The Dictionary According to Shannon

A (A, a) /eɪ/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [ey] 1. the first letter of the English alphabet, a vowel.

aardvark (aard⋅vark)[ahrd-vahrk] –noun a large, nocturnal, burrowing mammal, Orycteropus afer, of central and southern Africa, feeding on ants and termites and having a long, extensile tongue, strong claws, and long ears.

My house has always overflowed with books, and by "my house" I mean all the places I have ever lived, from my parents' home in the Valley to my dorm rooms in San Diego and Dublin, to my apartment here in Japan. The only place that I have lived that didn't share this characteristic was my grandparents' home, where we stayed for six months when I was 10, while our house was getting remodeled. (If you are symbolically-minded, like I tend to be, this fact is the nail in the coffin, or the nail that wasn't hammered into the horseshoe, whichever image strikes you as more in the vein of "Danger, Will Robinson, danger!")

Anyway, aardvarks. When I was a kid, my dad used to read this book to us called "Aardvarks, Disembark!" It was a picture book, with animals listed from A to Z, the premise being that Noah was calling all the animals to get off the Ark after they survived the Great Flood and then had to get down to the hard work of repopulating the Earth. Things tend to stick with my dad; he takes a line from a movie or a book or an inside joke from a million years ago, and inserts them into everyday conversation, until you find yourself repeating these nonsense phrases, too, and it gets to the point where you don't even know what it's in reference to anymore. "Aardvarks, disembark!" was one of them. He faced the problem that I think is universal for parents: it's almost impossible to get your kids into the car at the beginning of whatever journey, no matter what length of time (a quick run up to Target being the equivalent of an eight hour drive up to Lake Tahoe in the mind of children under the age of 10). At the same time, there is the same impossibility, upon arriving at any given destination, to get your kids out of the car in a timely fashion (again, there is the failure to discern the difference between, say, a day at Disneyland and an appointment to get your teeth cleaned). I am sure this infuriated my father, he who would rather park a mile away from the mall's entrance so as not to waste time circling the lot. He took to saying, "Aardvarks, disembark!" after he parked the car, partially because it was clever and funny and we giggled and partially because (I suspect) he was trying to mask his frustration--what is so difficult about unbuckling your seatbelt and getting out of the car??--with wit and humor.

Annabelle (An⋅na⋅bel) /ˈænəˌbɛl/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [an-uh-bel] –noun. a female given name. Also, An⋅na⋅belle.

Annabelle was my Cabbage Patch doll when I was three, four years old. I don't know if Annabelle was the name she was given and I kept it, or if I decided on the name myself, but I know that I was very attached to her as being Annabelle-esque. I would put bandaids on her cheeks and push her around in a doll stroller, which was also big enough to hold my little sister. There is a picture in my parents' livingroom, me in a pink dress, standing in the kitchen with its awful yellow-patterned linoleum, the double doll stroller in front of me, with my sister squirming to get out of the front section and Annabelle lying peacefully in the back. I am smiling and gazing off to my right, and my sister is looking at the camera with a look of consternation on her face, like, Are you really allowing this travesty to occur? I am embarrassed for myself, I am embarrassed for you, I am especially embarrassed that this is being recorded for posterity. This is ridiculous.

Anne of Green Gables. A bestselling book by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery published in 1908. It was written as fiction for readers of all ages, but in recent decades has been considered a children's book.

My mother had a rule, and while I'm sure she intended to have it apply to all of her children, it mainly impacted me, her eldest: I was not allowed to watch a movie adapted from a book if I had not yet read the book. One of the first times this actually impacted me in any real way was when the movie version of Anne of Green Gables was wildly popular among the girls of my tiny Christian home-schooling collective. I remember, with all the hyperbole that naturally comes with childhood reminiscing, the begging, the pleading, the gnashing of teeth over being allowed to watch this movie, please-Mom-everyone-else-has-seen-it. She was a good mother, and was thus unwavering in her decree, and thus I was cruelly forced to read a book that became treasured, loved, read again and again and integrated into my imagination and memories like only the best books can be.

I loved having pen-pals, getting decorated envelopes in the mail--getting anything in the mail--and I still have so many letters from my very best friend, my "bosom buddy," as we used to call ourselves. I became "Anne with an E" because my name contains "ann," and she became "Diana" because her middle name was Diane, and we transformed our sheltered suburban lives into melodramatic tales of woe and high adventure.

We went on to write short stories together, brainstorming and outlining and naming and outsourcing to her junior high "boyfriend" for illustrations. We constructed elaborate imagination games in her house, listening through the vents to the adults talking downstairs and making them apart of some sinister, evil plot that we had to escape. One afternoon, after a joint family brunch, we decided that it was all simply too much to bear, and we ran away, and made it all the way around the block before deciding that we should at least leave a note detailing the reasons for our departure. She is probably the only one in this world who understands why I eventually did run away, clutching to my newfound adulthood to justify my independence, why I separated myself from that world and that life, because she did, too.

anonymity (an⋅o⋅nym⋅i⋅ty) /ˌænəˈnɪmɪti/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [an-uh-nim-i-tee] –noun, plural -ties.

1.	the state or quality of being anonymous.

2.	an anonymous person: some fine poetry attributed to anonymities.

