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Tuesday, January 26th, 2010
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4:43 pm
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I wish I'd had a harder time in school.
I had several good teachers but only one who ever threw my ability back in my face. When I got to sixth grade, he gave me a rude awakening to show me that just because I could surpass the rest of my class without breaking a sweat in elementary school didn't mean that would fly forever. I hated it at the time but in retrospect I'm glad it happened. It's too bad that the rest of my school experience seemed hell-bent on proving him wrong.
In high school, I did have one or two teachers who at least held me a little more accountable. Still, outside of classes like calculus and physics - which most people would agree are objectively Difficult - I never really had to try very hard. College was a different story, as college is apt to be, on the virtue of increased personal choice and accountability. Even so, in its earlier years, I still did an awful lot of procrastination and settling.
But hey, that's over, I graduated cum laude from a university that you've heard of and I have an interesting job (occupational hazards aside). So what, right?
I feel like a part of me got a little malformed somewhere along the line. It's the part of me that still procrastinates, even though deadlines take on a much less tangible but much more serious significance in adult life. It's the part of me that prefers consumption over creativity - or worse yet, confuses the two (more effects pedals are not going to give your guitar playing the kick in the ribs it needs!). It's the part of me that still insists that things will work out okay because I am me - made worse by the fact that so far, that's yet to really be proven wrong. I was never really forced to put much time or effort into anything in those formative experiences so even now it seems alien and uncomfortable to me when I try to apply it to the things I really want to do.
Of course I can't blame school entirely for my inability to kick my own ass and I have plenty of friends who went through the exact same system. And I'm still an arrogant sonofabitch who just wrote several paragraphs complaining about how smart he is ("Woe is me, it's so hard shopping for pants when you have a gigantic penis!"). But ultimately I kind of feel like I'd be a bit smarter today if I'd been a bit dumber in the past.
current music: Hrvatski - Insect Digestion Melancholy
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| Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
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5:45 pm
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| Friday, October 2nd, 2009
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6:47 pm
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Okay, if I don't go to at least one day of BoroFesta and stop by 1H1D!!! while I'm in the area, I don't deserve to be in this country.
current music: OVe-NaXx "Ovekeyashiki" - Space is the Dancehall
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| Monday, May 11th, 2009
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9:55 pm - Seriously, Cromartie High School is a much more accurate depiction of Japan than you think.
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I became a member of a nearby gym today and immediately saw a guy do his entire workout in a bright orange T-shirt, matching luchador tiger mask, and a pair of jorts cut off in a way I can only describe as "artful."
I picked the right gym.
current music: Mongol 800 "Message" - あなたに
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| Tuesday, April 21st, 2009
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8:23 pm - A long entry about some nerdy crap
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Japan has been pretty nice lately, especially in terms of weather. It's been rainy today, but before that, we had the longest uninterrupted streak of really, really nice days I've seen since getting here. The cherry blossoms have come and mostly gone. This past weekend, a JET friend of mine had a birthday and decided to celebrate by dragging many of us to Kyoto and forcing us to eat a massive, $100 ice cream sundae. (We did not succeed. It was a sundae of remarkable size.) After that we enjoyed the weather and Japan's lack of open container laws by the Kamo river. A young Japanese man with a guitar played Beatles songs for us after being lured over by a "Same glasses! Same glasses!" moment with my Wayfarers.
Classes have started up and I'm getting to know the new English faculty better, so life is getting sane again. They've changed my schedule with Elementary schools to accommodate the new national curriculum for teaching English, but other than that things are mostly the same.
Because I'm a big nerd with no sense of priority or perspective, I've recently taken up Gundam Card Builder - ostensibly a CCG, though in actual practice more of an arcade-based strategy game where your options increase as you accumulate more cards depicting characters and objects from the old Mobile Suit Gundam timeline. There aren't booster packs like Magic: The Gathering and other card games (instead you get a new card at random after each game), and though they are collectible, the cards themselves are largely just a way to incorporate persistence into an arcade game.
But even though it's not a CCG in the classical sense, the format does bring back memories, most of them fairly fond. I played MTG pretty seriously from third through seventh grades. Of course, that meant my first starter deck was from Ice Age and I stopped not too long after the Rath Cycle finished up. (If that sentence meant anything to you at all, congratulations, you're a big nerd too.) When I look at MTG cards nowadays, I can barely comprehend them (and not just because they're in Japanese - the game appears to be pretty popular here to this day) and I'd probably get thrashed by an obese 13-year-old if I tried to play. Thomas and I do still joke about digging up our old decks and playing each other whenever we're both home at the same time, though so far it hasn't happened.
