The Constitutional Right to Freedom of OS

Now I'm a Mac user. Sorry but it's the truth. I accept that your preference of OS is much like your preference of religion; completely your choice and based upon personal needs. (I could go on and on about how Macs are Buddhism, PCs modern Christianity, and any fear of technology similar to atheism, but we just won't go there.)

But I've recently converted to Apple, and I love it. I love it largely for the simple English-Japanese switch and the built-in spell checker into anything you write, like for example in a blog or a forum. I also love it for iMovie, though iLife '08 is proving verra verra tricky, since I'm so used to '06 from campus.

Anyway, recently found this video, and I just needed to share. It's especially funny if you're very familiar with Moviemaker vs. iMovie. (And ya gotta love the subtle masochism, right? Right?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h30LQY3xWEI&eurl=http://www.joshuazimmerman.com/blog/2007/07/

Oh the Places You'll Go

I am very grateful to be part of my particular consulate. Other JETs out of the consulate have set up Facebook groups for prefectures and areas. Even better, our consulate liaison has suggested a wonderful book set called "Lonely Planet."

Wandering the bookstore today, I picked up both the Guide to Japan as a whole by Lonely Planet, and the Tokyo Guide, both of which I think I'll find very useful, especially since I want to do a lot of traveling.

I would like to visit Tokyo twice in the next 12 months. The 2nd time will probably be just to soak in the environment (after playing "The World Ends With You," I'm especially excited to check out Shibuya (しぶや), though I'll need to be far more trendy before I do) but the 1st time will be for the annual Tokyo Game Show, sometime in early October.

I tell ya, I'm starting to get pretty excited about all the places there are to explore, even just within Kagawa (かがわ). Terrified, too, of course.... but also excited.

At Long Last, I Escape Winter

There's a popular saying that Wisconsin has two seasons: winter, and road construction. (Considering that it is late May, and suddenly every two-lane in town has morphed into a twisty, turny one lane separated from certain death in the form of an oncoming semi by just a few measly orange cones, I believe this saying to be true.)

On the JET application, I did not specify any placement wish. My logic was: 1) I just wanna go. 2) Never been to Japan. I'd be picking prefectures at random, so why not just let them do it for me? 3) The less I demand, the more likely they'll put me someplace nice! (Sometimes I wonder if they would stick a kid who requested Tokyo into a small, fisherman town as far from Tokyo as possible just for spite.)

My one fear, as I sat last night contemplating the fun realization that I had no idea where I would be living in little over 2 months, was," Not Hokkaido. Anything but Hokkaido."

This is no knock against Hokkaido, which I've heard (maybe sarcastically) is a quaint, lovely little (big) prefecture. But I have had enough of Wisconsin winters for a while, and from my crude understand of meteorology, Wisconsin and Hokkaido could be twins.

Low and behold, at 5:44, I received my placement.

Kagawa-ken.

At first, mild amusement. (My university 先生 is 掛川.) Then mild panic. Where the heck is that? A few frantic Google searches later, I discover: 

1) it's in Japan. (What a relief!) 

2) It's on an island. Well, okay, duh, all of Japan is an island, but it's on ANOTHER island. Shikoku island, to be exact. 

3) It is (more or less) across the sea from Osaka-ken, which my mother will be thrilled about (she had her heart set on seeing Osaka and the cherry blossoms in April there. Her and her guide books....)

4) It's one of the smaller prefectures. 

5) Best of all... it's warm! Very mild winters... so mild, the snow almost never sticks around. 

Ha! At long last, winter, I have evaded your cold and clammy grasp! I'm going somewhere warm-with actual humidity! 

Now onto my CO. I don't know what city I've been placed in, but my contracting organization is listed as Mitoyo-shi. So yet another frantic Google search ensued, and...

1) Mitoyo is a municipality on the western side of Kagawa. 

2) It's about 130 square miles, so to convert it into Midwestern speak, it's about 2 hours wide. 

3) It has a population density a little less than where I'm living now, so not urban, but not thoroughly rural either. A nice balance, so I gather. 

4) According to my friend Gay Megaman, with my contracting organization being the -し instead of the -けん, I can expect to be working with middle schoolers and elementary school students. 

And that's all she wrote, folks. Now I eagerly wait (that's the word of the year!) for news, any news, from my predecessor and contracting organization. I'll be here, holding my breath, if you need me.  

Are We There Yet?

I have decided that JET (at least this stage of it) is nothing but a long waiting game. A long, excruicating waiting game. Let me illustrate:

-early September to mid November: Wait for the application for the next year to go online.

