frustration quit

So I’m going home.  Early.  A little earlier than my over-long contract permits.

This isn’t a post to bemoan my failure.  I didn’t fail.  I have had ENOUGH.

Children’s eikaiwa was never and will never be the place for someone like me.  Even the hard-skinned super-social bounce-it-off-to-drink-and-play-basketball extroverts have a difficult time adjusting to how hard our company can be on us.  And I cannot countenance how they treat the local Japanese staff, who are some of the nicest, smartest, best-intentioned people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting.  The word here is predatory.

I’m out.  Details to come later.

ohanami is…

The best thing ever on a Sunday afternoon at Kamogawa

with pizza and dango and turtle stepping stones across the river

 

 

the worry is…

a mask for the emotion you don’t want to have

a shell to cover the thing you don’t want to feel, that grows and grows until the real feeling gets lost inside it

armour to protect you from a thing as transient as a breeze

 

Oh and eventually time and dedicated practice make you a better teacher.  So does your two-year-old student having a tantrum and punching you in the face.  It’s character-building.

newness is a drug (or a fucking herbal supplement)

If you’re going to Japan, you’ll get told about the honeymoon period.   If you’re in Japan, you’ll more than likely get told about it by more experienced expats who are (mostly out of kindness, and maybe a little desire to establish a pecking order for the newbie) going to let you know that you’ll be sick of it shortly, there are a million awful things that happen, really the Japanese hate all foreigners and you’re going to be miserable.

It hit me like a freight train today, going over a bridge past fallow winter fields on a sunny February afternoon, that living in Japan is almost entirely what you bring to it, and how well you cope.  I’m not stoned on beauty here or anything; N-city is not the Ghibli Hills, and the section I hang in is not super-sexy mono no aware (think car dealerships and cut-rate suit stores).  I just really am enjoying this country.  Yeah, there’s some isolation sometimes and there’s missing your friends and family.  That’s why there’s Skype.  Maybe I’ve just been really freaking lucky; maybe I haven’t, not even sure.  All I know is that normally at this time of the year in Canada I’d be nothing but fucking miserable because the weather would be shit and not getting better, I wouldn’t have had the multiple mental ass-kickings that led me to realize how I was fucking up myself and my personal life (when your support systems are gone gone gone, baby, you find out exactly how strong you yourself really are), and I’d probably be glued to the computer watching mindless crap and quietly hating myself.  I don’t feel this way in Japan any more.  I can feel myself changing in response to it every day, and I mostly like the changes (or at least the new self-awareness that it brings, like figuring out that I need a ton more self-control and compassion with both bratty students and shy ones).

Anyway, there’s more to Japan than just getting drunk and laid every night, that’s all I’m saying.  Winter mountains in the afternoon sunlight are pretty fucking precious.

 

Done with this so much

The last two tries I’ve made at blogging, I tried too hard to be NICE and PLEASANT and LIKEABLE and the results were so fucking boring.  It reads like the blog of someone who’s worried about people she knows finding her blog.  I’m done with that because:

1) the motherfucking INTERNET

2) people who know me KNOW I’m slightly off-hinge, have a potty mouth, and rant about shit at the drop of a hat

3) all the best blogs are written by people who are themselves as hard as they can be and don’t give a fuck about what anybody else thinks of their content.

Also none of the existing Japan blogs cover my experience as a teacher.  I’m a highly sensitive introvert with anxious and depressive tendencies who’s trying to “do” Japan by way of a company (which shall remain nameless) that seems to attract super-social laid-back extroverts like honey attracts bugs.  Some of my shit is misunderstood; some of it isn’t healthy and thus isn’t exactly understandable.  The trick is sorting which from which.   I’m going to try and chronicle my experience doing that through this blog.  If this seems masturbatory to you, that’s why God invented the back button.  If you think it might help, keep reading, I’ll try not to let it go to shit or pander or what have you.

(Also writing a fucking book but the truth is writing about writing *is* masturbatory: great to do with someone who knows you and loves you, but only a few can do it in front of an audience successfully and wow I lost the hell out of that analogy there.)

ONWARD.