On The Last Year

My birthday has come and gone, and I have been thinking about how the last year went. I don’t have a great memory, but luckily I keep a journal. Looking back at my journals has reminded me that this was a pretty good year. A lot of firsts (both good and bad), and the year enabled me to grow up and become a better person. Well, at least I think it did.  I guess ya’ll out there reading this will have to be the judge of that
   
The year actually started off at a rocky place for I was still trying to get adjusted to walking after being bedridden in the hospital for breaking the fifth metatarsal (aka the pinkie toe bone) in my left foot. When I had broken my hand (ring finger in my left hand for that one) in high school football, I pretty much just had to put a cast on and I was back on the field like nothing happened. Being in the hospital for a month for a broken bone was a brand new experience to say the least. It was the first time I have ever stayed in a hospital overnight. While the stay could have been worse (it was actually quite pleasant in retrospect), by the last week, I wished nothing more but to be back in my own apartment. When I finally got back, it took a long while to finally feel like I was normal, and it didn’t help that the surgery to take out the metal in my foot (that was used to heal my foot from the inside) afterwards was mildly traumatic (though that was mostly due to a miscommunication between my doctor and I about whether I was going to be put under or not, it turned out I thought I was going to sleep through the surgery, the doctor had other plans). I realized how much I enjoy walking then, and how much it improves my life to walk around. I knew I liked walking, but not being able to walk for months (or at least no able to walk without pain), made me realize how much I do love a good walk.

I went with the rest of the year with solace that, no matter what happens, good or bad, at least I could walk. That was a blessing, especially since this year also had its share of car problems with my Japanese license renewal (and barely missing having to pay a huge amount of money), brakes failing (oh, you wacky brake fluid), and tire headaches (studless or not to studless). Walking has also made going to Fukuoka, Sakura-jima, and going back to America for Christmas with my fantastic, amazing girlfriend (hi honey!) a joy as well. Seeing my first concert in Japan (a band called “Aqua Timez,” the highlight was our group hardcore dancing to a song until we realized that the song was actually about the atomic bomb in Hiroshima), seeing my first volcano (or what I could make out of all the ash it was spurting), and being in Chicago for Christmas for the first time since I started working in Japan (an odd, snow-less Chicago Christmas, but going with family to see the movie White Christmas made up for it) made the year an extremely memorable one.

To be honest, there were a lot of other, much more personal things that happened, but I hesitate to really write about those because they are thoughts and memories I rather keep private. Also, there are a lot of things that, when I have a bit more time to reflect on them, I will be able to write on them with the sort of clarity I demand of my writing and myself.   And about writing, this was also the year I revived this blog! I had been writing off and on for years (back when it was called the “DDROG” and was primarily about blogging about my Dance Dance Revolution adventures in Japan), but it wasn’t until I got the advice that a creative person needs to set him or herself to a standard before they can get better and I decided that standard should be that I write a blog every week. I know I haven’t necessarily held myself to that standard in the past few weeks, and I apologize. All I can do is try and make sure I do better and it has been a great learning experience for me.

So, thank you so much all of you for reading, and I hope that you continue to read on as I begin on the adventure of my next year of life. This year is going to be a big one as it is the final year that I will be at the job I am now in Japan. I have a few plans and a few bets I am making (not literal bets, mind you), but I am sure that it will all work out somehow. I am hoping now that I am older and wiser I can write better blogs (and, god willing, get more readers), but it is something I am just going to take one post at a time.

BONUS!

Here are some highlights I wrote about in my journal that jumped out at me:
-Drinking a drink in Fukuoka supposedly made by Jack Johnson
-Having an argument with children about who is stronger: Goku or Batman (the kids thought Goku, but I knew Batman would win somehow)
-Remember SOPA/PIPA?
-Reading the Japanese comic series Slam Dunk made me fall in love with studying Japanese again
-This was the year I got into Oliver Sacks, Marc Maron, renting CDs in Japan (is that why CDs are so expensive in Japan? because you can rent them for like 200 yen at Tsutaya?), and a whole bunch of books, video games, and music.
-My most popular blog by far was A Lungistic Fate by far. Maybe I should write more about linguistucs?
- I still owe my girlfriend a steak dinner for breaking her bed. Sorry honey :(

Happy Birthday to Me!

