdy which was so great. Made by Lena Dunham, a brilliant artist who doesn’t get a fair shake by mainstream media, she placed a medieval story in a cute bubble with a sheen of modern style.
My brother is a staunch Catholic and sends text messages on the family chain relevant to the saints of that day. Many of them are young girls who decided they were called to become nuns at 12 or 13 years old. After watching the movie it makes perfect sense. The alternative to becoming a nun would be to be “sold” to an old man who would repeatedly rape you, then you’d continue to have babies until you die in childbirth. No wonder these young ladies were so receptive to God’s calling.
When we landed in San Francisco, I was eager to get home, but after being up for twenty hours, I felt severely under-caffeinated. During the last 15 minutes of the drive, I was grateful to veer onto the grated ground that gives your butthole the tickles because it jolted me back to reality, and I would say, “Just fifteen more minutes, focus and you will be able to take a nice ten-hour nap.”
I know, the nap is the main component in the recipe for jet lag, but I was spent. It took us a week to get back on track. We had a major setback two days after we got home when Geoffrey’s best friend spent the night, and their main objective for sleepovers is to stay awake all night long. I had another class that night and hid in my room on Zoom while they shot Nerf rifles around the house, but at one point someone came in and said, the toilets overflowing.
My Zoom face of interest was maintained while I nodded as the teacher gave me notes on my work, all the while imagining a flood of shit moving through our house like in Triangle of Sadness. Luckily the water didn’t keep flowing, and I was able to clean up the mess after my turn was up, and I could turn my camera off for a couple of minutes.
At three in the morning, I had to confiscate all their devices and tell them they needed to just lay on the couch, and they could have the TV on, but I know they still had an iPad in their grips. I wonder if I were a big man/dad, would they pass all their shit over, and go to bed after I asked them too? Child energy is crazy, and I wish I could stay up late and be full of life, but I also know the brain needs sleep, and staying up all night means you are just fewer hours away from giving yourself a psychotic break.
The kids had a few more days before they went back to school, so we went to the movies for a double feature. We watched Barbie and then Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kingsley was so excited to watch Barbie, she dressed in all pink, right down to my 13-year-old pink Converse high tops. After the movie, when we sat in the reclines for TMNT, I asked Kiki, “Do you know what a gynecologist is?” And she said no, so I told her, and her face lit up, clued in on the joke she laughed.
That night I was putting the kids to bed, and Geoffrey who loves to tease me to no end, said, “Hey mom! Guess what?” I said, “What?” And he replied, “I love patriarchy.” So I hit him over the head with a pillow, which is how he wanted me to react because he laughed hysterically. I had to remind him, it wasn’t very long ago when women were treated very poorly in this world. It’s not set right still, but we live in a much better time. Thank you birth control.
Marriage itself is one of those things that I won’t fully comprehend, but there are very lucky people out there whom it works for. My parents, it works for them wonderfully. I just don’t think it’s right for me. Madonna sums it up nicely. That’s Madonna the singer/dancer sensation, not Madonna Mother Mary sensation. She says, “I think that everyone should get married at least once, so you can see what a silly, outdated institution it is.”
After I saw Barbie, of course, I thought about a lot of things, that’s what a good movie does. I wonder if there was some primitive agreement made by women to take on this submissive role and absorb the dominance that men need to inflict in order to attain whatever brain chemical is released from feeling powerful, as a way to protect children. I worry that the rise of women puts children at risk, and when I read about child porn, men shooting up kids’ schools, and human trafficking, it makes me so sick. But what’s the solution, women resort to giving up all power so men don’t create this workaround to then feed this need to dominate on children. I don’t know though, it’s probably just a dark thought and maybe there’s not much to it. I hope so.
A couple of people were really impressed I took the kids to Tokyo, and I guess it does demonstrate a good sense of adaptability. I think I’m at a loss for words to sum up our week in the largest metropolitan area in the world because we barely scratched the surface. I hope we go back in six years. Then Kingsley will be getting ready for college instead of middle school and Geoffrey will be bigger than both of us. We can finally make it to the anime studio, watch sumo wrestlers, and find the world's best egg-salad sandwich because as we drove away from the city to the airport, I felt sort of sad like there was so much I didn’t discover, so much I wanted to know.
