on the sandwich and a steinway: Week 8

Hi Okasan and fam fam and anyone else who reads this,

LESS THAN A WEEK! We got travel plans the other day and we're leaving around 1 on Monday. I'll try to call Otosan's cell from SLC (our plane departs around 4:30pm so I'm not sure what time that will be in Alaska ... ). I think we get one more P-Day on Saturday so you might get another email from me before I leave. Thank you for the letters and packages. I got the cookies yesterday and the district ate them in a heartbeat. I also got a package from Meme and Jeff this week. It had 9 bars of dark chocolate (90% Lindt -- they know me too well). I opened the package and the elder sitting next to me says, "Wow. Your family must really love you." Haha. Yes, I definitely feel the love. Good thing most people don't like that dark of chocolate because it just means more for me to eat.

I loved Okasan's last letter. Zoachie has a Moleskine? And he writes detective stories? I want to read it when it's done. Also, you will be a very good seminary teacher. Just as I'm sure you were a super duper Stake RS President. And it sounds like you had fun in Nihon. Thanks for sending all the pictures. I'm not trying to get my hopes up, but it looks like Sado got moved into the Tokyo Mission. I won't know for sure until I get there but our boundaries now include Niigata so it's entirely possible. So maybe I'll end up running into Mamako and Papako at some point. I'm just ready to go, but I'm trying to stay focused in spite of it. I'm sure it will quickly set in how much Japanese I have to learn once I get there.

Exciting things of the week: 6 new missionaries came from Japan on Tuesday--5 elders, 1 sister. The Japanese sister, Nagamine Shimai, joined Cheney Shimai and I so we are officially a trio. Nagamine Shimai is from Okinawa and is headed to the Sapporo Mission. I feel like this week alone has improved my Japanese so much, especially with everyday vocabulary (the MTC doesn't teach me how to say Hepatitis A, haha). She's such a gem and has tolerated my torrent of questions all week. We introduced her to weighlifting and the joys of American cafeterias. I can't say that I was proud to show her either one of those things (especially Chicken Cordon Bleu), but we have a good time. One of the elders is fluent in Japanese (which he has studied for 4 years), and English (which he learned in 8 months by watching House on TV), and Portugese as his native language. So that made us all feel kind of lame. Or maybe just motivated to work harder. The nihonjin elders are a hoot. They teach us Japanese puns and we teach them really pointless things. Like Pig Latin. The one thing that they always say is that American food is way to heavy and way too sweet. #amentothat I laughed when I saw one of the elders dumping salt on his brownie to cancel out the sugariness of it. They're also into mixing every single beverage from the drink dispenser. It usually turns out to be a scary shade of brown.

I also got to play in devotional on Sunday night. I was a little worried because of my gimpy hand, but I just decided to bite the bullet and play anyway. It sort of really made me miss practicing / performing. Both Sister Maynes and I were a little concerned when we realized that 3,500 missionaries would be sitting there listening, but we loved it in that "I'm a snobby music major" sort of way, haha. The MTC president's wife was a violin and piano major at BYU so we had a good little chat. On a side note, my hand is sort of healing okay. I stopped wearing the splint but then it would get it crushed when shaking people's hands, so I'm just going to be obedient and wear it for a little while longer. Better safe than sorry.

Katherine sent me a letter this week and included a talk from her Book of Mormon class in it (probably the smallest, fattest envelope I have ever received. It looked like she mailed me a small rodent or something). It references Elder Maxwell's talk, "Notwithstanding My Weakness." Sometimes we get all caught up in this "striving for perfection" that it becomes far too overwhelming, and we're overly self-critical. The best line from the talk:

"Now may I speak, not to the slackers in the Kingdom, but to those who carry their own load and more; not to those lulled into false security, but to those buffeted by false insecurity, who, though laboring devotedly in the Kingdom, have recurring feelings of falling forever short ... There is no way the Church can honestly describe where we must yet go and what we must yet do without creating a sense of immense distance ... This is a gospel of grand expectations, but God’s grace is sufficient for each of us. Discouragement is not the absence of adequacy but the absence of courage, and our personal progress should be yet another way we witness to the wonder of it all!"

We can always do better, but we also are often doing better than we think. So I just try to remember that every time I get bugged that I can't remember how to say "haircut" or "porcupine" in Japanese. There's just so much to be grateful for. Like my free 5-minute haircut that I got today. (I decided it was better to be risky and go to an unknown MTC hairdresser than be sporting a mullet in Tokyo). Life is good. Love you all, and I'll talk to you soon.

Love, Magi-chan