I was too busy celebrating my birthday to write a blog this week, but stay tuned! There will be a blog this week! I PROMISE!

On Origami...eventually

I had some problems with a stomach flu (or whatever it was) this whole week, so writing a blog wasn't going to be easy. I couldn't think of any good ideas so I went to the unofficial JET program informative article contest page (which can be found here) and got a topic. The problem is that now I want to join the essay contest! I won't be able to post the blog in question today, but pay attention to your local facebook on July 17th! Make sure to like it (thumbs up!) as well!

Next week is my birthday blog, so until then, have a great week!

Edit: and here it is!

I took a Japanese language course back when I was in high school. It was pretty rare to have Japanese offered as a foreign language in a public high school at that time. I was very grateful to have that opportunity, but the teacher left much to be desired. It is not that she didn’t try, it’s just that it took years to unlearn all the outdated vocabulary words she taught our class (I still refer to dictionaries as “字引” [jibiki] sometimes, even though the current word, 辞書 [jisho] has been in common use for at least 20 years now), to relearn how to properly write kanji, and to shake the feeling that I would never learn Japanese because I had at one point been under her tutelage. I have completely forgotten my first Japanese teacher’s name, but I will call her Origami-sensei, for reasons that will become quite clear.

Origami-sensei, for all her eccentricities, had one in particular that I will always remember. In order to pass her class, the student needed to fold a traditional origami crane. This was rather strange, particularly because our class would spend entire class periods folding paper instead of studying Japanese. I was not very good at origami, and having my hands bruised by lineman drills at football practice didn’t help. I was becoming a bit of the clichéd “bumbling jock” trying to fold paper into something that resembled some type of bird. I remember spending several nights practicing how to fold the creases just right in order to pass the class. This was sort of funny because I was actually one of the top students in that class. I went along with it because Origami-sensei did seem like the type of person who might fail a student for not following her guidelines. On the third or fourth try, I managed to pass the origami test, and I can still fold a paper crane today.

Though Origami-sensei was sacked the next year and replaced by a much better and much more memorable teacher, I still wonder to this day why in the world she thought it was necessary to fold paper cranes in order to learn Japanese. To be honest, I was convinced it was just because she was crazy, but I have come to realize that traditional origami can be a pretty metaphor for understanding Japanese society. Origami as an art has many predetermined paths, and the folds may seem identical to the outside observer, but every piece of origami has the personality of the folder, though how apparent those folds are is really up to the person creating the paper art. Living in Japan, I can fall into the same folds as many other people; the path I travel may have been tread before, and others will follow the path I create.

It is that very realization of the repetition and the cycle of taking what was there and making it your own that is at the heart of traditional origami. Making a star, a box, or any sort of animal through origami requires both a vision of what the ideal craft should look like and the will to practice bringing that ideal to life. Even at its most immaculate, the origami can only live up to the icon that it is supposed to resemble. However, through hard work and persistence, that paper craft becomes more than a crane or a star; the origami becomes a representation of hard work and of how something as simple as a piece of paper can become complex and beautiful.

I can only hope that the origami cranes I leave behind me will be remembered and cherished by everyone that comes in contact with them. Perhaps mastering the art of origami isn’t simply about learning the Japanese language or Japanese customs. Maybe the real lesson that lies in origami is that sometimes the only way to learn something is to keep doing it over and over again. Thank you Origami-sensei, wherever you might be.

Doctors

I have been going to doctors as far back as I can remember. Unfortunately, when I was young I had some problems with ear infections, and I still remember being in a black room at a young age and listening to tones through old earphones to test whether my hearing was still there. I guess ever since then, doctors and I have had a rather symbiotic relationship. It helps that I also was in wrestling and football (the American one, not the one with the soccer ball) so doctors became a necessity when I broke my hand, got a concussion, or any such injury. Now I find that I go to doctors mostly to tell me that whatever crazy disease I think I have is in fact something that is  mostly harmless.

