日本にいるよ～

(Title: I`m in Japan)

I had a bit of an entry typed up on my laptop, but net cafe man wasn`t very keen on me using the ethernet at the open sofa area and SUGGESTED I use a stall thing. I see why people love these places, they are quite amazing.

For now I`m going to enjoy my two full days off (one of which has already gone by). I`ll have a post ready to go if I can ever find a way to upload it.

Packing and not packing

UGH I think I might be ever so slightly ill. I tried really hard not to get sick before leaving! Sad pandas.

I was kinda skinny!

I'm obviously not packing like I should be. I found my old keitai in my junk and decided to charge it up and see what shenanigans I was up to the last time it was on. Reading the old mail and looking at photos on it make me nostalgic for my two partners in crime, Ashlie and Christina. I really hope at least one of them can visit me in the next year, I think we'd have a lot of fun (as always). I have some awesome stuff on that phone that I never bothered to email to myself! I can't even understand all the Japanese I typed out in the old mails lol. Terrible! Warui gakusei...

Tomorrow I'm off with Tracy to Nihon. She seems like she's holding up pretty well, and I guess I could be a lot worse. I remember I spent at least half of my study abroad term fairly sick, hopefully that won't happen this time. I'm hoping to the Flying Spaghetti Monster that I haven't forgotten anything IMPORTANT. Ugh. UGH.

Gonna try to get a good night's sleep tonight, since I can never sleep on planes very well. I hope I don't fall apart at the airport or anything ridiculous like that. This time tomorrow I'll be in the air above Osaka~

Sweet Baby Jesus I'm going to Japan!

EEEEEEK I HAVE A FEW DAYS LEFT BEFORE I BEGIN MY NEW LIFE IN NIHONLAND.

I'm feeling a mix of...

• Starting a full-time job ugh. Gotta pay back my loans ugh.
• OH DEAR GOD I'M GOING TO BE ALONE IN JAPAN I DON'T EVEN SPEAK (much) JAPANESE. SAD FRIGHTENED PANDAS.
• DO I EVEN LIKE KIDS??? CAN I TEACH SMALL IMPRESSIONABLE CHILDREN???
• OH DEAR GOD I'M GOING TO BE LESS THAN AN HOUR FROM MY FAVORITE CLUB ATOM AND THE SWEET LEGIT HOTEL UP THE STREET FROM ATOM.

I wonder if Atom was around during the super ganguro popularity peak...

I'm sure the first few weeks will be interesting, and not always a "good" interesting. It will most certainly be a *very expensive* interesting. I truly hope I don't forget anything, like how I forgot the tickets to Slutty Jin's show when that was the central purpose to spending an obscene amount of money and flying to California.

My last day at work is Valentine's Day. Boyfriend isn't very happy that I'm pulling a double that day, because it means he doesn't get treated to dinner, but he's not paying for my day trip to Hiroshima so too bad. I have to make money off of all the people willing to pay for a four-course dinner and hopefully tipping out in accordance with the price of it. I'm sad that I have to leave all my friends, because I would consider a number of them good friends after having worked there for more than a year. We get on each other's nerves and work sucks sometimes but everyone comes back the next day forgetting what happened; it's nice and yet kind of weird. Like Jersey Shore when they all get in fights but eat Sunday dinner together (unless you skip out and get a banana and come back expecting everything to be peaches). One keeps telling me, "Don't be a stranger, okay??? We're still going to be friends when you're in Japan!!!" We are :)

I know I have way more stuff to do than I can think of to prepare for the big transition. I've been trying to get it all done, and I'm fairly certain I've gotten the important stuff done. Got the year's supply of contacts (maybe I'll go get a pair of those crazy circle lenses later), got the suits tailored and hemmed, got the omiyage, bought all my extra make-up from Sephora; I have my passport and related IMPORTANT items in one folder. I've had two suitcases out and have been slipping things in them every once in a while. I think this may be one big instance where college actually prepared me for something - I traveled back and forth every few months for four years, so I know what I absolutely need and how it should be packed. And having lived in Tokyo before, I have an idea of what I can buy there that I don't have to pack. I'm still giving myself anxiety over EVERYTHING, though.