I don't want to think about how much money I sank into MTG back then, but it was almost every bit of disposable income I could muster. I bought a lot of booster packs, starter sets, and separates, not to mention magazines, tie-in comic books, page-a-day calendars, etc. When I fell in with a larger group of players in middle school, I often bought and sold with my classmates, too. I remember secretly swiping at least ten dollars' worth from my folks' pocket change basket over the span of a couple weeks to buy a particular card from an older kid. (Sorry, Mom and Dad. I'll pay you back.) He cussed and the others laughed when I handed him the heavy baggie, but a deal was a deal.
But for all that, I couldn't have spent nearly as much money as time on it. I'd hang out at the comic shop that provided my fix whenever I could get a ride there. I read Scrye and Inquest, and though I never actually played in a regulation tournament, I kept up on which cards were and weren't banned in each class. I mailed cards to artists to get them autographed. Before my family bought a PC, I'd go to the library at least every other day to use the internet. My library internet use statistics would break down something like this:
The very first internet community I was actively involved with was an MTG chatroom. Granted, I was twelve or thirteen at the time, so I don't know if they particularly liked me.
Magic cards were banned in fifth grade, but when I got to middle school my friends and I must have played whenever we had more than five minutes to spare. We'd have sleepovers and end up doing nothing but playing MTG. We'd play by flashlight in tents on Boy Scout trips (the older scouts preferred the Star Wars CCG). I wish I could say that we all stopped because we realized it was a money sink or developed more mature interests or something, but in truth it was mostly a combination of the older kids who played graduating and Pokemon coming out for Game Boy.
current music: AFX "Hangable Auto Bulb" - Arched Maid via RDJ
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| Saturday, March 7th, 2009
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9:02 am - Proto Man was such a jerk in this show.
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| Monday, January 26th, 2009
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8:41 pm
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Travel tip: If you go to Japan, don't get sick. I've been fighting a variety of throat-y symptoms for a few days now and today I left work early and went to a doctor who spent about thirty seconds listening to my chest and three seconds looking in my mouth and told me I had a cold, thanks, here are some pills, come again. He did not ask me any questions, nor did he answer any of the ones I asked him, nor mention the earache I told him about right off the bat. I'm calling in to work tomorrow and considering seeing a different doctor, though I gather from Japanese/JET friends that my experience was more or less par for the course. At least the first thing he said was "It's not influenza," so that's a plus.
Other than that, and the returning cold weather, things continue to go well here. I had a parent observation day with one of my hardest elementary school classes, but somehow managed to get them up and participating for once, so it wasn't nearly the traumatic experience I expected ("Get that foreigner out of here, we hate him and we hate his sideburns!"). Middle school goes; last week, the entire second year stayed home for most of the week because a significant percent of them had the flu. I think their teachers were happier for the break than they were. My students got a real kick out of seeing me in a typical Japanese "I'm sick" surgical mask today, especially one of my favorite third years who's been crutch-bound for the past week - we briefly commiserated over our various ailments in the hallway. One of the third year girls is preparing for an English speech contest, and I've been repeatedly surprised by the ability she's been hiding behind her silent wall of Japanese-teenage-girlness.
Yuka is also sick - being an elementary school teacher, it'd be more surprising if she wasn't - and when she heard I was sick too, she came over one afternoon with a whole bunch of soup and some spray throat medicine with a picture of an ill giraffe on it. She also said she'd lend her car to an upcoming shopping trip in which I intend to pick up a bunch of new house things - curtains, sofa covers, etc. - to finally make this place look a bit more like my home. Especially since I just signed the form that keeps me here for another year.
Went to Osaka over the weekend, where I lucked upon a big discount on a pair of headphones I'd been eyeing for a while. I ended up spending about as much as I would have anyway, but I also got a decent portable headphone amp, too.
And then today, as if to prove to the universe that I am an utter simpleton with no real problems in life, I spent money on an extra-rare old PlayStation game in which the player assumes the role of a schoolgirl whose only ability is to swing on a fishing line in the manner of a grappling hook.
current music: Mass of the Fermenting Dregs "World is Yours" - World is Yours
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| Tuesday, January 13th, 2009
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4:59 pm
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It occurs to me that I haven't posted here since returning to Japan!