Though I blame my “disease exaggeration” mostly on the internet. As it turns out, no matter how small the pain or little the symptom is, the diagnosis I find on the internet will usually be either lethal or detrimentally life-changing. Sometimes I think I go to the doctor just for them to tell me I am crazy and give me some medicine to take when I get home. Though I know this is a rather privileged way of acting on my medical suspicions, and in the worst case scenario, I may not have the insurance to indulge. I have found myself going to the doctor more now a days, just to try and set up a threshold of what I can experience symptom-wise before I should worry.

Though I suppose that this reliance on doctors isn’t the healthiest seeing as doctors are only human. The fact of the matter is, doctors have to act confident and know everything in order to inspire confidence in their patients. If doctors don’t the patient may not go with the prescribed actions and medicine and just become weaker. Also, it is the confidence a doctor protrudes that may help spark a placebo effect, and make the patient feel better before a single pill is taken.

Maybe the lesson to take from that realisation is that a lot of health problems are not just physical, but of perception. That being said, I don’t think waiting for symptoms to go away and/or self medication is always the answer either. The only way I have been able to try and avoid this health conundrum is to try and just get healthier all around. When I exercise everyday, try to watch what I eat, and keep myself and my place clean, it may not make me invulnerable to sickness, but it at least gives me the peace of mind, when I go see the doc, that at least I tried.

Adults vs. Children

As I am nearing the end of the 5th book of Harry Potter, I am finding myself wondering a lot about the certain themes that run through the narrative. One thing I have noticed is how children and adults are separated into their own groups with the occasional exception. The reader sees through the children and the reader usually understands their motivations entirely (which gives credence to that old saying about being able to “read someone like a book”), while all the adults in the book are intentionally made hard to understand for the most part and set up most the mysteries and conspiracies that the children then have to solve. Children are honest, almost to a fault, while adults serve as secretive and at times, untrustworthy.

This is not unique to Harry Potter, in fact, most fiction made for children or even up to young adult that feature young people as protagonists feature that sort of “children vs. adults” conflict. I sometimes wonder as I am reading whether this is just for the convenience of the narrative or does it actually reflect on real life somehow? It is impossible to say definitively, but I do remember from personal experience that when I was a child, adults did seem like people I could never understand. The weird problem that begins to form as an adult reading a book for younger people is trying to parse what the author intends the book to actually say, and what the author is phrasing for the sake of the younger readers.

Not that those are mutually exclusive, but often I find that seeing through a child’s point of view can be a bit problematic for me at times. It is not just about immaturity, but often they end up in situations due to their inexperience and naivety that, while aren’t contradictory to the story, they sometimes feel like contrivances the author takes in order to fit the narrative. It is impossible by just reading the book why certain elements of immaturity are genuine or not, and it is almost pointless to really try and figure it out. In the end, the reader just has to trust in the author and decide by themselves whether or not it is a good story or not.

I guess the problem lies more in the fact that adults are typically the ones writing about children, and I can’t help but think they focus on their ideas of children instead of the reality. Though I am sure many children will agree that Harry Potter is pretty much what kids are like (or at least what they would be like with magic), I just think that sometimes people give thoughts and feelings to children the same way that people like to give thoughts and feelings to their pets. Obviously children and pets have emotions, but the worry is that adults perceive children's thoughts from what their minds want them to feel, not how the children are actually feeling. Even worse, what if kids read books like Harry Potter and feel like they aren’t living up to the childhood they should be having? Fiction can be a dangerous thing when we confuse it with reality.

Luckily, Harry Potter avoids many of the perception problems by taking place in a fantasy world, and also just being a compelling narrative to go through. The books go in great length to fill out the rest of the world, which helps a lot in trying to provide context for the reader. As with most things I find, the better it is written, the less problems with narrative seem to pop up. I can’t rate whether Harry Potter is a great series yet (not until I read all the books) but it is at least a book series that makes me think, and that is why I read books in the first place.