Clipped wings

You know what really pisses me off? When keys on keyboards decide that, in order to WORK, you must intentionally exert three times as much force as is necessary, thus making your typing speed three times slower. I don't know about you guys, but I type with speed and most definitely without looking. And so... when my quicker fingers, which usually dance across the keys, have to instead jab... I am likely to get thoroughly irritated.

That aside, here I am at just past 6 with still an hour and a half until meeting time for my all-you-can-eat meat-athon, and I am already tired. This does not bode well, for a night of karaoke surely means another twelve hours of ridiculousness are ahead of me.

Perhaps the anger will get my blood flowing and wake me up a bit.

Nostalgia

I've been feeling an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and homesickness lately, what with the Holidays coming up, considering that this will be the first time I will have spent them away from home and family. Just one more step into the "adult world," so to speak. I never thought I'd feel homesick, I've always been able to adapt up to this point with being away from home and not missing the family too much, but I don't think I've spent more than 2 or 3 months without seeing my parents. Kind of silly when I think about it. No matter how much I like to think I'm an adult, there's still bits of childishness trailing behind me, slowly but surely drifting further behind.

The homesickness has made me realize that, honestly, the life I lead here is closer to the same as in Portland last year than I had really anticipated. My regular schedule basically consists of wake up, breakfast, school, return home, do homework/study (or more realistically, slack off and end up doing the homework before class in the morning) then go to bed. Pretty exciting, right? The major differences between here and there are that:
-I live 40 minutes from school, as opposed to 5 minutes from class.
-I have no internet at home (Which will, hopefully, be remedied very soon)
-Japanese. Japanese.

And that last one cannot be emphasized enough. Though I am getting better at Japanese (at a snail's pace, it seems), it's still not to the point where I can hold very interesting conversations. I can talk about food, school, and other relatively basic matters, and when I do I occasionally get comments from native speakers that my Japanese is good... until I open my mouth to speak about something resembling an opinion other than whether I like it or hate it. At this point, I'm pretty sure they'd feel bad about taking back the comment, so at least I'm left with my ego intact.

I've degressed, and also run out of time... but do expect an update in the next few days about eating way too much grilled meat and being thoroughly exhausted from a karaoke all-nighter--my Thanksgiving plans. Wish me luck!

Soon-to-be Sensei adventures

The last few days have been quite unremarkable, though not entirely uneventful. As I have mentioned I was working with an American Business class on Friday, "volunteering" (I use quotes, because I don't think getting money for something is volunteering) along with some other exchange students, by helping the Japanese students make sure they understand what's going on in the episode of The Apprentice they watched. Because of this, and how ridiculous reality TV is, I realized that I have a very high probably of laughing in pretty much, well, any situation. This makes for awkward moments when you see something cheesy in a show, laugh, and find yourself the only person in the room having done so. Can we say "awkward silence"? I wish I could say this is the first time, but I'd be lying if I did so.

Anyway, this class thing is going to only last for a couple more days, and talking with some of the other exchange students about doing private English lessons has prompted me to create a profile on a popular site for this purpose and I think I am honestly going to try this to make some extra pocket cash. Undoubtedly, this'll resort in some interesting hijinks, so I hope all (three) of you are looking forward to reading about it. :)

Money and a life... and I'm complaining?

Sorry, no pictures until possibly tomorrow when I will be coming into school--even though I don't have class. I signed up for helping out this class on the Engineering campus of Waseda, assisting the students with a project that requires they use English. Great thing about it is that I get compensation of the cash persuasion. Thirty bucks for each day, three days total. Can anyone say "free money"? FREE MONEY.

After all the complaining about nothing to do, now I feel like I have too much to do. Lots of studying yesterday and today for my big exam later, helping that class tomorrow, and I got invited to do three different things this coming Sunday. When did I actually get a life?

Short but sweet.

If I didn't know tutoring was a common thing among exchange students and Japanese students here, I'd be super excited about the fact that I'm helping out a cute Japanese guy next week as he is studying to take the TOEIC. As it is, I'm still kind of psyched about it. Makes me feel slightly productive, on top of the fact that I get to spend time with him.

