"Something sleeps in us when there`s no change." One of my favorite people in the world just emailed me this quote from Dune, and it`s been rattling around in my head. Change and I this year have been inseparable. Certainly I believe in the necessity of change for any healthy growing human spirit, I am perhaps a bigger proponent of change than most, but I think my share this year has bordered on unhealthy. Aside from gender reassignment surgery, I can`t actually think of anything else I could do right now to further upset my equilibrium, if indeed I have any left.

A small anecdote. I inserted the quotation marks in the above movie line by using Copy and Paste to transfer punctuation from my web log template`s html because I still haven`t found the quotation marks on my Japanese keyboard. I had difficulty even identifying "Copy" and "Paste," because on my Japanese Edit menu, they look roughly like this: %'?$# (for Copy) and $@+!& (for Paste). That`s right, like cartoon swear words. My space bar is about one-third the size I am used to, and the key directly to its left turns all my letters into Kanji. I am a decently fast touch-typist thanks to high school typing class, and my semi-flying fingers tend to hit this key frequently. The first time this happened, it took about 10 minutes of frustrating trial and error to turn my email to my mother back into English. And this is just my computer keyboard. I have a whole apartment full of this stuff. Not to mention the greater world beyond my front door.

Many of the children I teach are still of temper tantrum age. I feel like I know where they`re coming from. When absolutely everything in your world presents a challenge and it seems impossible to catch a single moment`s respite, it`s comforting to know you can still count on the simple flat six-sidedness of blocks, or the forgiving squishiness of a stuffed bear. And failing that, sometimes it feels good just to scream.

In summary: Change is good. Moderation is good too.