the lady at the store

Last week, we had a moving day at work. We were moving our office one station away, and a few coworkers and I sort of went back and forth to carry things to the new office. The new office is pretty rad. It's a tiny, cozy space surrounded by cool temples and nature and right across from a preschool so you can enjoy hearing little kids happily chirp and shriek through the window glass as you work. We all liked it the moment we saw it.

Excited as I was, there was also a bit of sentiment. Moving is sentimental because you are usually leaving something, somebody, somewhere you've come to know pretty well behind. I knew I would miss our old office, an aged Japanese-style house. I would miss hiking up the hill every morning. I would miss sitting down on the tatami mattresses and even the spiders and moths who quite peacefully shared the space with us. 

There was another thing I would miss: that convenience store down the hill. It was basically the only store where we could buy lunch unless we wanted to eat at an ancient-looking Chinese restaurant nearby every day. Though I would usually bring my own lunch, it was pretty much my habit and rare chance of exercise to go down to the store to get something--tea, juice, ice cream, sweets, chips, anything.

There was this lady who was always there around lunchtime, a skinny woman with long, dark hair, with a charming smile, probably around ten years older than me. She was already a pleasant cashier the first time I saw her, but in the weeks and months that followed, we had slowly warmed up to each other. Now when she saw me coming in, she smiled a bit more widely than usual. I could hear a bit extra friendliness in her hello. I'm sure I did the same; I smiled bigger and said thank you more enthusiastically when I received the change and left. On every visit, I would glance around to see if she was working and was a bit disappointed if she wasn't.

On the moving day, before I stopped by for the last time at our now-former office to fetch some things, I went into the store to get coffee. I was hoping the lady was there, but at the one open cashier was an elderly lady who was also pleasant but not to the point of the friendliness I shared with the younger lady. Disappointed, I stood behind the guy who was paying; then, my favorite lady came out from the staff room like a blast of wind (well, not really, she just trotted out happily) and called out to me from the other cashier, "Next, please!"

We grinned and she scanned my coffee. "One fifty," she said. I paid. As she gave me back the change, I blurted out, "We're moving the office to the next station, so I won't be able to come here anymore." The truth is that I could still come here, but somehow, it felt as if it was truly the last time to see her.

She looked a bit surprised, but then the smile returned and she said, "Oh, really? Where did you work?"
"Up the hill. You know, you go straight by the bakery and make a left at the temple, then up the long stairs."
"Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about."
"Yeah, but we're moving a station away. Guess I have to find another convenience store."
"Will you be closer to the beach?"
"Kind of. We are near the temple."
"Oh, I see."
We were smiling at each other. A customer was waiting behind me.
"Well," she said. "Goodbye, then. Good luck with your work."
"Thank you. I'll see you around."

As I walked out the door, I realized it was the first real conversation we had ever had. Until then our interaction had been strictly limited to business without a single case of small talk. We still knew we recognized and maybe even slightly looked forward to seeing each other. It's funny how things happen just like that, being there simply felt and sensed but maybe never acknowledged. It's that girl you met in your second grade homeroom who would always smile at you when your eyes met even though you would never really talk because she belonged to another group of friends. It's that favorite hair stylist who would take your hair seriously and actually enjoy conversing with you, who you would one day remember realizing you had stopped going to that salon. Later you wonder if it was only you or you both felt the same--happy to see each other--though there's no way to confirm. That's fine. That's whatever you believe.

But I'm glad I got to confirm something with the lady at the store before I stopped going there. Even that confirmation might be something only I imagined, but that's the meaning that little small talk will hold in me, which after all is all that matters.

on creativity

Today, I was talking to a friend who likes to draw, take photography, write, and all that jazz.

Him: "But I never have time to really do any of these."

Me: "True, it's tough when you work...but you should try if you like doing these."

Him: "Well, yeah, I guess when it comes to creativity, I tend to refrain from really getting into it because, I guess, I'm afraid of being a failure or something." 

Me: "Well, there's no..."

(I pause and think.)

Me: "Well, actually, there is...but you gotta try anyway!"

Much as I wanted to say there's no failure in creativity, my instinct told me there is. I couldn't ignore that voice in my head. But now I think about it a few hours later, and I guess there actually is no failure in creativity if that is for our own personal use. But when it is for someone to see--that's where all the bad books, bad drawing and badly taken photography come in, and I understand why my friend gets cold feet, as it is probably in our instinct to share our creativity. The fear of sharing something not good enough has stopped me many times from posting here even though I know this blog gets only a handful of readers.

