I am going to blame the chaos of this week on the moon. With two giant snow storms in a city unused to any, a visit from my brother and four appointments each in new locations of Tokyo, I think I burnt out my stress metre.

Today is Sunday; it’s sunny and I am going to clean house, re-arrange the furniture and answer all the emails that have been waiting.

At 4 in the afternoon yesterday, I was adding a few finishing touches to a file I was preparing for a presentation of my work that I was going to give to a group of artists, curators and art historians later that evening. I was adding one last image when suddenly, I could no longer find the file. Vanished! It had disappeared. I knew that it was still on the computer somewhere, but I couldn’t remember how to display all the files in order of size or date of creation. Stunned, my body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. I had 45 minutes to recopy video files into a new folder and find my way to the event in the north of Tokyo.  Find the essential and  keep moving.  I knew I had to give up the idea of the beautiful smooth presentation that I had prepared.

That was the third blow of the day. The first had come earlier that morning. I was preparing a special post that would carry an image of the Japanese Yen. What other money in the world would leave a perfectly round empty space in the middle of their bills? Part of my reason for coming to Japan was to continue my research on the idea on nothingness and paper as metaphor for empty space. This was poetic evidence!

When I dragged  the images of the bills into Photoshop, I was confronted with a pop-up window stating -this application does not support the editing of banknotes. There was a large blue button with the word Information on the bottom of the page and I pushed.  A list of countries with their laws was indicated, but I could not find anything stating that Japan forbid posting images on the internet. There was an email address to write for information.  I decided to write and on an impulse I included the images asking if I could use them. Later, when I told Paul in a skype conversation, he punched a hole of dread straight into me. Was I crazy?  He immediately saw the police coming to my door, not for posting the photos, I hadn’t done that yet, but for even taking the photos and I had sent them the evidence! Naive, yes, I guess that was a pretty naive and dumb thing to do. The rest of that story is yet to come. I wonder how long it will take to receive a response and how zealous they will be?

So for now you will just have to wonder what that hole in the middle of their bills is all about. But, I definitely had a hole in the middle of my calm and the day was just beginning. I then had to call The Grand Prince Hotel of New Takanawa and go there to retrieve a computer. We had just had another snowstorm, the buses were not running well and the subway was having delays.

A week ago, a snow storm created a backlog in flights out of Narita airport including my brother’s. A tiny glimmer of a thought passed through my brain earlier in the day, that maybe flights are cancelled, but then two days had already passed since the storm and off they went, the hour-long bus ride to the airport. Later, I decided to check the internet to see if their flight had left and to my surprise I could only find one scheduled for the next day. I emailed them and some time later I got a message saying -yes they were delayed until the next day and were in a hotel somewhere. Too bad, we could have had a whole other day together. Early afternoon the next day, Norman called just as he was boarding their plane to tell me that he couldn’t find his computer and that it must be in his hotel room. He had just enough time to give me the address and phone # of the hotel.

It took me a long time on the phone, with the receptionist, but they were so patient and kept me on line while someone went and searched his room. Indeed the computer was there. My brother would have to send a photocopy of his passport and a letter allowing them to release the computer to me. That took all week to happen, Norm was now somewhere on a beach in New Zealand.

Saturday morning, I found the hotel and  after much confusion and many phone calls, waivers signed and photocopies taken of my passport, the computer was in my hands.

The end of this story comes tomorrow…..