Oh August, you fickle bitch.

So, it's coming into the final countdown for Dustyn in Japan part deux and it has been exciting!  I am pretty sure I have all of the things that I need to bring, but they are spread across several houses and/or cars, so it is very difficult to take any sort of inventory.  I'm pretty sure I don't care if I forget some stuff, but I am sure that anything I forget will be terribly important, so I can take some solace in that knowledge.  Everyone I know seems to be getting incredibly tired of listening to me talk about Japan, but I can't stop so I appreciate their not kicking me in the face.  They usually stare at me with half bored expressions on their faces, waiting for me to finish so that they can desperately attempt to change the subject.  I am definitely running the risk of offending some people here; my friends could be looking at me with great interest, but now they know that I think they look like dullards.  Oh well.  No one reads this blog anyway.

In any event, August has been a bastard of a month.  I found out my financial aid was $5000 less than I thought it was going to be.  It was mostly my fault, but it was definitely something of a miscommunication from the financial aid department.  I thought that when they were setting my need to a certain amount, that meant that my student loans would increase to compensate.  As it turns out, they were simply making room for the scholarships that I would have gotten if I were better at school.  I'll be honest.  I'm not sure that I actually have enough money to go to Japan at this point.  I mean, if I work the numbers, I have barely enough, but I don't think I'm going to let that stop me.  I figure that I can just eat less and try to find a job.  (If you are someone from Meiji, disregard the part about me getting a job.) I've been trying to find a cosigner for a supplemental student loan, but that hasn't been happening so I figure I'll just try to sell a kidney and then if that fails, I'll just be poor.  I forget who gave me the advice, but someone told me, "It's better to be poor in Japan than poor in Missouri."  I'm not sure if that statement is actually true, but I'm pretty sure I'm about to test it out.

So, I think I'm going to go ahead and start updating this blog more often.  I'm planning on posting at least three times a week in Japan.  For real this time.  I stopped posting at some point last time, and I'm not really sure why.  I definitely regret it, so I'm going to make sure that I don't have that regret again.  My laptop is pretty poop, so it's not like it does much more than surf porn and allow me to post awesome posts for no one to read on my blog, right?

As always, I refuse to proofread.

Is this thing on?

I am not a very superstitious person.  I don't collect four leaf clovers and I defy any of the cracks that I come across to break my mother's back when I step on them, so my recent behavior has been out of character.  I have been avoiding posting on my blog about Japan because I was afraid that by posting on my blog, I would be jinxing my return to Japan.  Deep down I realize how silly this is, but it changes nothing.  I am still halfway afraid even as I type this that my trip will be cancelled and that the reason it will be cancelled will be this post.  It is taking every ounce of my willpower to keep myself from deleting this post.

As almost everyone should know, I was finally accepted into my program at Meiji University in Tokyo.  This was a no more arduous process than my previous experience, but it was a lot more nerve-wracking.  My application was turned in before the first of March, but I didn't receive any confirmation about my acceptance until the middle of June.  I was the last student to receive word from their host schools at Missouri State.  As it turns out, Meiji University only accepts ten students per semester, so they had a lot of narrowing down to be sure.  The waiting was frustrating, but after having been accepted, my headache is gone.  I can only imagine that the people who didn't get accepted after waiting so long are very upset, but if they were to the point I was when I finally got news, they probably aren't as upset as I might thing.  By the time I got my letter, I barely cared if I got to go; I really just wanted to know what I was doing.

I am considering moving my blog to a different site, but I'm not sure why.  I don't have any problems with google.  I just thought I might want to try one of the more trendy sites. I can't even remember the names of them right now.  This paragraph isn't very interesting, but I'm keeping it anyway.  If any of you blog, maybe you could tell me if I should move?  The only problem I ever had with google was that they are real stingy with photo space.  When I was in Japan before, I would take pictures and just do massive uploads to facebook, but I would much rather have used some of them on my blog and captioned them and stuff.  Google just didn't have a very good interface for that sort of thing.  I say didn't because I don't know if they do now or not.  I suppose I could try to upload a picture and caption it and see. 

Anyway, I'll likely be updating this thing more often now, so if you are interested, keep an eye out.  If you are a spammer here to trick my friends into giving you their passwords, good luck.  I promise you one thing: if you post a link to a website where my friends can buy penis enlargement pills, you will sell infinite pills.