The fact is, though, it's still better to share, because creativity often evolves when it's shared. Comments from my writing peers, both positive and negative, have empowered me a lot in such constructive ways. Being creative is often accompanied by wanting to be good, and to be good, you have to accept the possibility of you being "a failure" and still create the best you can. 

I'm telling this to myself as I ramble, and wishing that I had given this as my piece of advice to my friend. That would've sounded a bit better than "You gotta try anyway."

dealing with tragedy

Bin Laden is dead.

When I read the news on Twitter, I was struck by the empty feeling I always feel when I hear news of someone's death. Every time I get shocked, by the fact that someone who has been alive and breathing until just a second ago can be gone in the next. I was by no means sad, knowing what he has done, but when I began to see reactions from American people on the internet, I couldn't help but feel a wave of estrangement.Those were words of joy, excitement and celebration, none of which, to me, fit the occasion--whoever it was that died, it was an occasion of a death (or, in fact, four deaths, as the news later reported).

For all he did, he probably deserved to die. The world is most likely safer and better off without him. He was, after all, the leader of a bunch of terrorists.

But then, who ever deserves to die, really?

Two weeks after the earthquake on March 11, a boy gave a speech at his graduation ceremony at a junior-high in a town by the northern coast where so many people died from the tsunami. Tearful and clenching his teeth with sadness, he said;

"The disaster took away too many precious things from us. It was brutal. We are sad. It is really, really painful. But in this hardship, we should not resent. We should accept what happened and live on, supporting each other. I believe that's the mission for those of us who survived."

The situation is not the same. It wasn't other human beings that cast the tragedy upon us. It wasn't anybody's hatred. There would be no way of revenge even if we wanted it--how would we chase down, catch and kill nature? We never know if Japan wouldn't have wanted a revenge if it had been a human being attacking and causing this much devastation to our country, so it's not about Japan and America. It's about how we get over such devastation, the kind that keeps you up all night in fear and makes you bawl in helplessness and despair.

It's hard not to resent when you are in so much pain and sadness. It's hard not to hate when you lost things that were precious to you. But in all the brutality of what had happened, this fifteen-year-old guy refused to resent, and I find it extremely brave, because it's probably even harder. Resentment, anger, hatred, things like these can get you moving. It takes energy to give up on these and still try to move forward.

But that is the start, I believe, if we want to step ahead for the better.

So maybe we should stop rejoicing over another death, because after all what's behind the seemingly exhilarating joy is hatred, and such joy is in fact empty. This death doesn't cancel thousands and thousands that preceded. This death doesn't bring us back what we've lost.

The sad, but maybe comforting, fact is that there seems to be only a little we can do when something extremely sad falls upon us. We can just grieve and cry over whatever makes us cry writhing and fists gripping for as long as we need to, somehow leave that behind, and keep on.

That's the only way out, and we are all brave enough for that.

what i learned from miyazaki

We have to create to reach out, not for our own satisfaction.

dead and alive, living and dying

My late grandfather

Over the weekend, my mom and I visited Yamagata, where she grew up. The main purpose of the trip was to see her mom, my grandmother, in the hospital. From what we'd heard from my aunt, mom's sister, we thought grandma would be weak and groggy, probably not able to tell who we were, but when we got to her room, she smiled and grabbed my hand with strength that surprised me.

"Do you remember her?" my aunt asked, pointing at me. It'd been five years since I'd last seen grandma.
"Of course!" she said a bit indignantly. "But I didn't recognize her." She looked at me and gestured with her hand, "She was so little when I saw her last time!"

So she remembered me only as a little girl. She'd shrunken, and her hands were pale and bony. But her eyes had twinkle of a sane person, her words sharp and humorous.

For all we knew, my grandmother was dying. She is. She was diagnosed with ovarian cancer two years ago, and the doctor told her family (she doesn't know) that she'd only have a few months. Since then, in our minds was always the question, How much longer will she last? When my mom and I planed this trip earlier this year, she asked my aunt, who told us visiting in February would be a bad idea because of the snow, "Will we still make it in time if we visit in March?"