I am an unabashed word and grammar dork; I think one of the reasons I find it so hard to learn another language is a) I am absolutely in love with the English language, b) I hate not knowing the exact word to use in any given situation, and c) learning a language requires that humility, to admit that you have a limited vocabulary, that you might bungle the pronunciation, that you can't immediately talk about politics and philosophy and religion and get into the grit of it all. This is a common thread, this fear of learning something new because I will not automatically be a master of it. It's the reason I hated piano lessons (why play when you know that it will be years before you can play Vince Guaraldi's A Charlie Brown Christmas?) and the reason that I find it almost painful to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper and sketch something. Writing, words, has been the one exception to that fear of failure--I have kept journals, started newspapers, written short stories, attacked 40 page papers with glee.

So it is with some trepidation and a lot of shame that I admit this: I cannot, for the life of me, say the word "anonymity." I have to sit there and think about it, and even then, it comes out stilted and mangled and I blush as a result.

i am sitting out on my balcony, listening to water trickle and kids whine and trains go clickety-clack over tracks that are three bridges away. i am sipping a california cabernet sauvignon, cheese and bread already long gone. if i didn't know i was in a foreign country, i could be fooled into thinking i was in southern california.

that's the weird thing about traveling: when you're not in one of those famous cities, seeing the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben or the Coliseum, it is easy to forget that you've left home at all. it really does all look the same, in the sense that you get used to being where you are and it becomes ordinary. i see the rice paddies and the canals and the mountains, day in and day out, and on my bike ride to City Hall or one of my schools I pass a community garden full of flowers, and then I see a cemetery, overflowing with headstones, each one of them adorned with a vase, and you can tell who has paid their respects to the ancestors recently and who hasn't based on the vitality of the bouquet. the sun doesn't set in the direction i expect it to; every evening at dusk i'm surprised when it goes down behind the mountains instead of the direction of the sea. still, every october i remember that i like this month's sunsets the best, and sunsets in japan do not disappoint.

news.

Following domestic news from outside of the United States is a surreal experience. When I was living in Dublin, I would scan the headlines of the Irish newspapers and get a glimpse of whatever was going on. At the time, I marveled at the extensive coverage devoted to the 2006 midterm elections: for a solid week, the front pages of the Irish Times and the Irish Independent were devoted to in-depth profiles of the Senators and Representatives who were up for election; op-ed pieces discussed the seats necessary for a Democrat takeover and the ramifications of such a win on Iraq and other salient issues. Freed from the circus tactics that seem to plague the U.S. media conglomerates, the Irish media actually delivered information to its readers, and treated them as intelligent, well-informed...adults. When you turned on the news, you did not witness shouting matches from political pundits who were trying to get a word in edgewise against a bullish host; you did not hear the same obviously partisan political phrases being repeated ad nauseam; you did not see a 45-second sound bite story that was more impressive for its graphics and cut-away edits than its actual content. You were not treated as though you were an ADHD, Ritalin-deprived four year old who needed to be entertained by a constant barrage of colors and noise, because those four year olds? They are not the ones that should be setting the bar on the quality of information being provided by the media, and the news should not be just another form of entertainment. Catering to the lowest common denominator is helpful to no one and detrimental to all.

Being here in Japan, I don't have nearly as many options for getting news via Japanese sources, mainly because I don't know the language. There is one English-dubbed half-hour newscast every night at 7PM, and I definitely try to watch it, but I have a penchant for getting my news via print sources. I read the New York Times online and have a roster of blogs that I visit that link me to other news sources, as well. Obviously the presidential campaign has been taking up most of the media's time (even I have gotten sick of the "lipstick on a pig" debacle), but I have also been reading tributes and obituaries of David Foster Wallace, tracking hurricanes, following the demise of Wall Street.

I met an Israeli who has lived in Japan for the past 10 years. He said that he felt like he was fluent after 5 years, and then he put himself to the test: he tried to watch (and understand) the Japanese news. He couldn't do it. He was finally able to understand the news after he had been here eight years or so. That's a long time to go without following the news in the place you're living in.

dusk

The view from my front door at 6PM on a September evening.

sound of sand

what does sand sound like, anyway?

in an hourglass, there is a barely audible swoosh as the sand measures time's swift and silent passage, but the sound is swallowed up by the sight of the stream of particles flowing, from top to bottom, forming a heap that is ready to be flipped again all too soon.

at the beach, any sound the sand happens to make by itself is overshadowed by the crash of waves, and the crunching sound it makes as it gives way to feet and towels and bags and umbrellas and coolers and books and iPods and sunscreen tubes (why do we insist on bringing so much with us to enjoy nature?) is muffled by our yelps as it burns our sensitive soles, or ignored completely in the search for the perfect place to sun ourselves and catch the breeze off the water.

by itself, i don't really know what sand sounds like. i'm torn between thinking that sand doesn't really have a sound, and realizing that i probably never stopped long enough to actually listen to it. could i even hear it if i tried, or have i trained my ears and my brain to only listen to the sensational, to the things that insist on my attention? i wonder what i would hear if i was able to put the ocean on mute and press my ear up against the sand. i wonder what i would hear if i put myself on mute.

in a sense, that is what has happened. i could say that "i have been muted," but i prefer the agency and sense of control that comes from saying, "i have put myself on mute," even if it's not entirely true. in any case, i cannot be heard by anyone outside of myself. whether or not that is of my own doing is largely irrelevant.

i am grasping to things that remind me of my own self, of who i am, and it feels as futile as trying to hear what the sand sounds like. as i cling, i'm waiting for the moment when i let go. even as i write this, my jaw is clenching up, yet another sign that that day is far in the future.