-December: Wait for notification that your consulate received your application.

-rest of December to early January: Wait to see if your application has been accepted, and granted you an interview.

-early January to late February: Wait for the interview, and soak in your nervous sweat.

-late February to early April: Wait to see if you are accepted. Convince yourself 15 times a day how well/poorly/undecided you did on the interview, usually in a rotating fashion.

-early April: Get accepted!!! Hurray! Then here comes the avalance of paperwork.

-early May: Wait anxiously about whether the consulate has gotten your paperwork. (Darn you Post Office!)

-mid May: Wait anxiously for various government agencies to get your paperwork, and return their own paperwork to you so you can return it to the consulate.

-late May: Wait for placement. This is where I am sitting. The word on the web is the South Africian and Toronto consulate received their placements within the last two days. Chicago's placement list goes up today at 5, so right now I am twiddling my thumbs, trying to pretend I am thinking about something else when the only thing occupying my mind is," Come on clock. Faster! Faster faster!"

Still, I wouldn't trade the experience for anything. It'll make applying to grad school in December feel like a breeze. ("Only a two month waiting period? No problem!") And what a relief to finally be nearing the end of it! Or, at least, the end of the waiting period for the placement. Now there's just the actual waiting for Japan.

Well, that, and the whole Visa-application, CO-contacting, predecessor-contacting, box-mailing-fiasco....

We're Only Human...: Plumbling the Mediocre Mind

We're Only Human...: Plumbling the Mediocre Mind

Speaking of letting your mind wander when you should be working... Well, honestly, I feel as if I should always be working. Last night at BB Class, one of my fellow half-blacks commented how she had done nothing for the last hour, and felt eaten up with guilt and anger over it because it IS the week before finals, and she has much to do. But honestly-what's an hour or so of rest? Every year it seems to get worse; this barely-controlled terror that I should be working more, thinking more, doing more. But how much more can I do without exploding? Could I ever get into Yale like some friends? Could I ever learn Japanese just by watching a ridiculous amount of anime? Can I ever stop feeling like a failure because I am, by all intensive purposes, middle of the road, humdrum average?

To Err, Human; To Forgive, Divine

In my 23ish years of life, I've tallied up quite the impressive list of people who have wronged me and people I've wronged. The former is much larger than the later, for the simple naive reason that I don't see myself in those terms. If this were the Matrix, and I was projecting the image of myself, I would be an open-book, tolerant, trusting, and blindly, happily rushing on to my own demise. In this Matrix world, I am nearly always the victim, and rarely do I turn my burbs upon the populace that sometimes so justifiably deserves it.

Many life events have convinced my head that opening up and trusting people is a recipe for masochism, yet I continue to dance back and forth between opening up to people and hating myself for it.

Recently, life has transpired to be ironic. Today, waiting for a burn that might finish during the Second Coming (in Heaven, computers will burn with no encoding errors and perfect quality) I stumbled across an article about War Crimes of the Heart. The author explores, to an impressive depth, what it might really mean to forgive someone who has wronged us, and to ask for forgiveness.

The former is tough. The latter is even tougher. I am a big fan of closure; sorting things into neat boxes and stacking them on my Shelf-'O-Experience. But relationships are rarely that easy. Even just looking at the last four years... how do I forgive someone who, by all external signifier, neither wants nor notices my attempts at forgiveness?

Or, even more pressing... how can you forgive if you cannot trust? Let us say that someone extends the olive branch and asks for forgiveness; ironically, one of the very few people I crave to give forgiveness to and make amends (ah, be careful what you wish for.) But what if you suspect that their motives are not kosher-that their attempts at friendship are really a smoke screen for something more sinister? Is there a way to grant forgiveness without re-building that foundation of trust? Or does forgiveness require a certain level of trust?

My instructor once told me that bitterness in the heart is like rust on the sword; all it does is eat away at the metal and make it brittle. I do not want rust on my sword... but nor do I want to risk another betrayal. I feel that, if I am withholding trust, I am speaking forgiveness with my mouth but not my heart. Maybe that's why only the divine can forgive; they know the world and you in the world so well they can anticipate exactly how much hurt you will dish out the next time.

It is one of my deeper regrets, that I am such a coward about people. I seem to slink between trusting too much and trusting too little. Is there a balance? Is there a way to forgive without building another version of the relationship that was once broken? Or should you risk the hurt to rid your sword of rust? "If you want peace, prepare for war." That seems to be the real Catch-22; if you want to be a trusting, forgiving, open person, prepare for endless betrayal.