Once when I was teaching English, my student and I started talking about adjectives about living and dying. As I explained the differences between dead and alive, and dying and living, a realization hit me, and I said, thrilled, "So when you're dying, you are actually living, too. Dead and alive don't happen at the same time, but dying and living do." 

That's what I saw in the white, small corner of the hospital room. Dying people are living, not dead. My grandma, though her body might be decaying little by little and she might've been the closest to death among the four of us, was still there, living.

She ate a dorayaki (which is a type of Japanese sweets) we brought as a souvenir slowly. My aunt and my mom were engaged in a conversation about their relatives. Grandma glanced up at me a few times and lifted her eyebrows in a smile, which made me feel as if I was the little girl she remembered. It was a fuzzy, happy feeling. Embarrassed by the assumption I'd made about her dying, I held grandma's left hand in my hands as she spoke with my mom, for she'd told us that the left side of her body was always cold. The talk went on, and my arms grew numb, but I kept my hands in the praying position feeling her hand, frail like a baby bird, gaining warmth, slowly, but surely.

en

En is a Japanese word I like. The best way to translate it would be "connection by chance." Some may say it's "by fate," and the word certainly has the sense of "being meant to," but to me, "fate" is too strong a word. En is more like paths crossing, the luck of it, and the connection that stays after you go different ways.

Moving around and going through some goodbyes, I started believing more in en. You meet someone, and the connection remains after a goodbye.

So yesterday, I had a plan to meet up with my friends from college. I was just having brunch when I thought of another friend, Jodi, whom I also met in college when she was here as an exchange student. We'd known each other since then, nearly for eight or nine years, though we'd only seen each other twice after she'd gone back to Vancouver. We'd kept in touch mainly thanks to the fact she's such a good letter writer, and now, I knew, she was living in Tokyo though she'd said she was going to visit Vancouver till mid Feb.

Just on a whim, I texted her, along with my number, asking if she was back yet and saying we should hang out if she was. She called right away and said, excited, "Oh my god, I just e-mailed you like five minutes ago!"

Turned out she'd sent me an e-mail to my PC asking for my cell phone contact info literally five minutes before I sent out the text. Some synchronicity, isn't it?

We ended up meeting up in Shinjuku, shopping and walking around the city while catching up, and having dinner and drink with the college friends in our college city. I hadn't seen Jodi in four years and the other friends in almost six years, but it felt as if nothing had changed. "You haven't changed at all!" we all told each other.

There were, of course, things different from the "old days"--different make-ups, talks of career, loves lost and found--that told me we were not the college students who would drink and fool around all night, but what we'd had was still there.

It's not even about keeping in touch. You may hardly talk, or never, even (I hardly talked with my college friends while I was gone), but the fact you met and shared some time of your lives won't go away, and when luck has it so, your paths cross again, and you pick it up where you left it off.

That's en, and, I tell you, it's a great thing to believe in.

be young, be free

Today, walking down the stairway to a train station, I saw a crowd and heard music and yelping. I peeked through the crowd, and there was a bunch of young people of different colors singing and dancing to musical numbers.

They were a group from the US called The Young Americans. I stopped to watch for a few minutes--and ended up staying for half an hour till the end of the performance. I was captured by their energy. Oh, how joyful they were, their voices, their smiles and dancing so powerful!

Joy is contagious.Though the majority of the polite Japanese audience stood still except occasional clapping and picture/video taking on their phones, there were lips curled into smiles, eyes twinkling and giggles as happy as the musical numbers the performers were singing.

And then, there was a sudden urge, to dance, to sing, to laugh and speak English, a language I've somehow been helplessly in love with. I didn't do any of them, but the sentiment was so strong it made me a little teary-eyed as I stood in the crowd, the sound of English words so familiar in my ears.

The performance ended in great applause, and slowly, people began scattering away. I started walking toward the ticket gate, too, and then it occurred to me that it was an urge to let go, to be free. The young performers dancing, enjoying every moment with hope and joy, that sense of being in the present, that's what I was longing for. In an attempt to readjust to my own culture which so far felt rather restricting, I hadn't had that feeling of freedom since I'd come back.

For a moment, I missed California terribly, but then, I decided it wasn't the matter of where. Wherever you are, you can feel whatever you want--hope, joy, you name it--and it's all up to you to create where you want to be, whether that means refusing some restrictions of your own culture if necessary to protect self or bursting into dancing and singing in the middle of a foreign train station building, hooking the busy commuters and spreading joy even just briefly.