さよなら。

The feelings I am having right now are such a mottled, twisted mess that I am unsure that I could unravel them.  There are so many different stimuli hitting my limbic system at the same time that my prefrontal cortex is having trouble sorting it all out.  I am excited to be going home and seeing my friends and family again.  I miss my dog.  I miss working(somehow).  I am very unhappy at my circumstances for returning, but I still stand by my decision, regardless of how the situation here turns out.  I hope that nothing bad happens and I hope that everyone stays safe and gets to finish their studies here, but at the same time, I don't feel like I'm being properly informed of the gravity of the power plant situation from either the Eastern media or the Western media, so I can't stay here and just hope for the best.  The fact is that even after this disaster is resolved, for better or worse, Japan will still be here and I can come back.  The same thing can't be said for me; they can not rebuild me and they can not make me better, stronger, faster.

I'm more than a little bit upset that I won't get to finish my studies here.  It's not the thing I'm most upset about because language acquisition is extremely difficult and I don't appear to have the knack for it.  I am able to learn the grammar points really well and I have a pretty easy time remembering the vocabulary, but I can not get myself to get over my fear of looking like a buffoon.  I've had a ridiculous amount of practice at looking like an idiot here and I can't seem to get used to it.  At home, I love having attention, both good and bad; in fact, one might say that I thrive on it.  In Japan, it's much more off-putting for me.  People greet me with this strange mixture of curiosity and interest and it makes me feel like I have something that I have to prove; almost as though I am on stage.  For whatever reason that makes me lock up and almost all understanding and ability to make coherent sentences goes out the window.  I feel like that kid on the playground who gets hit with a sick burn, but only later during class does he come up with a comeback, except that this is for things as simple as "do you have any more classes today" or "have we ever met before?" or any other simple, mundane question.  So, I can say that I am upset that I am missing out on all of the learning that I had ahead of me, but I am not missing out on all of the bad grades that I would have inevitably come away with.

Up until now, I was sure that it wasn't going to effect me, leaving all of the people I've met here but now I'm not so sure.  Despite the best of my efforts otherwise, many people here have managed to endear themselves to me in one way or another.  I daresay that some of them may even be my friends.  I'm unsure how this happened, as I spent an inordinate amount of time being anti-social, but it did.  This isn't all bad being as how the interwebs bridges all gaps in physical space, so it isn't like these new-found relationships will be unable to grow.  I only hope that their growth isn't too stunted.

Ultimately, I have to say that I am happy.  I have a lot of things to be upset and frustrated about, but dwelling on those things would only diminish all of the things that I have to be happy about.  I may be terrible at it, but I managed to pick up quite a bit of Japanese.  I met many new friends that I could have forever.  I lived in freaking Tokyo.  I watched Rent in Japanese.  The list goes on.  I am sure that in the upcoming days and weeks I will experience the full gamut of emotions involved in re-entry culture shock, but through it all I know that I will remain happy.

雪。

It snowed today.  I mean, it snowed once before, but it was at night and none of it stuck.  This time it snowed all day long and some of it actually stuck!  It wasn't much, but there were still patches of grass and trees, still green with foliage, with snow covering them.  It's funny the effect that it had.  I'll admit that once I realized that the winter here was so mild as to be non-existent, I was happy because I thought that I was going to skip an entire winter.  I didn't really think that winter would be something that I would miss from home, but when they got their big snow recently, I was upset that I missed it.  I've been a part of a hundred snows and it never occurred to me that I actually liked them and would miss them.  I was very happy to see snow here and I feel comforted from having walked around in it and felt it falling.

The snow seemed to effect Tokyo, too.  I mean, it was a pretty heavy snowfall, but the roads and sidewalks were staying clear and I still saw almost no cars out driving around.  I still saw people walking around like normal, but they were all bundled up and had their umbrellas out.  I'm fairly used to people acting like it's freezing when it's barely chilly, but I've never seen people using umbrellas in snow.  That being said, I wonder if people would use umbrellas in snow at home if they were doing more than walking from their car to their destination.  Probably.

It's been two and a half weeks since break started and I'm starting to crack up a bit.  I've been spending more of my time in the dorm, playing video games.  I haven't really felt like going out exploring, but I'm wondering if maybe I should anyway for no other reason than I know that if I don't I'll regret it.  I'm sure that whatever I find will be awesome and new and interesting and I really do want to see new and interesting things, but I've been in the grips of a horrible apathy and it's hard to care about that sort of thing.  I'm sure that if I could get myself to go out, I would have fun and then I'd want to do it again and the apathy would fade, but maybe I'm too much of a coward to let my apathy fade.  Maybe I want to hide behind my apathy and not experience anything more than I have to.  Of course, it doesn't help that I don't have very much moneys.  I should go to Shinjuku at night and turn tricks.

