Fighting for Meaning Ok, I need some venting time. Not because I’m not grateful for what God’s doing in my life, but just because I’m at a period of transition again. To be honest, I love my kids, I love the atmosphere of my schools, I love that I can understand a lot of Japanese, but…well, I’m back to being really bored and finding little meaning in what I do. I mean, seriously, my job, when I’m not teaching or planning by myself, anyway, is not very hard. When I first came here, I found ways to make it meaningful, like by watching people, learning the culture, reading books about Japan, studying Japanese, etc. But now, well, I have two months (actually, less) left at school, and those things just seem to be kind-of a waste of time. Coming to school seems like a waste of time—especially when I have TWO THOUSAND things I could be doing outside of school that hold a lot more importance in my heart and really, really need to get done (for example, talking to people back home, preparing for our upcoming Easter program, cleaning, writing applications, working on other grad school stuff, the list goes on…) Not that the relationships at school are unimportant, but I find it ironic that today the most meaningful part of my time at school was helping my head teacher pick out a wedding dress from a catalogue. I’m not kidding. That is my wonder for the day: helping Tamaki sensei decide on a wedding dress (which was really fun). The rest of my day consisted of spending two hours dragging out making a worksheet to put verbs into past-tense and having kids repeat things like “You are happy. You look happy. You are sad. You look sad,” after me for an hour. The rest of my day? Staring off into space, thinking about whatever decided to pop into my head. Not rocket science. I need a new job. Maybe I’ll start studying Japanese again. Actually, maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll start studying Japanese again…it would keep me from dwelling on ambiguous things that make me want to go insane. Ambiguous things are not good to dwell on…EVER. Japanese is nice and concrete. So much so that it makes their system of studying English way too much like math. But…even math even sounds stimulating right now. So…Friday, I think I’ll bring my Japanese textbook. Jyaa...to not going insane: gambarimasu!