Maybe not briefly. The train ride home was a happy one.

Thank you, Young Americans!

round and chubby

I met with a friend who I hadn't seen in 6 months.

"Oh, you've got your hair pretty short!" she said.
"Yeah!"
"But...with the sides like that, it kinda makes your face look round and chubby, doesn't it?"
"Um," I said, "I think my face is round and chubby. I gained weight."
"Right on!"

I wish I could say it was my hair, but when I came home and pulled up the hair on the sides, my face still was round and chubby in the mirror.

there's been love

I went to visit a friend to meet her 3-month old daughter. Ah, those little hands (with super little fingernails, as the Korean girl says in Juno), marshmallow cheeks, and toothless and yet sweet mouth! She wiggled, and it filled me up with warmth that tickled inside my heart. I was captured.

Babies do that. You look at them and see how precious they are and, all of a sudden, you feel an urge to hold them tight into your arms, press your cheek onto theirs and keep them away from all the bad things in the world. It's an instinct. It's love.

And whenever I fall in love with a baby, it gives me hope, because for every one of us alive, even if we feel nobody has ever loved us, there have been moments when someone fell in love with us. Those moments might not have been permanent. That someone might've been just a passerby. But there has been love. Someone saw us and felt the urge to protect us from all the bad things in the world. How could we survive our baby time, otherwise, being so helpless and fragile?

I believe this love might sustain us when we are desperate and feel there's no love, even if we don't remember.

recycling a blog

One of my new year's resolutions was to start writing a blog, constantly. I'd just learned about some of my friends' blogs, and that inspired me to do the same. Again. The problem is I always start something like this and stop after a while, being too busy or finding writing something presentable on a regular basis quite a difficult task.

I decided to set up an account with a Japanese blog service, and then realized I had this one and that there wouldn't be any better time than now to write a blog in English. Now that I've moved back to Japan and won't be using the language as much as before. English, I'm afraid of losing it. Language is so easy to lose.

So here it is, I'm recycling a blog I started 18 months ago, around the time many of my friends went back to their countries after graduation. It's my turn now. It's my first night in Japan and my mother is smothering me with all that motherly attention we call love. As much as I appreciate and enjoy it, there's a part of me who yearns for privacy, and writing helps. It always does.

And so I try to continue even if I end up stopping again. At least my butt is on my chair and I've been thinking in English for the past fifteen minutes or so. Not a bad (re)start!

no worries, mommy and daddy

I'm leaving for San Francisco tomorrow by car. It's my first time to drive for that long by myself, and at first I considered flying and renting a car up there. It'd be too costly, though, and I didn't want to have a fixed departure date in case I need to stay there longer. Yes, I was car-less and license-less when I arrived in the States, but I've been driving for two years now. I'm pretty sure I can handle it. Well, I was, until my parents started overreacting.

When I told my mother about the trip, she sounded fine. She must've thought about it overnight, then, because the next day, she e-mailed me asking if I have thought about taking the plane. I explained to her about the cost and the freedom of not having fixed dates, along with the comfort of driving in my own car. She replied to me today begging me to take the plane, offering she would pay for the tickets, the car and everything. "Please. My heart is already pounding just to think about it," she told me.

Then my father also e-mailed me and asked me why don't I take the plane instead. "Your mother is worried," he wrote. When I didn't reply for a few hours--I was packing--he even called me, which he hardly ever does, not even when my mother had a surgery and I was eagerly waiting for his call.

Parents, it's not such a big deal! It's just a seven-hour drive!

I told them I'd be fine, that I knew the way because I'd driven the same route before. They finally said okay and stopped e-mailing me. I sighed and went back to packing.

Then I realized I was feeling a bit unsure about the drive myself. My parents' worry, based on the belief that I may not make it, made me lose some confidence. It was a rare feeling for me, for my parents, especially my mother, has always been blindly trusting of my ability. Whatever I decided to do, she never doubted I could do it. I hardly ever heard "What if you can't?" as I grew up. Imperfect as they are as parents--who aren't?--that was one of the best things they've done in raising me; trusting me with my decisions.