On the 31st, I ended up at the Vortex with a bunch of Atlanta friends, where I ate a hamburger covered in bacon, fried bananas and peanut butter. From there, we were to go to our friend Billy's New Year's party, but I started feeling too drained and awful to head out to Acworth and back before three AM, so I just headed back home and fell asleep around eleven. On the plus side, though, the hamburger was surprisingly fantastic.
On the morning of the second, I bid my family goodbye and got on an airplane. Moments after said airplane got off the ground, an engine exploded and filled the cabin with smoke, so it was a pretty short trip. That flight had been a little late, and then the replacement plane's crew was rather late, so what was supposed to be a 9:45 flight left Atlanta at about 2:45.
This would have been fine, except that as a result I missed the last Shinkansen that went to my stop. Fortunately I worked out an alternative route just in time to buy another ticket and make that last train, which got to Kyoto just in time for me to catch yet another last train to somewhere local. Yuka (the lady it turns out I met after all) was not only willing, but actually volunteered to give a very tired me a ride from that station back to my apartment.
Since then, things have been pretty low-key. Work started back for the semester last week, but today is the first day I've had classes; last week was largely administrative/ceremonial, and yesterday was a holiday (Coming-of-Age Day or Adult's Day or whatever the preferred translation is these days). The long weekend kept me busy, though. On Saturday, Yuka and I went to see the new "The Day the Earth Stood Still," which was entirely salvaged by a self-imposed challenge to read and comprehend the Japanese subtitles before each spoken line was finished.
On Monday, I was invited to participate in a tea ceremony by who I assume are the pillars of the local tea ceremony community. I felt tragically underdressed and eventually gave up sitting in seiza (after I lost all feeling in my toes and the old ladies around me, either picking up signals I didn't know I was sending or guessing very astutely, assured me it was okay if I relaxed a bit) but all told it was a lovely throwback to last fall's halcyon days of "hey, let's bring the gaijin along and give him a bunch of food, why not?"
It's snowing a lot these days. I'm typing this up during a slow period at work to post later (cleaning time is over but I'm honor-bound to my desk for another hour or so) and looking out at a soccer field that's solid white, save for a few footpaths where certain students have stomped out their affections in kana legible from third floor windows. Over the weekend, any snow that fell overnight melted away fairly steadily, but today it seems pretty persistent.
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| Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
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7:30 am
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This winter break has repeatedly kicked my sense of time in the head. International flight shenanigans aside, since arriving I've been getting up early to travel to another time zone, alternating between crashing at 3 AM and crashing at 10:30 PM, and wrestling with the forgotten child part of my reptile brain that still remembers that Tomorrow Is Christmas, How Can You Sleep! It's 7:30 and I've been awake (though fairly well-rested) for a couple hours already. Did finally finish Gravity's Rainbow.
It's been a good trip home, though a bit confined, schedule-wise. There's a lot I'd like to do, but still more that I still have to do, before heading back to the future on Friday. Christmas was nice; among other things, I received a device that makes my guitar repeat itself and a lovely journal that my sister made.
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| Thursday, December 25th, 2008
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2:03 pm - Merry Christmas.
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| Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
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10:17 pm
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My plane left Japan at 5 PM on Tuesday and landed in Atlanta at 3 PM on Tuesday. It has been, quite literally, a very long day.
The days leading up to today were also of note, but considering how tired I am, I just wanted to get it out there that I am in Atlanta until the 2nd. Unfortunately a lot of my time here is already spoken for, but hey.
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| Sunday, December 14th, 2008
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12:49 pm - If I'm being honest with myself, I'm probably more like Hank, though.
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It's been a good weekend. Work on Friday was a little rough. I had two sixth year classes at elementary school, and it's like pulling teeth getting them to participate at all, even with the "if you go, you'll get to pick who goes next!" stipulation. In one class, the teacher actually apologized to me during class while haranguing her students about how they'd better shape up because when they go to middle school next year, they're going to be seeing John-sensei a lot more often in classes that are a lot more important. At least I also had a third-year class, and kids at that age love having a foreigner around to ask silly questions and play onigokko.
On Friday evening, though, I had a date. Like a bona fide Dean Venture brush-your-teeth-twice-before-leaving-the-house date. It was pretty old school except for the karaoke part. So that was fun, even if it proved moderately difficult to process Italian words written with Japanese syllables on the menu.
Earlier in the week I'd received a mysterious phone call at work from someone asking me to come to his house on Saturday for reasons that were not entirely clear. I was a little wary, but I went anyway, and I saw that it was just an older couple who wanted to meet me and practice English. They had evidently signed up for an ALT-sponsored event that had been cancelled, but asked around, found out that the nearest ALT (yours truly) had also volunteered for that event and decided to get in touch with me. It was a very pleasant afternoon, they gave me lunch and showed me around their old family house.
