The Lighthearted Wanderer

Knowing approximately 0.01% (rough estimate) of the Japanese language has prompted me to develop certain coping mechanisms to maintain a sense of having an understanding of the world around me. Basically, whenever anyone is speaking around me, I pretend to know what they are talking about. Last week the females teachers at one of my schools were excitedly giggling with the vice-principal (also a female) and walking around the staffroom talking and collecting money--the vice-principal was asking for donations for buying a gift for a teacher, mostly likely one of their fellow female teachers that just had a baby (or had a successful surgery, that far I couldn't quite tell). I realized later that something similar had happened last week at that school, so I changed the story to being that they are collecting money to buy lunch for the day, which might actually be the case... I know that I have no basis for guessing what is actually going on, but it feels good to make up these fun st...

I remember it was the summer after 6th grade, and I was at school because of academic decathlon or something like that. Sitting at my desk here at one of my schools, I just had a memory about one of the first tasks that they had us do during that 6th grade summer. Imagine a young and eager-to-please me, excited to be solving puzzles and doing brain exercises... By the way, I have no idea what the point of this task was with regards to academic decathlon. There was a worksheet, and the moderator was actually one of my elementary school's alums that couldn't have been more than 3 years older than me, but boy did I think he was a cutie back then...anyway cute older boy tells us that the point of the worksheet is to finish it as quickly as possible. He tells us to start and it's this insane list of like 50 things that have us running around the whole school doing ridiculous things like: 1. Go ask for a drink of water; 2. Write your name on the blackboard; 3. Leave the cla...

One time during a doctor visit, the doctor made a funny remark about how I must really lOve food. Not because I was fat, but because I had probably mentioned food or food detail in each story I had previously spoken to her. I told her, "I once saw a list of 'Would You Rather?' questions on the Internet and one was... "would you rather have good food and bad sleep, or good sleep and bad food, for the rest of your life?" and obviously I said good food, I told her. "that's a good sign that you picked the food," she said, "because that would mean you haven't experienced really bad sleep," Unfortunately, I'm starting to think that I need to change my answer.

A couple rounds of tipsy mafia are a great way to bond. Bugs are gigantic an mildly terrifying, though it's rather addictive to try to get up close and take good pictures of them. The candance of my sentences sometimes resembles that of an Australian or British person, not so much the cool vowel sounds but more like the overall up and down pitch of my sentences. Get four girls in a room together and of course they talk about relationships, getting/being married, and kids...they can be from four different parts of the world and still laugh like school girls when a boy shows up at the door to wish one of the aforementioned girls good night ;)

"you know, there are a lot of really little things that you can do to make her happy and to not have her on your back as much" "yeah, but what if those things don't make ME happy?" - Talking to a friend in the program about significant others If making the other person happy doesn't make you happy...is there something the matter? Train rides have become my new airplane rides, times of thinking, usually by myself, about whatever is stirring about in my brain ...I'm not sure if this is a good thing.

Today I was at work (okay, well I`m still at work) thinking up different ways that I wanted to structure my first lessons for the upcoming term. The teachers has asked me to have our first lesson be an introduction about ourselves, our home, and our interests. Now, anyone that has been around me when I`m planning out anything, from events to meetings, might know that I`m the type that thinks and brainstorms and swirls ideas around in my head for a long while before I come up with anything. And then all of a sudden, in the wee hours of the morning before an event, inspiration strikes and I figure out what I want to do. Those that see this as a positive attribute can call this working well under pressure. Most others call this procrastination. Most of the time, however, it really is that I really think about how I want to present something, or how I want the proceedings of a meeting to go, and it takes a long time for me to settle on an idea or to be satisfied with what I`ve come up wi...