The teacher I'm replacing and the other English teacher I'll be working with have been AMAZING. I think they know I have a blog but I don't know for sure so I won't name them, but if you read this THANK YOU FOR SAVING MY LIFE IN ADVANCE (pretty much). They have been SO HELPFUL I am forever indebted to them. For serious. It helps that they are American females of my generation; it'd be different if I was replacing some weird dude bro neckbeard who came to Japan looking for a wife. But NO I was blessed to have two awesome girls helping me out!

Over the next few days, I'll be desperately trying to be positive so as not to give myself an ulcer. I'm excited to see a bit of the Kansai area, maybe even a day trip to Hiroshima. I think Nishihara and I deserve some super happy fun tourist time. I'm looking forward to hunting down old friends and going drinking with my long lost Fujiyoshi relative. I want to meet my coworkers too! I have to indulge the positivity and ignore the negativity! Eeeek!

I am a horrible blogger, part 2981

Yet again, my plan of keeping the blog alive and updated fell by the wayside. Since that last post in September, I did the following:

Got a second job. Quit lol.

Started working daytime shifts at the first job. 10x more stress!!!

RECEIVED MY CERTIFICATE OF ELIGIBILITY. HOT DAMN I AM GOING TO NIHONLAND.

Oh and I didn't see anyone or do anything really fun because I was working all the time. ALL. THE. TIME. And not normal hours where I get weekends off, but like 14-hour days at the mall. Apparently that doesn't stop once you enter The Real World, as my friends with full-time jobs and responsibilities and grown-up things like that can attest to. Not that I was ever a really big party girl, but when it comes to clubbing and drinking now we're all MEH. We still indulge every once in a while, but I've become especially bored with it.

And you know what else I didn't do? I didn't go see my dearest Slutty Jin in concert again! SAD PANDAS. KUNTT is coming to Hawaii at some point in the future, so I'm probably not going to be able see them either.

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In other news, today (even though it's past midnight I still consider it the same day 'til I go to bed) was New Year's Day, which means FUKUBUKURO. My mother can't say that 10 times fast. Hit up Spiral Girl again, got another bag full of goodies, and they actually fit me this year! I will have to post that.

Reading is fun

I'm not as active a reader as I'd like to be. It's not that I don't have more than enough material to keep me busy, I'm just lazy. My wish lists on Paperback Swap are impossibly long, and they get longer every time I hear about a great new book or see an interesting cover at a bookstore. I want to go back and read stuff from high school and college that I wasn't able to enjoy because I was too busy writing essays or analyzing them. This past summer I wanted to get through a stack of books that have been sitting around since forever, but I only managed to get through three of them. It didn't help that my enthusiasm was curbed with the first book, which I gave up on about 1/6 of the way in (The Other Boleyn Girl).

A good smutty book

I like smutty books; most of the books I read now have some theme about sex or drugs in them. I think that started when I read Memoirs of a Geisha, which led to my interest in Natsuo Kirino, the author of Out and Grotesque. I have Real World sitting on my shelf right now, but I'm waiting to read it until her next book is translated so I have something to look forward to (I'm a nerd lol). Kirino led me to other not-so-nice titles - In the Miso Soup, Battle Royale, Lost Girls and Love Hotels (super quick and super smutty!), After Dark and Tokyo Vice all fall into that sordid group. Jake Adelstein even tweeted me recently OMG I squee'd; I'm a big fan girl now because of that and the fact that he went to Sophia University. I'm reading his sugoi journalist tales of keeping up with the yakuza right now.

Go watch his Daily Show interview, he's funny.

But after a while I begin kind of guilty and spoiled by just reading fun books all the time, so I try to temper the filth with *real literature.* Normally I'd read the *real literature* in class, so I've been slacking on my own. I kept some Natsume Souseki novels from my last lit class and there are some other classic titles and anthologies lying around somewhere. Botchan has been staring at me from a shelf for about a year. And if they aren't anywhere in my room, I live near some funky used book stores where all the books are haphazardly stacked by genre and I have to wonder how they pass fire inspections.

I have been purposefully staying away from one author in particular - STEPHANIE MEYER. When I go to book stores I can usually pick up a book and read a couple pages, even if I chose only because the cover was pretty and I have no real interest in buying the book. I've tried ironically reading Twilight aloud to my friends who like the books, and I can't even make it through a damn paragraph without wanting to whip out a big angry red Sharpie and start editing. The films are unintentionally hilarious in part because the source material is so awful. Though her success does give me hope that maybe I could start writing bad fan fiction and make it rich and never work a day in my life.

Then I could just read smutty books all day!