I'll be in the States from the 24th until the 2nd, and available in Atlanta for most of the time after the 28th. Hard to imagine that I'll be there so soon, but it might be harder to imagine that I've already lived here for nearly five months.
EDIT:
hahahaha
current music: MIDISAKA "Cave Attack!" - 大往生
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| Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
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5:20 pm
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Evidently people are interested in my boring life and have asked me to actually post in my LiveJournal, so without further ado, here is what I am doing...
...at work:
The last days of the second semester are fast upon us, and as there isn't much I can do to help with final exams beyond saying target sentences into a tape recorder, I am unused and bored. Days in the office are largely long stretches of free time, provided I at least look like I'm working. I've been trying to prepare for Christmas-related lessons requested by the elementary schools I visit.
Work in general is going well, and I'm getting to know the students much better lately. There's only one at my main school who really actively dislikes me, though honestly I don't think she likes anybody. I'll be sorry to see my third years go at the end of next semester, but on the plus side my current first years seem to generally like me the most, so it's good to know those are the kids I've got for the longest of possible hauls. I look forward to my kindergarten and elementary school visits, especially for the kids who're still too young to know how to be shy.
...recreationally:
On weekends I usually take a train to a bigger city or two, sometimes Osaka or Kyoto, sometimes nearby Hikone or Omihachiman. I may need to scale back, as I tend to take a "vacation" mentality and spend a lot on these trips, though during the week I'm fairly tethered to home so I spend little or no money at all outside of bills and groceries. I have discovered, to my certain ruin, that there's a really good used game store about eight minutes from my house by bike.
I've been making an effort to work on music more and more regularly. I'm still moderately awful at the guitar, but I am noticeably improving, and hope to upgrade to a Jaguar I've been eyeing after further progress. Beyond that I've mostly been working on Famicom/NES music programming with MML; I've ordered the means to play what I've made back on actual hardware, too, and will hopefully have something to show for it in the coming months.
I am, perhaps regrettably, not writing. I had hoped to after I arrived, but it just hasn't been happening. These days I am fairly repulsed by the adverbed and hyphenated mess I've made of my own style and aim to do a lot of paring. I've read good writing and bad writing, and I've read my good writing, and it is not what I have been doing lately.
...socially:
To be honest, I still don't really know many people outside of work and JET. I get along well enough with my coworkers, but we're all too busy for much socialization these days, especially when it takes one of us twice as long to say anything. A couple weekends back, I went on the annual employee trip to Gifu, which was a nice opportunity to be with coworkers in a casual setting. I have been really thankful for the Shiga ALT crowd, who're a fun bunch, and occasional city trips with Ko*.
Things are going with the lady I may have met. Nothing too terribly interesting to report on that end. We're really just helping each other linguistically for the time being, but we do have mutual friends and see each other fairly frequently, and if nothing else it's nice to have someone local to talk to outside of the office.
...otherwise:
I'm trying to make a more active effort to sharpen my Japanese. JET provides a correspondence course that I'm taking, though it doesn't line up very neatly with what I already know/remember.
I will be coming home for Christmas this winter, albeit briefly. Much of my trip will be spent at the annual family Tennessee gathering that we skipped out on last year, but I will be in Atlanta for a little while at the end of December and start of January. I haven't made any conclusive decisions regarding recontracting just yet, but next year I'll probably stay here for the season.
* Last time we went to Osaka, we ended up in a mother cafe on the top floor of Mandarake - kind of like a maid cafe, only the waitresses are supposed to be matronly rather than servile. The most motherly thing ours did was make us get up and change tables so we could watch the nearby Street Fighter II** tournament, though.
** Speaking of Street Fighter II***, SF2 Turbo HD Remix came out and I bought an $80 joystick to play a $12 game. As always, if anyone else is playing it on XBL, lemme know.
*** Yoga flame. Yoga flame. Yoga fire.
current music: η "Hysterical Object" - 明日ハレの日、ケの昨日 GBmix
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| Sunday, November 30th, 2008
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8:42 am
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I think I've eaten more in the past two days than I had in the entire week or so before. Thursday night saw Thanksgiving dinner with JETs, and then last night was all-you-can-eat yakiniku (since the 29th of each month is "niku day," because one way the Japanese can pronounce 2 and 9 is "ni ku," which sounds like their word for meat). Apparently I am some sort of yakiniku-processing machine, because I kept going well after most of my comrades succumbed to The Itis. Needless to say, eating is not very high on my list of priorities for today.