I think tomorrow I will try to upload some of the photos I took at the potluck I went to last night with some of the other exchange students and our host moms. The hotel was freaking ridiculously expensive looking, you'll have to see for yourself.

"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

With a fiery passion, to rival all of the burning, seething, fatal flames of hell, do I HATEHATEHATE the fact that I have to lug my laptop to school to use the internet. And not only that, but that I also have to screw around with proxies and pull out half my hair getting nowhere to use Pidgin or any IM service. Then I try meebo.com, browser-based IMing, and that still screws up by logging me out every 5 god damn minutes.

Can you tell how pissed I am right now? Seriouslyseriously pissed. That's how pissed.

A couple small things

A) Obama has prevailed. Praise Americans for making the right decision!
B) I am pretty sure my Japanese Cultural Anthro. professor uses words the Japanese students can barely understand (if at all), let alone spell well enough to properly scribble them down in their notes.

On an entirely different note, I've been feeling uncharacteristically introspective lately. Or maybe I just have more time to myself forced on me so I'm only just now noticing it.

Buddhism teaches that everything in the world is interconnected, part of how they justify no killing. To follow Buddhism, to think this way, one must change the way they act before they can change the way they think. When I did youth corps a couple years back, one of the crew leaders put it well: "Fake it till you make it."

A couple issues that I'd been wanting to attend to while abroad is my lack of care of myself (eating more junk food than I should, not getting out and doing physical things as much as I should), as well as procrastinating more than is healthy. I figure if I can just force myself to do these things than it'll eventually become more natural to me, and not so much of an ordeal to do so. Problem is that I am finding it incredibly hard to get up the willpower to start. One of the wonderful things about having a significant other: someone close to you, who (presumably) wants the best for you, to push you when you don't have the power to push yourself.

This is becoming a blog more about me and less about Japan. Hrmmm. How should I remedy that?

Annoyance by proxy

To think, today is the first time I've been online since Thursday! Ghastly, I know. I'm really finding it quite irritating dealing with no internet access at home (and stubborn proxies on campus), and I'm reallyreallyreally quite tempted to buy a router and set it up at my host parents' place, though not yet tempted enough to outweigh the headache I anticipate maneuvering my way through a Japanese operating system and an undoubtedly Japanese instruction guide for the router itself. Just thinking about it makes me break out into a sweat.

In other, but somewhat related news, I started uploading my photos onto my google/picasa account thing (since the school proxy apparently doesn't like Flickr), and I have a few I wanted to share, simply because I absolutely love messing around with fireworks settings and nighttime scenery. That's what you'll find floating around this entry.
One thing I noticed I have not yet figured out is the idiosyncrasies of Japan's weather. Though somewhat similar in relation to Northwest weather, it's definitely different enough that I find that the chilly morning does not indicate a chilly day, and that a scarf added to my sweatshirt will just be hot and uncomfortable and subsequently removed once I get to school, though I may desire to remove it before that time. October and November have just been so much warmer (at least during the day) than at home, and I find myself suddenly questioning why I am complaining about this. Perhaps I am just in a whiny mood.

On another note, I remember now that I haven't updated about the meet and greet (more like meet and eat) that Tokyo Cowgirl and I had the weekend before last. We went to this ramen shop in the area of my school and feasted on deliciousness after convincing the server that, yes, we did know it would cost more to pay for things separately instead of in a lunch set, could you please just take our order? After talking for a while and buying drinks (and receiving little trays of food we didn't order... I have a sneaking suspicion this was to keep up appearances that we weren't loitering and had an actual reason to still be in the little shop), we headed out for a walk in the area and had a pretty good time. Though, for some reason, I ended up being quite tired at the end of the expedition. We plan to hang out again on Friday. Happy happy joy joy for getting to converse with another American who isn't studying abroad.

Alright, this update turned out a bit more boring than I expected, but the weekend was too full and I have too little time for a proper entry. Enjoy the pictures at least, and I'll try to update again tomorrow or Thursday!