Measure by measure

A feel for numbers

I come home from New York in a fog. There are so many tourists on the train from Narita, they’re loud and don’t understand the rules, their suitcases are packed too densely, the handles bobbing absurdly, and people can’t pass. I’m annoyed, so cranky, the train is so clean and fast and smooth and I’d trade it to be back in the piss and stink and ancient black streaks of the MTA.

I need sleep.

I make a list of everyone I care about in Tokyo. I do it to feel sorry for myself but it ends up kind of long. I make more weird lists, draw blanks. I flip switches on the wall to see which 1 is counterclockwise 1 (cooling) and which 1 is clockwise 1 (not cooling). There are two 1’s and it turns out they both do the same thing.

When will I sleep?

I don’t know how to feel. It feels hot in the loft of the deluxe nun quarters but the temperature is 25. What is 25? I know what 40 or 41 means but only as it applies to bath water. I go to the onsen and the sign over the water says 37. Ew, pass. Another sign says 40. Perfect. Foot, calf, thigh, hip.

J says he has a sense of certain measurement systems only in specific contexts. Measurements are sort of like language, he says. We straddle systems and become measurement bilingual, I say. His body temperature, he says, is tuned to Celsius, because he had to report his temperature every morning at work in Fukuoka during covid. He can scan the string of numbers 180/70/35 and know if someone is his type or not. On some of the old browser cruising sites in Japan, people don’t upload pictures, just list their height/weight/age in metric. For my part I know keenly the difference between a man who’s 5’7” and who’s 5’9”. Reddit has a lot to say about Japanese condom measurements, here intuition for centimeters and millimeters breaks down completely. I don’t understand the weight of a man in pounds or kilograms, but I’m acutely aware of my own in both, down to the first decimal.

Miles and kilometers have both stopped having meaning, distance means more when it’s given in time.

But J and I agree, we still feel air in Fahrenheit.

The promise of sleep.

It’s too hot to sleep in the loft, and after careful nightly scrutiny I record the change as the tip from 23 to 24. But that doesn’t account for humidity, does it, tired brain says as it flips and flops. So what is 25?

I write in number of words, I read in minutes. I do both as I try to sleep, they say you shouldn’t do these things in bed but I do, I read Graham Greene and Marcus Aurelius and Asako Yuzuki in the loft. The one book that doesn’t make it up the awkwardly designed steps is the silver edition of Proust, even though the opening passage is “literature’s most famous failed bedtime” as Marie Darrieussecq calls it. When I can’t sleep I try to read her book in bed, Sleepless, about insomnia’s “causes, implications and consequences,” it seems like a good idea, it obviously isn’t.

I decide it’s the futon that’s the problem, centimeters of a futon, 5 is too thin, 7 borderline, 8 is starting to get plush, 10 is almost gross. I buy a new one, it’s 20 centimeters wider than my current one which is only relevant in that it allows for more flopping, what I really want to know is the height, and the chart on the website manages to be both very detailed and completely ambiguous. I mistakenly ask my sister to trim to one centimeter above my eyebrows, she lobs off at least an inch of bangs. It’s OK, they look cute. Is cute a measurement sort of like language? It’s certainly not a system or scale that I can count on.

The sun’s gone down. It’s a matter of time.

“Dread of night. Dread of not-night.”