I still have a hint of worry in me thanks to my parents' sudden and unusual act of overprotectiveness though deep inside, I know it'll be fine and it'll add to my confidence as a driver (which probably shouldn't grow that much). If I have doubt, I can trust myself at the end, because that's what I learned growing up. So parents, please just say "You can do it!" to you child even when you're unsure--or maybe don't say anything discouraging at least and let them do it. From a child's perspective, I tell you. That helps. Really.

teaching language isn't teaching what to say or think

The other day I went to observe a language school. I was sitting in a one-on-one ESL session, and the tutor was discussing different ethnic foods with a Japanese student.

"How about Middle Eastern food?" the tutor said. "What do you think can be included in Middle Eastern food?"

"Hmm," the student thought about it for a few second. "I don't go to Middle Eastern restaurant often. What country is Middle Eastern?"

"Well, I think Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia..."

"Oh, that's dangerous!"

"You think it's a dangerous area?"

"Yeah. Terrorist country!"

The tutor looked at me and we just had to laugh. The naivety in her words made it easier to do so, but I was feeling embarrassed as another Japanese person and conflicted as a teacher-to-be.

When I was tutoring, too, sometimes my students said things that made me feel this way. A few times I tried "poking" them a little ("If we allow gay marriage, they spread AIDS." "Really? How do they do that? Can you explain?"), but when their only response was a blank or completely puzzled stare, I sort of gave up and let it go. My excuse was that our focus was the language; we shouldn't be carried away with discussing the content, for it might make them forget about language accuracy. But letting go always involved a feeling of guilt, as if I weren't doing my job properly. Maybe I wasn't. I don't know. When what you teach is language, a tool to communicate, to express ideas, do you have any say about what the students choose to do with the tool?

Some of the things that have been said, though, are wrong. Not just inappropriate, but wrong. Wrong in that they label and define others in a negative way; wrong in that the utterer, with such innocence, isn't questioning what they are saying at all. It's just a fact for them; just as "Summer is hot," "Middle eastern countries are terrorist countries."

I wonder if it would be right to leave the student saying what I feel is wrong. Would it be neglecting the student in some way? But then, when a student says something like that in perfect English, as a language teacher, what would I do? All I would do, probably, is just say, with as much doubt as possible, "Really?", swallowing the hint of guilt I'd be feeling.

blah blah: on connection

When I'm secluding myself and starting to feel I might as well live in solitude like a monk, phone calls and e-mails come in offering me chances for reconnection. And I realize we are never alone; we could never be, because we could never survive without being connected to someone else.

The umbilical cord is cut off when we're born to the world, and maybe that's why we cry, for it's our first experience of separation. We keep creating cords as we live on, though, connecting with more people, and if some of them are fragile and disappear after a certain period of time, others remain, never breaking, even when we wish them to. I guess that's what's incredible and crucifying at the same time about life.

on language

Kaho Nashiki, in her essay collection "Gururi no koto," wrote this about language:

I believe the purest skimming of communication is conveying the air around what we want to say. Language is very important to me, but sometimes I wonder if humans began to roll faster down toward destruction when they discovered language. There's no way we could abandon it now, though, so we just have to say about this, too, "Oh well." When we are filled with this sort of compassion and acceptance, we might understand each other without needing any words.
It's true language is troublesome; it's hard to deal with. But I believe my job is to weave a piece of cloth called a story, with fabrics called words, that offers different colors and patterns from different angles or with different lighting. I want to be an artisan who simply keeps producing work, and to be that I just can't lose faith in this helplessly unreliable thing; language.

That's exactly how I feel about language. I keep wondering if it's a blessing or a curse that we humans have language. If the most important thing in communication is to "convey the air around what we want to say," and it seems so to me, all we need would be just a smile, a hug, a gentle pat on the shoulder, things like that. Too often we use language instead of those and make things get worse. When we get into this bad spiral, it's not easy to stop; the more words we use, the further apart we drift away.

But, like Nashiki, I still want to believe in language, what great things it can do.

I just got an e-mail from a friend who left here. It's been almost two months since I last heard from her, and I was surprised how happy it made me. Her words were kind, just as they always had been. It made me smile. That's something only language can do. Without language, there would be no way I could feel her presence the way I did through her words when we are 60000 miles apart.

But the words themselves maybe don't matter. It's hearing her voice, imagining her smile behind them that gave me the warm feeling in the heart. That's more than what the words conveyed literally; that's "the air" part that wouldn't need words to be understood. And yet this time, because of our distance, it would've been impossible if it hadn't been language.