Winter Vacation.

Tonight is the first night of winter vacation and I find myself sitting at home, alone.  I'm not sure how I feel about it.  On the one hand, it seems like I should feel depressed.  On the other hand, I don't feel depressed so maybe I shouldn't dwell on it. 

I've spent the last several weeks engulfed in apathy and dripping with frustration.  I'm reasonably sure that it's a direct result of one of the lower elbows of the culture shock 'W' I was told about, but I can't be sure.  I'm made to believe that I am going to make a lot of friends, but things don't seem to be heading that way with anyone.  I can't get Japanese people to talk to me and the other exchange students like me sometimes, but then don't like me other times.  I'm reasonably sure that we're all riding the same ride and when we are dipping into the bottom of our respective 'W's, it's hard to want to talk to the new people.  Sometimes you see the new people as your only lifeline and sometimes they are part of everything that is frustrating you.

I genuinely feel bad for not writing in this thing as much as I was, but as you can probably tell, I just haven't had as many life changing experiences.  My time has been spent avoiding schoolwork and trying to cling to what little Japanese I can as we rush through chapter after chapter.  It's definitely not a bad experience, but things are just so busy and exhausting that it's hard to want to keep going.  I'm really glad that we have the next two weeks off so I can maybe spin down my engine a bit and try to get excited about Japanese again.

I hope that I have more awesome things to write about next time.

The tortoise.

I wanted to write a blog post about turning 30 in Japan and it keeps sounding depressing so I keep deleting it.  Suffice to say that I'm not all that depressed and turning 30 is kind of refreshing:  I can close the boring and pointless book that was my 20s and start writing this one.  I hope the story progresses more in the 30s than the 20s.  The 20s was full of filler and almost no fan-service.  There wasn't even any real good exposition.

I hope the art gets better, too.

For class.

I wrote the following short story for class.  I don't know how to feel about it.  I am incapable of thinking positive things about my writing, so I will leave the cultivation of my ego to the internet.  Putting it that way makes it sound like a bad idea.  I just figured that I haven't written anything on here in a while and maybe I should post something.

Hobbies

                It no longer feels strange when I wake up in the morning.  At first, all of the similarities to home brought upon a sense of familiarity that was both comforting and disorienting.  The sun is the same and the air is the same, but the people are different; or so I thought.  As it turns out, the people here are like people anywhere else, struggling to get by and find happiness wherever they can find it.  That fact sort of blends in with the confusion I still occasionally feel.  I’ll still occasionally walk around and lapse into a vague sort of calm contentedness only to have it interrupted by the realization that things are moving too fast, that all of the colors are beginning to blur together and that if I don’t slow down I won’t experience enough.  I suppose that is when I started killing.

            It began as things have a tendency to begin, with an accident.  I was standing at a crowded intersection and someone behind me got pushed forward by someone who was behind them, almost like a set of human dominoes and I was brushed by a fast moving car.  It only left a bruise on my skin, but beneath that bruise it left an idea:  What would happen if someone actually did make their way into the path of an oncoming vehicle, speeding so it wouldn’t miss a light?  Would the authorities arrest everyone on the corner?  Would anyone on the corner even be there when the authorities arrived?  We are all very busy and we all have places to be, so it seems like an experience worth having, even if it only serves to break the monotony of everyday life.

            The first experiment was a failure.  It wasn’t a complete failure or I may have ended up in jail, but things definitely didn’t go as they were supposed to.  I spent the week after my idea waiting for the right moment.  I would line up in front of an intersection like people do, but I would insure that I was on the second layer of people.  I would then wait for the light to change and watch for fast moving cars.  That was the first problem.  I had to develop patience, a trait that I have never been known to possess.  If I jumped the gun and no one actually ran the light, it may appear obvious what I was attempting to do.  Likewise, if I acted when there weren’t many people at an intersection it would be very obvious what I was intending to do.  I needed to wait for the right moment.