Priorities for today:
1. Play Super Nintendo
BSK's new album is out and though I still like The Final Computer better, it's really good.
current music: BSK "Bit Shoujo Kisser" - Lucy
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| Thursday, November 6th, 2008
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4:27 pm - Up front, there oughta be an etc. etc.
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First off: Good job, guys!
But look, I hate to poop the party, but don't forget that president-elect Barack "Neon" "Prime-Time" Obama is just a man. There's -
Oh, thanks, Drac. But as I was saying, there's nothing wrong with that! I'm just a man, and so is everyone I know. Hell, every president we've had has been just a man.
And about that. A president is not only just a man, but he's one of the least-free, most-pidgeonholed men there are. Popular opinion of the Bush presidency honestly amounts to one man and eight years catching the blame for what several men have done over decades. Bush did not help, of course, but all the bad nonsense we've dealt with during his presidency? He alone can't be blamed for it (though he can be blamed for dealing with it very badly). Just as one man couldn't have messed things up as terribly as Bush gets the rap for, one man cannot fix them again.
I'm definitely not saying that I think Obama is going reveal that he's a Secret Muslim and punch every old person he sees the instant he takes office. I'm very glad to see him shatter the race barrier over the executive branch and I honestly expect he will be a positive ChangeTM for the country. But expecting him to be a shining, messianic perfect thing is dangerous.
Remember that Obama is not president yet - even if you're planning on letting your guard down once he takes the reins, at least keep it up for a few more months! Also remember that our problems aren't going to vanish just because Obama is replacing Bush, any more than they suddenly appeared the instant Bush replaced Clinton.
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| Monday, November 3rd, 2008
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1:47 pm
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It's been a busy last week or so. It's midterm time, so I've been writing and recording listening comprehension tests between preparing for elementary school and kindergarten visits.
Today is Culture Day - a national holiday - and I'm using my day off to catch up on all the stuff I didn't do over the actual weekend. Saturday night was the Shiga JET Halloween party, which featured married friends as Triana Orpheus and Dean Venture, surprisingly only one each of Sarah Palin and "Dark Knight" Joker, and a truly frightening and anatomically-accurate tanuki. Unfortunately I did not have a costume, since I didn't have any time or costume-worthy material. Still, a good evening. May have met a lady*.
On Sunday I got up early and headed into Kyoto, where I met up with Ko and someone he knew for Touhou Koroumu, a large and crowded doujin event focused entirely on the Touhou Project series of shoot-em-ups and definitely in the running for top ten nerdiest things I've ever done. After that, the three of us spent a nice afternoon in Kyoto, mostly walking around and eating. We stopped in a good kaiten-zushi place for lunch where I had basashi (raw horse) for the first time, and a chance at fugu. I passed this up, though; not out of fear, but because if I'm going to eat a potentially-fatal fish, I'd kind of like to pay more than three bucks for it.
Anyway, now it's back to working on midterms and trying to get my apartment passably clean again. Also: apropos of nothing, but anyone with XBL (or whatever the PS3's equivalent is I guess) should check out the Mirror's Edge demo.
* Not as in "may have met her" or "may have been a lady." You know what I mean.
current music: Number Girl "Omoide in my Head 1" - Cramp Discharger
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| Friday, October 17th, 2008
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6:24 pm - I'm officially a Cornball McGay but hey, if you don't like it, you can go die.
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Today I had my first elementary school third-year class, which I was a little apprehensive about. Second-years are seven, which is when every kid is awesome, and fourth-years are nine, which is when kids learn to be difficult in ways that aren't endearing.
Thankfully most of the kids fell on the awesome end of the spectrum and one slipped me a note during lunchtime and asked me to read it later. I did and it says, "To John-sensei: Thanks for today! Please teach us English again. My name is Obvious Pseudonym* - please remember!"
There are a lot of times when I wonder what the hell I think I'm doing here anyway, but if I had to make the choice today I would re-up in a heartbeat. Thank you, Obvious Pseudonym. I won't forget.
*Not actually what she wrote. Obviously.
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| Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
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6:02 pm
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It's been busy here in Japan - Our school's culture festival was a week or so ago and last Friday I started my visits to kindergarten and elementary school classes. The culture festival was fun, and somehow I was drafted into the PTA Chorus group so I went in front of all my students with most of the other teachers and sang in Japanese. I'll admit we were off the stage before I was convinced that it wasn't all a setup for some sort of Japanese Candid Camera, and that the teachers weren't all going to fall silent and leave me singing alone.
