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This weekend I will have a table in a tent with Third Coast Comics and other great Chicago Comics artists at Printer’s Row Lit Fest in Chicago ( around the area of Dearborn Street, from Congress to Polk streets) on Saturday, June 7 from 10am thru 10pm, and June 8 from 10am thru 6pm.  Come check out my newest Dragon and Goat comic: The S’Parktacular S’Particles: HERE.

This Thursday, Feb. 27 will be the opening of my Solo Exhibition of new paintings/drawings at Triton College’s Art Gallery.  I’ll be giving an art talk at 7pm.  The show will run through Mar. 14, 2014.

The show is running concurrently with a solo show featuring the artworks of Hyunsook Jeong who will be giving a talk remotely from South Korea at 8pm.  These shows are curated by Mi-yeon Kwon.

The Art Gallery is in Building J, Triton’s Art Building. Triton is located in River Grove  at 2000 5th Ave, River Grove, IL 60171

Having settled in a bit into life in Kyoto, I feel like I can finally wrap my brain around some of the experience…and, well, now actually post, because I have worked out a better means of getting online.

Telecommunication has been probably the most difficult thing to figure out for me so far. Not the food (it’s mostly delicious), not the customs (bowing is really good for the back), nor the language barrier (which is vast but, at least, I have a good enough grasp to do a little more than just get around). The most difficult thing I’m having to adapt to is figuring out the best way to stay in touch with home.

Though in China I had a cellphone, in Japan mobile numbers a heavily restricted to one number per person- at least, this is what I have come to understand- so I can’t get a phone. I don’t have regular Internet at my house, which was expected, but there’s no landline phone from which to call so to make calls home I have to head to the train station and call from a phone booth. At least the one booths aren’t extinct here yet.

This morning as I was calling home, an older man pulled up on a bike next to the booth, pointing at the phone, and I gestured for him to wait. When I got off the phone, I told him I was calling home and he asked where, telling me he was calling Hawaii. I guess that explained the Hawaiian shirt.

My host mother has no TV but this is good because we just sit in the dining room kitchen and talk in the evening. Her radio is constantly running the English lesson station. The shows repeat over and over again, and I am curious how many people are practicing this week’s dialogue, “Don’t drink my blood!” Fortunately I got to recycle it in a dialogue of my own in this week’s Japanese class when we had to write about the Japanese system for gauging personality types by blood type.

Eventually we were given access to wifi at the school, so everyday, like myopic pups, the other students and I get to school bright and early to have a drink at the invisible teets of delicious wifi internets. I’ve found 711 lets me, at least, email with their wifi. Their main local combini competitor Lawson’s requires an app and a registration by mobile phone. You can also access the net via wifi at many Kyoto bus stops, yet in a catch 22 to access the free city wifi you have to email the city, which requires Internet to do…Yet it turns out that the mountain that I live near has free wifi, so I can now get online at Arashiyama, a green paradise just outside the city.

While exposing how my own addiction to the Internet has developed since my last stints abroad, my frustration with the lack e-communication reveals a bit more about my assumptions about Japan. So often in the West, we see Japan as some sort of technophilic paradise, yet actually being here the struggles between technology and tradition, class, and economics are just as evident as in the States, if not perhaps, even more pronounced.

I think this is especially true in Kyoto where the struggle with tradition and progress are in constant tension. The myths of a futuristic metropolis fight with the nostalgic edens nestled away in temple gardens. Not every bus can transform into a monster fighting robot. Not every temple is haven for transcendental meditation.

A couple weekends ago we had our orientation at the College of DuPage for the Japan Program with Director Prof. Shingo Satsutani. Aside from me, the student for a summer, there are 11 undergrad students. And they are young. During discussions most barely had working memories of 9-11 and had not yet been born by the time the Persian Gulf War was over. Naturally this is not their fault, but I am wondering how different of a world view someone born in the 90’s might have from a child of the 80’s – and how this will impact their views of Japan? Does it matter that they grew up on Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh rather than Voltron and Godzilla? Maybe I should make a survey.

For many of the students this is their first trip out of the country, and for some it will be their first time away from home for an extended period of time. I’m interested in seeing how the trip affects them. Traveling doesn’t just reshape how you think of the world but also your perspective on home.

When I studied abroad in Thailand in 2002, at first, everyday was culture shock. Bangkok was nothing like the European cities that I had already visited. Rome, London, and Paris – sure they were foreign, but I could get by on my English or limited French and these places, as wellsprings of Western culture, didn’t feel too far from home. Yet Bangkok was full of the exotic: elephants roamed the night streets begging for bananas (that their touts conveniently sold), monks in bright orange robes punctuated crowds like spiritual exclamation marks, and street vendors selling foods I had never seen or smelled.

This was my first experience in South Asia, and even though I had done a lot of prepping and research, no books could fully prepare me for living in Thailand. As I first settle into my neighborhood in BKK’s Pinkao District, I noticed flower planters lining the streets that hosted these small, beautiful lotuses, blues and purples, nested in black water. When I stopped to look closer, I realized that beneath the surface swam tiny goldfish. They glittered in the sunlight, disappearing in and out of the murky water.

Seeing and diving beneath the surface became an important analogy for my experience of Thailand, and a way for me to not be overwhelmed by culture shock but rather to find wonder in simple things.

One of the problems when we call anywhere in Asia the “Orient” is that the out-dated term invariably puts an impossible distance between the Western and Eastern worlds and sets up China, Japan, or Iraq as an exotic otherland that we can’t possibly understand. There’s an imbedded complacency with the divide between “Us” and “Them.”  The East and West, however, are only true opposites on a compass-not culturally. Living in Asia as a foreigner requires that we let down the guards that defend our notions of what reality is and how it should be and learn to adapt to the terms of the new culture in which we find ourselves- or, at least, do our best to understand it.

Some of the best moments abroad are when you have forgotten that you’re not home because suddenly everything seems so familiar.  In those moments you are not disoriented, but anchored. Fixating on differences can make for good, exotic stories when you return to the comfort on your homeland, but finding similarities just beneath the surface can make it easier to forget you’re so far from home and become oriented in some place new.