In current news, the social networking giant Facebook has gone public with it’s company and is more valuable than ever. More and more people around the world sign up for a free account everyday, probably on par with the amount of people already using Facebook and complaining about how many times their profile or newsfeed setup has been rearranged to their disliking. Personally, I could care less about the latest and greatest change to Facebook though freely admit I’m resisting the switch to “timeline.” Most importantly I have temporarily suspended my Facebook access for an undetermined period of time.

My beef with Facebook is not Facebook itself, but how I am interpreting the information that my friends are posting about their lives. We’ve all seen it: I’m engaged, I’m married, I’m pregnant, I’m single, I just saw the most awesome movie, I just got a new job, I’m moving, I’m in love with this TV show, I went on an awesome hike, I love my puppy, my team won, and every other interesting and uninteresting detail about our lives. I know I’ve been part of it and I’m not condemning any of it, but I’ve come to realize that living in Japan and living in America at the same time is a little damaging to my mental and emotional health. Being on Facebook, even casually, makes me want to be there and be a part of your lives. “Liking” a status, posting a comment, and your reciprocation doesn’t fill the void I feel in my heart. Spending more time on Facebook doesn’t help either, in fact it makes it worse because logging off and returning to my “real” world here in Japan sharply reminds me that I can’t just finish work and go grab some coffee with you at Starbucks. I treasure my relationships with my friends and if you’re reading this then you know I’ve invested in your life and you’ve invested in mine. Quality time is the best way I know how to connect with people and Facebook can’t satiate that craving no matter what fancy application they buy next.

It is a true paradox, being bound to Facebook in order to keep in touch but in fact losing touch due to lack of interaction. Real interaction. The more stories and newsfeeds I read, the farther apart I feel. The loneliness made me retreat from my current living in Japan, pine for my job and friends in America and created some resentment towards my situation here. Of course I don’t want to feel that way about my job or my team, and I certainly don’t regret moving to Japan. I enjoy living here in this safe and hospitable country and I appreciate the opportunity to live overseas for 2 years. Decidedly the best way to deal with my inward struggle was to become less attached to the America that WAS and more focused on where I AM.  This realization was the catalyst to abandon Facebook until I come up with a reasonable balance of communication with my friends at home.

My mother served two years in the Peace Corps back in the day, sent to the dry, dusty, and very third-world Yemen. It was not the dangerous rebel-rousing country it is today, of course. She sent letters to her family and close friends, probably to whoever took the time to write her back…including my dad. When I was a teenager I remember rummaging through some old tapes and noticed a few weren’t labeled. My dad and I popped them into the living room stereo system and a familiar voice boomed throughout the house. It was my mother, a younger version with a distinct Jersey accent, reading her journal aloud on tape so her parents and siblings at home could hear her voice and keep up with her adventures. No Facebook, no Skype, no acquaintances dropping a line. As I listened to it I thought, “How horrible! She was all the way across the world with primitive communication, weekly at best, and no thought of email or video chat.” My mom came from a corner of the house and realized what was playing. She ordered us to turn it off but we were having too much fun imitating her East Coast pronunciation of words like “cawffee.” I paused it long enough to ask, “When you came back, what happened to all of your friends?” “Well,” she started, “When you live so far across the world and for such a period of time people tend to go on with their lives without you. When I came back many of my friends were married, kids, new jobs, moved, you get the picture. So, I just went along with my life too.”

“That’s terrible!” I thought. “If I ever go overseas I’m going to keep in touch with all of my friends and when I get back it will be like I never left. Thank God for the Internet and the 21st century!” I now realized it’s both a blessing and a curse. My mom’s experience had truth in it even though it seemed to be from the stone age. Underneath the mask of which mode of communication you are using is a universal truth: time together makes people closer. How much time does it take to post a comment? About 2 seconds. How much time does it take to read a comment? About .5 seconds. How much time does it take to write a letter? 1-2 hours for me. How much time does it take to read a letter? About 10 minutes, usually more because I read it more than once. How much time is my average skype call? 1-2 hours. That’s even with people I Facebook on a regular basis.

You see, what’s invested in a relationship is so much more than just the information you’re giving and receiving, it’s the TIME you’re investing. I’ve decided to stop investing my seconds in small talk and comments, to save those for where I am now, not where I could be. Spending an hour of time browsing a hundred newsfeeds of a hundred different people is less valuable to me than a 10-minute real-time conversation. Of course I have no desire to trash all of my relationships in the states, I’m just not giving myself false hope to think that your lives are going to stop and reconvene when I return. I know I made a joke of it when I left and told my friends they weren’t allowed to get married or have babies for two years, but the truth is that we’re all changing. See you on the other side.

Again, I don’t know how long I will be MIA from Facebook, perhaps a week, a month, a year. I care about what’s going on in your life, but I also need to be fully here in my current relationships and not living my life with regrets of missing out.

Skype me, email me, or write me a letter when you’d like to invest some time in us. I’ll do the same.  

Have I mentioned that I’m climbing Mt. Fuji in August?! Well, I am. Everything has been arranged as far as accommodations and travel, so now I’m amassing a wish list on REI to keep track of the gear I need to buy. In lieu of this fact I also decided to go hiking as much as possible until August 6th. I’m much more confident in my train and road navigation abilities. The recent discovery of my bicycle having an internal gear system made it much more amiable to ride up and down the hilly valley roads to get to a trailhead. Learning Japanese hiking vocabulary is a step-by-step journey but I’m making progress in that area as well and was able to find a very helpful site for hopeful hikers. The absence of a car makes it a little tricky and I have to be more picky about the mountains I climb, but it always promises adventure for me and the party involved.

