Thoughts
I have been working my way through the Collected Stories, written by Saul Bellow. The Bitter Baron lent it to The Wife and I and I know I have been thoroughly enjoying it. I like the one line review they included on the back cover of the book, "A literary delight, best savored one per sitting (Boston Herald)." I tend to agree. The stories aren't long, but the weight of the description of the environment, both characters and setting, calls for deliberation. I find that he is able to paint the past and present within his word choice, and so while looking at the lines of age in a character, you find the story behind those lines. I'm not done with the book yet, but I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Well, I went to Gambro last night, but only had one student, Makiko. I find Makiko is a very interesting person, in fact, I find most of my students at Gambro to be very interesting students. We discussed some interesting things after a lesson on writing reports. I think most interesting was our discussion on Gender Roles. I know Aku Ender is interested in gender roles, but also our friend in Shigaraki, R, who is doing prework on a PhD in cultural studies while he is here. I mentioned the article that I received from Mr. Ender and the change in psychology to viewing men as emotionally immature rather than females, which was the belief for quite some time. We discussed, to a brief extent, the nature of traditional Japanese gender roles, which are still quite strong. For The Wife and I, there are some very bizarre occurrences dealing with the evolution of gender roles that we have seen here.

The first that comes to mind is the lack of heterogeneous friendships. By this I mean, that it is incredibly rare to find boys with friends that are girls, and girls that have friends that are boys, outside of a dating relationship. Second thing that comes to mind, homogeneous touching. The Wife and The Bitter Baron have reported in depth homogeneous touching. Some examples would be, two boys, one sitting on the others lap, receiving a hard massage; two different boys, hugging. I'm sure other examples can be made by those reading this. Third thing that comes to mind is that, in lieu of very strong gender roles, one, perhaps, can assume that children know that what they do does not affect their role? For example, just because a male wears female clothing, it does not make them any less a male. I think that this can be seen in JVR (or Japanese Visual Rock), where there is a definite appeal for males to look like females. Gackt is a fairly recognizable example of this, as he uses his ambiguous sexuality in advertisements. Which brings me to the subject of beauty.

In present America, at least commercially, there is a definite focus on the "sexually attractive" woman or "sexually attractive" man. I would like to think, however, that these ideals of what is attractive, are in fact perversions, or rather, the idea of sexuality, attached to beauty. Now, I'm just sort of talking right now, and I'm open to discussion, in other words, these are not thoughts that I have made my mind up about, so please feel free to comment. I think that there are a lot more objects of beauty than the "sexually attractive" genders as seen on commercials. I think you can have a very beautiful man, beautiful girl, or beautiful boy, and of course, the beautiful woman. We often say it in conversation, "Oh, you child is so beautiful." Several of The Wife's male students are in fact beautiful. They aren't carved mountains of manly muscle, but they have a feminine beauty, or what is considered feminine beauty. I personally don't believe that it is wrong to find beautiful people beautiful. This is about where my thoughts on this subject are currently, so I'm going to stop here.

You can represent a system larger than the universe itself with 500 quantum bits. Just thought I'd let you know that. Out. Also, Happy Birthday to my very beautiful Wife! I don't have lessons tonight *wink*