It's times like this that I feel maybe language is, after all, a blessing. For all the bad it might do, we need it sometimes to reach to each other. We still can't forget language is a "helplessly unreliable thing," though, because if we start relying on words too much, we stop seeing what's most important, which is the person's gaze, touch, voice, laughter, things that are behind and beyond the words. And when we write, we see how we are always trying to get where language may never take us. That's why we want to doubt it, while never losing faith in it.

ponyo; kids in miyazaki films

So yesterday I posted the entry on Ponyo, got up and went to see it. I was a little worried about how I would feel about the characters speaking English, but it hardly bothered me, to my surprise. It might be because the film doesn't rely much on words, or perhaps English has become less of a strange language to me. I remember how estranged I felt when I saw Spirited Away in English about six years ago; and I had seen the film twice in Japanese already. It was sort of exhausting because I had to be constantly paying attention to catch what was being said. Now I could sit back and enjoy Ponyo, understanding, if not every word, the meaning of almost every sentence. It made me happy how comfortable I've grown with the language.

But it's not about English and me. It's about Ponyo!

I don't think I'd be a good critic because I'm pretty much programmed to like Miyazaki movies, if not love. The moment the ocean blue spread before my eyes in the opening with all the colorful sea creatures, I was already happily smiling.

One thing I really like about his movies is how he has faith in children. Always, in his movies, children are the ones who have the greatest power with their innocence and big hearts. They know how to forgive, and they know how to love. Like Sosuke and Ponyo, their love is very simple and unshakable; they never even need to ask their love, "Do you love me, too?" And there are always adults who care about and watch out for them, while trusting them enough to let them do what they need to do. Idealistic? Maybe. But let us dream, that's what fiction can do.

Another Japanese person who also seems to share similar views on children is Kenjiro Haitani. Having been a teacher for a long time, he never lost faith in kids. He knew how fragile and strong they are, and in his stories there are always adults who never cease to trust kids. Maybe we can see them as adults who "successfully" became adults without losing what they had as kids.

Now it's possibly quite a Japanese way of seeing kids. I feel I could sound like a good anthropology major if I could take an author/filmmaker or two from America and compare and contrast our views on children, but I don't think I've done enough observation on the American perspective to do that. The boy in the story is immensely pure and yet powerful.

But if you'd like to take a peek into the Japanese view, or the one of Haitani, try reading his "A Rabbit's Eyes." I liked it when I read it as a nine-year-old, and I still liked it when I read it as an adult.

on being a stuff person

When I helped my friend move out, I was amazed at how much she'd accumulated in her room in four years. She had all her necessities in that small space--and unnecessities. It was space full of stuff. Stuff like a plastic SpongeBob keychain that must've come with a fast food meal, half-used notebooks with the blank pages to write in, class handouts and paper menus from restaurants. Stuff that makes you constantly ask, if you're just helping out, "Can I throw this away or not?"

Well, maybe not if you're a non-stuff person. Those things are on the borderline only when you're a stuff person who collects and keeps, like a hamster getting ready for winter. If you're a stuff person, you can call nothing trash. Everything has its own memory. Nothing is completely worthless. Who knows, I might use this tomorrow, next week, or--years later.

But the truth is, you won't. You will never use it or even really pull it out of the drawer that's always full until your next move when you spend a few minutes wondering if it should go to the trash bag. It should, usually, and if you can't make up your mind, a non-stuff person around you will with a head shake and a desperate sigh.

I know this very well, because I'm a stuff person, too, even though I tried to pretend I wasn't at my friend's apartment. I shook my head and threw things away like I was used to doing that, but there was always a moment of hesitation when I picked up something and looked at it. Looking, I guess, is bad already. Non-stuff people don't look. They just pick and throw. That's what our other friend did (or could), and without her, we might still be cleaning the room.

I came home that day, and was shocked my room looked just like my friend's, only without the typical mess before a move. It was full of stuff. It scared me to think about the day I needed to move out of this room. It kept bothering me for a few days, so I finally decided to clean my room. Or more like throw things away. I went through piles of paper I had in the corner of my room, books, letters. The trash was filled immediately, and there seems to be a bit more space in this small room; and yet I know there are drawers that haven't been checked, boxes not yet opened. They probably contain more unnecessary stuff--but then, who knows it's unnecessary? After all, we humans have thrown away too much; that's why we're recycling now, isn't it?