Kindergarten was easy enough - if small Japanese children were in charge of the radio, "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" would be at the top of the charts - until it was time for me to read them a story. In Japanese. Thankfully translations of Eric Carle are well within my comprehension ability, so the hardest part was reading Japanese characters upside-down while holding the book. I got really good at doing that with English at my last job, but they don't put much emphasis on upside-down reading comprehension in NYU's East Asian Studies department. It's a serious problem.
Elementary school was also enjoyable - on Friday I worked with second-graders and fourth-graders. The second-graders were great; English class at that point is mostly just an extra recess that they have to spend at their desks, and their Japanese is developed but still simple enough that I can communicate with them almost fluently. Fourth grade is a bit more of a challenge thanks to the sheer size of the class and there I encountered the first student to introduce himself to me as "Sasuke Uchiha." "Really?" "Yes." "Really." "No."
In Nerd News, I've finally caved and bought an XBox 360. I think this might actually be the least-behind I've ever been on buying a new generation of game console (except for the Virtual Boy - I was an early adopter there!), but I'm still on games everyone's already played to death. Namely Bioshock and Orange Box (which I had for PC, but my laptop's video card didn't play nice with much of it and TF2 made it kill itself). I think I've spent less time on either of those than I have on Mega Man 9, though. Anyway, if any of y'all are on XBL, let me know. My name there is, predictably, Johnny Landmine.
( Now, photographic evidence of what ear-mounted wireless headsets do to you. )
Now I'm formatting and burning a DVD of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" music video because one of my teachers wants it for a Halloween lesson.
current music: I can thrill you more than any ghost who'd ever dare try.
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| Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
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9:25 pm - Maybe this "intermittently posting old pictures of myself that I enjoy" thing could be a Thing
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Man, good times:
The bike's been reported with the police and all that jazz. In the meantime I've got a loaner bike from school. The weather has mysteriously turned obscenely nice this week.
current music: maru "Kill Club #001" - Rainbow Grass
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| Sunday, September 21st, 2008
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7:21 pm
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I managed to never lose my bike in New York City, but less than two months in small-town Japan and mine's been either stolen or impounded. I'm not sure which is more likely, or how to deal with it, really. I asked the agent at the station where it vanished yesterday where impounded bikes get taken, and he either didn't understand my Japanese or didn't know the answer; the response he gave me could have meant either one1. I was getting the "if I don't feed him, he'll go away" treatment so I eventually gave up and walked home.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, what'd you think of the play? I found my bike missing after a nice day in Osaka, checking out Amerika-Mura. The weather yesterday was much nicer than everyone expected and I picked up the new Touhou game, some beep boop music and some clothes. (I am currently wearing a T-shirt made by a Japanese company that's a size Small. It's on the tight side but not embarrassing or uncomfortable. There's no way I've lost that much weight here - what's going on, world?)
I'm actually feeling a bit lousy today - probably mostly because of the bike, and the weather today has been extremely nasty to boot. I'm really missing my home and my friends lately. Outside of work I still don't know anybody here and it's starting to take its toll, and I'm not really near enough even to other JETs to do anything with the sort of spontaneity we're all used to. Everything I do on my own just seems to become another diversion that I stay interested in just long enough to spend money on2. I just wish I had ways to meet (and regularly see) people who I can actually really connect with.
No, fuck that. Even if there isn't much nearby, maybe I have to bridge-and-tunnel it, but I live near Osaka and Kyoto, for God's sake. I'm making enough that I can figure out how to be there when interesting things actually happen. If I get over the initial shock of realizing I know less Japanese than I thought I did, I can get past this business of thinking that I know less than I actually do. I wish every tiny everyday thing I do didn't feel like some sort of challenge, but that will change. They hired me because I can do this.
1 I kind of doubt the former, though, since not four hours before I'd had a completely intelligible conversation with a guy in a store about where I came from, where I live, why I can speak Japanese and how I'm just looking today but maybe someday I will buy one of these expensive vintage Yokosuka jumpers, who knows? My Japanese is far from stellar but it's good enough to ask anyone where bikes are taken if they're impounded.
2I can't blame Japan for that, though - that's been a bad habit of mine for a long time. Sitting alone in an apartment with it has made me see that and I can't stand it.
current music: USK "Kill Club #001" - Xinosonic Wings
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+ The way 6 comb their hair +
+ Makes me want to say +
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bluesummers's journal