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.