4

I have the best coworker in the world. I'm sorry everyone else; you lose.

Here's a little story about the past few weeks.

My coworker is a math teacher whose desk faces mine. We chat every day about this and that. A few weeks ago we got on the subject of James Joyce and I gave her my Japanese copy of Dubliners and introduced her, just for kicks, to Finnegans Wake.

(Usually when I start talking FW people start backing away slowly. But my coworker is different. That's one reason why she's the best in the world, as I said.)

She started reading Dubliners and the other day, nearly finished with the book, she asked me why I liked James Joyce so much.

In stumbling Japanese, I said Joyce was interesting because his writing style changed with each book. That he was neat-o.

In response, she compared Joyce to Natsume Soseki and commented on the way Joyce depicted life in Dubliners straightfaced, without comment, and the effect that lack of verbal decoration had on the narrative as a whole.

She said lots of other things, too, but I couldn't catch most of it. Part of the reason was because, as I mentioned before, my listening abilities in Japanese are dismal; but another part of the reason was that the conversation had turned me into a tightly wound ball of wonder and I was too caught up in the moment to think. Like when a fanboy meets his idol by chance in the street and can only gape at awesome fortune, here I was finally, after years in Japan, having a deep conversation about literature in a foreign language with someone much better read and a more articulate thinker besides. I was too existentially happy to bring anything to the table. Because--I'm saying--this was a dream come true. I have good conversations about literature all the time with non-Japanese friends over here, and I can get my lit-fix on the Internet anytime. But this was the first time that I had a serious, high-minded conversation on the topic with a Japanese person in Japanese.

It was thrilling. And that episode was followed up this morning when my coworker pointed me to this gardening blog written by a Japanese woman living in England. She recommended it to me on the basis of it being beautifully written in an older style of Japanese (take this for example: 「本当に長いご無沙汰の後の更新ですが、そして薔薇のシーズンにはまだ数週間を要しますけれど、今の庭の様子をご覧いただければ幸せに存じます」), and by telling me that "when I try to talk like that, my tongue catches."

I can sense the beauty of that sentence like I can fathom a glacier from its bobbing iceberg tip. But it's a start, and I have someone who can guide me sitting right across from me.That, to put it mildly, is McAwesomesauce.

Anyways, really happy with my luck this year. In fact, I've been having nightmares all week about the stuff I went through last year--school and roommate problems--but the atmosphere in my area of the teachers room is even better than the nightmares are bad. The kind of person my coworker is is truly rare, and I'm incredibly fortunate to have someone as quality (and as patient) as her to talk to every day. It's the kind of understanding we should always strive for in communicating with our friends, but perhaps rarely do. It's a return of that electricity that I felt most often in late high school and throughout college talking with my friends. It turns out it doesn't necessarily fade with age, just in the people who let it.

Maybe this is a small thing, but I don't think so.