           Luckily, my problem presented itself as a faulty technique and did not manifest in my patience.  There I was, like any other day, waiting at a light just behind this woman carrying groceries.  Everything seemed different, though.  The air was electric; it felt like everyone was connected on some sort of high powered circuit, like somehow the moment became self aware, donning  its tailcoat and wielding its baton.  The people around me were all having idiotic conversations about the weather and where they needed to be and how late they were running, but I felt like I was on stage.  Time slowed down.  I watched as the crosswalk sign for the other street started blinking.  Slower and slower it blinked.  The turn lane lights clicked on and they were set so my lane was still open. Everything was falling into place.  It was like final crescendo in an orchestra performance and the conductor had his baton raised, pointed at me and ready to give my cue to hit the high note and end the song.  I don’t know if the moment grew to be too huge in my mind or if I just wasn’t ready, but at the very last second, just as the baton started to fall, I hesitated.  I had practiced this moment in my head a thousand times.  I knew that I didn’t want to just push; I needed to put some weight behind it.  At the last second though, I realized that I hadn’t actually explored the mechanical aspects behind pushing someone and both insuring that it wasn’t an obvious push and that my target was made to move forward.  In any event, my push was fumbled and awkward and I was left with a slightly annoyed woman who only dropped her bag and smashed her eggs.

            Still, the attempt was not a complete failure.  I felt like I had learned a lot and it had only cost me the price of some eggs.  I decided that I would not let this setback deter me and I would instead learn from it.  I spent the next several hours using the adrenaline that was still flowing through my body thinking about ways to push without pushing and practicing them on some clothes I had hanged on my door in my room.  It probably would have looked ridiculous to any onlookers, but that’s what doors and locks are for.

            The next two weeks were torture, but I could not let my weak sense of patience get the best of me or all of my plans and testing would have been for naught.  I knew the conductor was just playing through the boring part of the song and my cue would come soon.  Still, I found myself wandering around the city during rush hours every day, trying to find that moment.  Every intersection I came to had a crescendo, but the baton was not tipped my way.

            It wasn’t until the third week, when I was on my way to school, that I felt the electricity in the air again.  It had been three weeks and the memory of time lapsing had begun to fade, but at this one instant I felt it and remembered.  This time, perhaps because I had experienced it before, I heard some of the other players:  there was a child riding a bicycle, ringing a bell, there were two men having an argument across the street.  I could smell bread wafting over from the bakery behind me and the scent of the cars and the people around me was strong, but I refused to concentrate on any of that.  I had a solo I was about to play, amidst all of this accompaniment and I wasn’t about to miss my cue this time.  The crosswalk light blinked slower and slower, finally stopping.  The light on my side popped on with a turn signal for the oncoming lane.  The boy standing in front of me, looking neat in his school uniform, shifted his weight from his right leg to his left.  The light blinked to red, but there was a man driving a supply van who didn’t notice or didn’t care.  He just drove through, one hand on the steering wheel and the other clutching the microphone to his radio.  At the last second, I felt the baton drop and shifted my weight forward as I’d practiced so many times before in my room.  I shoved my left knee into his thigh and collapse the leg which had all of his weight on it, causing him to fall forward into the path of the oncoming van. 

            This is where things did not go as planned, however.  Instead of tripping forward and getting hit by the van, the kid lost his legs altogether and fell down onto his hands and knees.  I think it was at that moment that the kid realized he was part of the orchestra.  It was only for a moment that he enjoyed that realization, because with that realization came the bumper of a van, followed immediately by the front tire.  I half expected the child’s head to pop like a grape, but it managed to keep its structural integrity.  The sight was no less gruesome with the lack of brains on the pavement.  There was still most of a face. 

            From there came the obvious repercussions of such a horrendous event.  There was a not insignificant amount of people who had better things to do and left, but those who stayed –me included- stood around completely shocked that such an accident could happen.  I was elated.  Not only had my plans come to fruition, but it had worked out the way I’d hoped:  almost everyone had left the scene and those who remained had convinced themselves that this was an accident.  Maybe some of them had an inkling that this wasn’t an accident, but people are weak and most of them don’t want to believe that someone could push someone else in front of a van.  They would much rather continue to live their lives in the quiet comfort of ignorance and denial. 

            For fear of drawing attention to myself, I stayed and let myself be questioned by the police.  They especially wanted to talk to me because they knew that I had been the one standing behind the boy.  It wasn’t difficult to get through the interview.  Along with my elation, came a catharsis so strong that I could easily feign shock.  I related the events leading up to the climax, adding in that I felt some pressure on my back to step forward but also adding that everything came as a blur and that I could not be sure.  This caused the man who was standing behind me to fight the man who was standing behind him, thereby adding more thickness to my growing smoke screen.  I am made to believe that the police will contact me upon the resolution of this matter, but I won’t hold my breath.

            It has been six months since that time at the intersection.  I have not stopped my excursions.  I have, however, expanded into subways and viewing rooms in tall towers.  Every day offers opportunities and it is important to take these opportunities, lest life become a hollow existence comprised of a meaningless series of events.  I wonder if I will be able to continue my habits at home, where people are much less crowded.