Recently Eric was the hiking buddy victim and he accompanied me on a hike up Mt. Ootakine. Although I woke 2 hours before I had to leave the house, an impromptu conversation had me scrambling to pack my things at the last minute because I couldn’t say goodbye. I whipped up some pancake mix and threw in blueberries, filled my water bladder for the first time and hoped it wouldn’t leak on it’s inaugural run. Eric was ready to go and came to check on me…good thing because I had since forgotten about the pancakes cooking and ended up charring a few. Oops. Steaming hot they packed in tinfoil, I stuck some veggies in a plastic container, grabbed the camera and battery from the charger, bug repellant and sunblock from the dresser, sunglasses from atop the mirror and off we went!

We took a train 3 stops to the South East, a direction I’ve never taken on the train line. It was there I remembered that the map I’d painstakingly written out the night before was still lying on my bedroom floor by the computer. Oops. Riding further into the countryside we stepped lightly onto a single empty platform, the nine o’clock sunshine promising a slightly view from the mountain summit. At such a small station there is no one to man it so we stuck our tickets into a wooden box by the entrance. Walking along the road we passed local farmers carefully planting each baby rice plant by hand in the flooded fields. Our road weaved up the mountainside for an hour. We passed some local tourist attractions like a cave entrance and a “pure water” bottling plant. At the top of the ridge we walked through a nifty looking campground that had large and small cabins available to rent.

Walking over the summit of “Sendaihiwara” our road finally began to slope down. At a fork in the road I suddenly wished I had remembered the map. We went right….after a few minutes we turned around and took the left fork. The correct one. Soon we came to the trailhead. The trailhead didn’t let us down and led straight up the southwest ridge of the mountain. Some parts were actually pretty steep! I changed from my road running shoes to my hiking shoes and began the ascent. It involved some awesome trees and short bamboo brush, a few rocks to climb over and some ladders and chains to climb up the dangerous places. We passed only 3 people who were coming down the mountain.

The top was somewhat anticlimactic as it was the post for a communications base for the Japanese military. 1,192 meters (3910 ft.) if you’re interested. We walked around the chain and barbed wire fence that hogged the summit before settling on a lovely view of the lazy wind turbines chilling out on the south ridge. Do you know how huge those things are?! I passed one on the freeway once…one blade was being carried by the entire length of a flatbed semi truck. As we ate our lunch in the sunshine we theorized the probability of surviving a flight through the gap in the blades while hang-gliding. According to our non-calculations, one has 5% chance of survival, all dependent on wind speed and the length of your glider.  (In case you were curious). We tried to look at the ocean through the binoculars but it was too hazy to see it clearly. I did see two large towers by the coastline and couldn’t help but wonder if they were from the reactor plants. 

On the way back we hunted for and found the overgrown west trail. Quite steep and slippery, it more than made up for its faults when it followed a stream for the last mile or so of the trail. The route crisscrossed countless times back and forth, allowing us to jump, leap, and otherwise tip-toe across river rocks to make it to the opposite bank.  This miniature lush mountain paradise was further enhanced by the joyful songbirds and croaking frogs encouraging us along the way. 

Coming out of the woods we happened upon a cute little church building complete with a rock wall and white birch tree border. Approaching the front of the building there was obvious earthquake damage to the tile staircase and the rock retaining wall. One of the front doors was completely gone and most of the windows had left their glass on the floor. Fans were hanging by wires from the ceiling. A piano left out collecting dust was luckier than the pulpit covered in rat droppings. Discarded programs from a wedding were strewn about the floor as were relinquished ribbon pew decorations. Silently we walked through the deserted set, imagining a wedding being interrupted by a violent earth shaking, windows shattering and people screaming as they run outside only to be met by crumbling rock walls and cracked tiles. Of course we can’t say for certain that is what occurred, but the remnant pieces certainly fueled the imagination. 

After leaving the chapel we walked a few paces down the road only to discover that it was owned and operated by the hotel perched above the tranquil rice paddies. The hotel had long since been abandoned as well, though a bit more methodically than the chapel. All the furniture, documents, props, and other easily movable/sellable items had been removed, right down to the light fixtures in the ceiling where bare wires now crept out of dark holes. They took everything but the kitchen sink and the industrial laundry machines…and the disco ball. What a shame to leave THAT behind! The windows were mostly shattered of course, and the parking lot was completely impaired since half of it had slid down the hill into the road. A lone boulder sat in the middle of the pavement, content in its new location.

We chose a different road to return by, this also requiring boarding at a station further down the line. We began descending the mountain speedily enough but realized that we had quite a ways to go. In an effort to not miss Bible Study that evening we decided to try our thumbs at hitch-hiking. Two cars later (and those were the ONLY two cars coming down the mountain) an old lady pulled over and offered us a ride into town. We had a lovely little chat with her for the next five minutes or so as we enjoyed the sensation of sitting and moving. After nothing but walking only up or downhill for hours it was a very welcome feeling. It turned out that our kind driver was headed to the store directly across from the station! Everybody benefitted from this encounter, especially since we had four minutes to spare before the next train pulled in! Had we walked into town we would have had to wait another hour and a half for the train and arrive home late for the meeting. Awesome. And a definite win for my first ever hitch-hiking experience. Sitting on the train home I opened my pack to partake of the last burned pancake. It was delicious.

 Hopefully my next summit will be Mt. Bandai, the local volcano to the west sitting at 1816 meters (5,958 ft.)