The Nutcase So, after all is said and done, I’ve come to one great conclusion: I am an idiot. This realization I have come to before, but never with such a blast of humiliation. I’ve heard some of you say (or rather, read some of you write) that at times, in the office, you occasionally snicker or smile in weird ways, which evokes curious glances, or slightly irritated stares in your direction. Well, I’m sure I’ve topped you all. Two days in a row, in fact, have I topped you. So, Tammy and I have been discussing how allegories are a wonderful thing, and how they make difficult concepts seem more comprehensible. So, we began brainstorming about different objects to link with each unique personality in our group. Tammy, as was realized by Cristy, strongly resembles origami. Though tender and fragile, because of the “folds” God has made in her life, she has become quite resilient and can endure much hardship with strength and perseverance. This being such a wonderful description of her spirit, Tammy and I set out to try to find an object to characterize me. We thunk and we thunk, till our brains were all thunked out, but ultimately came up with nothing except for something like “porcupine” since I’m often rather gruff when I first meet people. But, we ultimately gave that one up, because a porcupine has no desirable thing behind the gruffness, just a dangerous, prickly animal. So we forgot about it. Until yesterday. In the past two weeks, I have been venturing to put to rights my complete detestation of Little Women. Having only seen the movie, and being highly disturbed after each viewing, I resolved to read the book, and hopefully discover it more entertaining, and ultimately more fulfilling, than the Hollywood version of the classic. So I asked for the novel for Christmas, and my brother Chris, being the fellow literature lover that he is, indulged me. After falling in love with the book, for it is, in fact, very different from the film, I realized that I have many similarities to the often boyish, brash, and act-without-thinking Jo March. Therefore, you can imagine my excitement when, toward the end of the book, Jo’s sister suggests an object that well describes her character, saying, “You are like a chestnut burr, prickly outside, but silky-soft within, and a sweet kernel, if one can only get at it.” “That’s it!” thought I. But unfortunately, less than a second later, I proved myself a little too like Jo’s character, when, impulsively, without any trace of forethought, (in the teachers office) I exclaimed, gesticulating enthusiastically with my non-book-filled hand “That’s it! Tammy, I’m a chestnut!” Yes, that was bad. It was very bad. And I believe in the next few seconds I was more of a beet than a chestnut. I sank down in my chair a bit, chiding myself for how silly and impetuous I allow myself to be, and determining to not let such an outburst of emotion occur again. Especially in the all-formal, Japanese teacher’s room. But like I said, my character is all too much like Jo March. Today I finished the novel, and was looking for something to do during the “just-finished-book slump” that inevitably came on afterwards, so I got on the internet to check my email. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a message from one of my good friends in Mansfield, and even more surprised (in fact, shocked out of my pants might be a bit mild) to read therein that one of my friends is expecting a child, good friends of mine are considering lives as missionaries, and yet two more friends, who just started dating before I left for Japan, are now engaged. What I should have done was maybe raise my eyebrows a little and squash the surge of astonishment that bolted through my body. I should have waited until later to express my surprise. Instead, I sat there, mouth dropped as far as my jaw would allow, and made some sort of loud hard-breathing noise, as if I was hyperventilating and would soon collapse if I didn’t gulp in air in a panting furry. Before I realized what I was doing, it was too late. The teacher next to me, concern seeping from her furrowed brows, asked me with deepest sympathy, “Are you ok?!” I don’t really know if I’m ok. I’m incurably plagued by the disease of idiocy. How do you explain that in Japanese?