Fear and Blendy.

Today was our welcoming party at school.  We all got together at the Sky Hall, which is at the top of the tallest building on our campus, 16 stories.  It's not incredibly tall, but the hall has wide open windows all the way around it so you can see an incredible view of Tokyo.  You can also see a mountain that I was told was not Mt. Fuji.  It's apparently way smaller than Fuji, but it's huge still.  Seeing Mt. Fuji is definitely on my list of "things to do." 

Our party was really cool, but it did have an awkward part where all of the exchange students had to do self introductions.  By this time, we've gotten pretty used to it.  It's sort of a ritual that you are taught first semester.

Hajimemashite.  (Nice to meet you.)
Boku no namae ha(pronounced 'wa') Dustyn Covert desu.
Douzo yoroshiku onegaishimasu. (lit. Please treat me well.)

So far, that iteration is about as formal a presentation as I've seen.  There are shorter ways for less formal meetings.  You can leave out words here and there, but it all amounts to roughly the same thing.  In any event, I somehow ended up almost last so quite a bit of tension had built to me.  Usually I take the lesson I learned from the band-aid all those years ago and just get it over with, but by the time I saw what was going on, I ended up at the end.  Anyway, because of all the tension, I deviated from the original plan of just following the script and what I said came out more like this:

(Awkward wave.) Hi.
Boku no namae ha Dustyn desu.
Just Dustyn.  I don't really do the whole last name thing.
Etoooo.(Umm...)
I am afraid of all of you, so I might act like I don't like you, but I don't not like you:  I'm just scared.

I was afraid I was going to offend them, but I think it came out alright.  Some people told me I said what everyone was thinking, maybe the same things that Japanese were thinking, too.  Either way, I spent the rest of the day working with my language exchange partners and that fixed a lot of my fears.  I'm still not entirely comfortable speaking, but I know the words are in my head; I just need to find a way to get them out without sounding so stilted.