Before coming to Japan, my life wasn't terribly different from what it is now. Except of course, my friends and family were closer and when I went to the store to buy household cleaner, it didn't take me 30 minutes to translate the kanji to figure out if I am buying actual cleaner or house perfume. Oh and I cant forget how much simpler things were when I had a dryer to fluff and un-wrinkle the clothes I left lying on the floor for a few days too long.
No, for the most part, my life is pretty much the same even when its not.
So, why is it that I don't feel half the stress I did when I was back home and things were 'simpler'?
I have faced some pretty nerve wrecking things in my first few months. There was the 3 visits to various doctors to have gunk vacuumed out of ears, the continuing gunk that built up afterward until I discovered the translation for peroxide in Japanese and was able to continually bubble out the weird stuff, along with my own infection remedy to reduce the swelling. It worked amazingly. Trust me, I am as surprised as you. Not to say Japanese doctors are incompetent or less qualified than the ones back home, I just became increasingly uncomfortable with the loud noise associated with vacuuming my ear canal.
I also lost all my photos when my computer crashed and thought I had backed up my data, only to find out that the backup also failed. Its nothing dramatic, just that I was really attached and proud of some of the work I did in creating some of those photos. Its a tragedy to lose the original pixels. And now, my computer is acting up again...
So what is greener?
I laugh. I feel free to laugh at my mistakes or my students mistakes. Mistakes don't rule my life like they do in America. I don't when I realized this but its weird. All those things would have bothered me in before, dont keep me up at night. My exhaustion at the end of the day, is just shear exhaustion from navigating in a world where I dont speak the language. And if people are talking about me... I dont know and I dont care. Well mostly, I dont care...
Hahahaha... For example. I have no clue about the conversation happening behind me but I keep hearing the teachers say, "Hasta la vista." And I am wondering what Arnold or Terminator has to do with their convo. I know that they dont teach Spanish in this school.
How can you not laugh at the oddity of only knowing 25% of the conversations around you? And reading even less?!?! In all my life I have struggled with school, work, judo, everything! Never being more than average at best. And here, here by all standards of language, literacy and dare I say it, fashion. I am a complete failure!!! And yet I still walk around with a smile on my face and a skip in my step. I hope that when I return home, I can keep this sense of self with me, more than any material thing I bring back. I want to walk through the rest of my life feeling that I'm walking on the greener side of life.
Sorry, I suppose this is really meant for my own personal journal but.. I havent had the time to write much lately. I took on extra classes... for fun. Can you believe that!
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