There is nothing here. Thanks for all the good times. I'm still keeping my LJ around to read everyone's entries. A good friend gave me the paid feature a couple of years ago. It's one of the best gifts I've ever had and I'm keeping it. ♥

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."

Nagasawa finished his beer and lit a cigarette.

"Isn't there anything about life that frightens you?" I asked.

"Hey, I'm not a total idiot," said Nagasawa. "Of course life frightens me sometimes. i don't happen to take that as the premise for everything else though. I'm going to give it a hundred percent and go as far as I can. i'll take what I want and leave what i don't want. That's how I intend to live my life, and if things go bad, I'll stop and reconsider at that point. If you think about it, an unfair society is a society that makes it possible for you to exploit your abilities to the limit."

"Sounds like a pretty self-centered way to live," I said.

"Maybe so, but I'm not just looking up at the sky and waiting for the fruit to drop. In my own way, I'm working hard. I'm working ten times harder than you are."

"That's probably true," I said.

"I look around me sometimes and get sick to my stomach. Why the hell don't these bastards do something? I wonder. They don't do a damn thing, and then they bitch."

Amazed at the harshness of his tone, I looked at Nagasawa. "The way I see it, people are working hard. They're working their fingers to the bone. Or am I looking at things wrong?"

"That's not hard work. It's just manual labor," Nagasawa said with finality. "The 'hard work' I'm talking about is more self-directed and purposeful."

"You mean, like studying Spanish when the job season ends and everybody else is taking it easy?"

"That's it. I'm going to have Spanish mastered by next spring. I've got English and German and French down pat, and I'm most of the way there with Italian. You think things like that happen without hard work?"

Nagasawa puffed on his cigarette while I thought about Midori's father. There was one man who had probably never even thought about starting Spanish lessons on TV. He had probaby never though about the difference between hard work and manual labor, either. He was probably too busy to think about such things--busy with work, and busy bringing home a daughter who had run away to Fukushima.

My younger sister just lectured me... "You'll never be happy in this life; always living up to other people's expectations; you're not here to live for other's expectations, they can do that on their own. You're here to live for yourself."

The other day I suddenly discovered that I can do this dance move and I showed it to my sister.

She goes, "Congratulations! You now have discovered your hidden talent... Problem is, everyone else can do that."