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Hey, it's my half birthday today
You know what's dumb? I got home last night at like midnight, and I didn't go to sleep until 3am, and yet I didn't write any LJ or Marinerds entries at all. I hate when I do that. Sometimes I feel like the words simply aren't there, even for mundane entries, though then I do something like going back to read old entries and I'm so glad they're all there, and I feel like a big lazyass. I still need to write up my Monday adventures.
As it turns out, blowing off work for the 3-day weekend wasn't catastrophic. I was a little bit pressed for time and pretty much didn't leave the building from 1pm to 11pm, but no big disasters happened. Only one thing sucked and it was that I started doing GEOS counselling, and my first student that I talked to about their progress and future plans basically said they're not sure if they'll be renewing in 2 months and that makes me REALLY SAD because sometimes I can't tell if they just worry about money or if they worry about ME.
My other counselling went ok though. I told my student that I was worried about whether they are just shy or if they are worried about English ability. As a result they talked more than anyone else did in the 7pm class. I *hope* that's a good thing.
I taught tongue twisters in my 8pm class. "She hates sea snakes" turned into "She sells sea shells by the sea shore", because I couldn't get them to say "she" and "sea" differently. (In Japanese there IS no "si", just "shi"). And in 9pm... I had only the one student again, which is good because I can work with them, but BAD because I don't go through the planned Sprint lesson, more like I teach the grammar point and then try to pull it into topics we like to talk about. I also make a big point of saying a lot of "do you understand?" because this particular student will nod and smile and nod and smile and not understand a WORD I'm saying. Maybe this is still my problem. I'm still learning.
I played some Pop'n when I got back to the station at 11ish. "End of the Century" on whatever level makes it a 27 is really fun. I know I'm not getting better at PNM all that quickly, but there's definitely been a shift from "I play stuff in the 22-24 range and push myself to pass 25's" to "I play stuff in the 25-26 range and push myself to pass 27's and 28's".
I noticed that my station arcade has Quiz Magic Academy, the trivia game I played with Shinsuke last weekend, but I'm not sure I could possibly play it by myself, even if I just tried the sports questions. On the other hand it'd be good Japanese reading practice.
I had dinner from the small katsu place near me on road 35. I love and hate that they are always so grumpy there. Maybe it's that I only come in at 11:15pm or so and they're tired. It's partially kind of nice NOT getting a big happy fake chipper Japanese welcome and all at a place, and at the same time sometimes I think they're just thinking "Great, the gaijin's back." But they're grumpy to everyone so it's ok.
And then I spent the next 3 hours cleaning my room and/or goofing off. Seriously, my apartment looks a lot better than it did a few days ago, though it's still... cluttered or crowded or something. Maybe I need a little more storage space or something. I'll try to take a picture of it sometime in the next few days, since I realize people have no idea what my place looks like.
OH yeah, and I also think I need a new suit jacket. All of mine are ridiculously big, and the smallest one now looks like crap because I've been machine-washing it twice a month... despite that the label clearly says "you can machine wash this suit jacket". The larger jackets are... well... way too fucking big to wear now. Like most of my clothes. I mean, I can actually take off my suit pants without unbuttoning them. Though I've actually sort of plateaued at 8 kilograms lost since moving here, so if that's stable, maybe I could seriously start researching some new clothes.
The only issue is, the cleaners here don't do one-day cleaning, and most of them are closed on Sunday, and close on Saturdays at 8pm. I guess I could find out if it'd be possible to bring in stuff on Monday morning and have it ready by Tuesday afternoon -- or if I was regularly going to get suits cleaned, maybe just start wearing my grey suit jacket, and ONLY get it cleaned.
As it turns out, blowing off work for the 3-day weekend wasn't catastrophic. I was a little bit pressed for time and pretty much didn't leave the building from 1pm to 11pm, but no big disasters happened. Only one thing sucked and it was that I started doing GEOS counselling, and my first student that I talked to about their progress and future plans basically said they're not sure if they'll be renewing in 2 months and that makes me REALLY SAD because sometimes I can't tell if they just worry about money or if they worry about ME.
My other counselling went ok though. I told my student that I was worried about whether they are just shy or if they are worried about English ability. As a result they talked more than anyone else did in the 7pm class. I *hope* that's a good thing.
I taught tongue twisters in my 8pm class. "She hates sea snakes" turned into "She sells sea shells by the sea shore", because I couldn't get them to say "she" and "sea" differently. (In Japanese there IS no "si", just "shi"). And in 9pm... I had only the one student again, which is good because I can work with them, but BAD because I don't go through the planned Sprint lesson, more like I teach the grammar point and then try to pull it into topics we like to talk about. I also make a big point of saying a lot of "do you understand?" because this particular student will nod and smile and nod and smile and not understand a WORD I'm saying. Maybe this is still my problem. I'm still learning.
I played some Pop'n when I got back to the station at 11ish. "End of the Century" on whatever level makes it a 27 is really fun. I know I'm not getting better at PNM all that quickly, but there's definitely been a shift from "I play stuff in the 22-24 range and push myself to pass 25's" to "I play stuff in the 25-26 range and push myself to pass 27's and 28's".
I noticed that my station arcade has Quiz Magic Academy, the trivia game I played with Shinsuke last weekend, but I'm not sure I could possibly play it by myself, even if I just tried the sports questions. On the other hand it'd be good Japanese reading practice.
I had dinner from the small katsu place near me on road 35. I love and hate that they are always so grumpy there. Maybe it's that I only come in at 11:15pm or so and they're tired. It's partially kind of nice NOT getting a big happy fake chipper Japanese welcome and all at a place, and at the same time sometimes I think they're just thinking "Great, the gaijin's back." But they're grumpy to everyone so it's ok.
And then I spent the next 3 hours cleaning my room and/or goofing off. Seriously, my apartment looks a lot better than it did a few days ago, though it's still... cluttered or crowded or something. Maybe I need a little more storage space or something. I'll try to take a picture of it sometime in the next few days, since I realize people have no idea what my place looks like.
OH yeah, and I also think I need a new suit jacket. All of mine are ridiculously big, and the smallest one now looks like crap because I've been machine-washing it twice a month... despite that the label clearly says "you can machine wash this suit jacket". The larger jackets are... well... way too fucking big to wear now. Like most of my clothes. I mean, I can actually take off my suit pants without unbuttoning them. Though I've actually sort of plateaued at 8 kilograms lost since moving here, so if that's stable, maybe I could seriously start researching some new clothes.
The only issue is, the cleaners here don't do one-day cleaning, and most of them are closed on Sunday, and close on Saturdays at 8pm. I guess I could find out if it'd be possible to bring in stuff on Monday morning and have it ready by Tuesday afternoon -- or if I was regularly going to get suits cleaned, maybe just start wearing my grey suit jacket, and ONLY get it cleaned.
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still, I dunno, it might be expensive AND I'm not even sure where I can have it done.
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Admitting you don't understand is such a hard thing to do, but also so incredibly important. Perhaps the greatest life skill you can teach this one is how to do that.
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Dang. Nice work! How'd that happen -- more not-driving, less eating, ... ?
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