Locking Day

Today was just another normal day =) Japanese didn't go so well because I had confused myself into thinking Kanji day started tomorrow when it actually started today, so I had another quiz I wasn't prepared for... whoops! It shouldn't happen again though.. Man I hate kanji... I'm just so far behind everyone. I hope I can stay focused and do some backtracking on older ones that everyone else seems to have learned already.

I got a quick lunch by myself so I could go study for as long as possible (I got ice cream too XD ). Greg joined me after a while and we both took turns napping, haha. I got a pretty good amount of work done. I really like that Tues/Weds/Fri gap between lunch and practice where I can study, instead of having to do it all after 10pm.

Then it was G-Splash time! Tonight was my favorite.... Locking! It's such a fun style of dance, and the two members who teach it are super-effective and really energetic. They're definitely the best teachers in the whole club. They taught us a ridiculously complex-looking dance in about 25 minutes and we had the rest of the time to practice! It's still a little confusing, but it's
reeeealllly fun! Most definitely my favorite style. I had been feeling a little unsure about G Splash with the time commitment and everything, and I wasn't having as much fun the past few days, but doing lock again changed everything! I want to learn that style!!

I got kaaragedon (like..sort of fried chicken with egg on rice) for dinner and it was pretty good. Now I'm home! Tonight I've got to practice those kanji for another quiz tomorrow, and I'm supposed to present my self introduction for the class tomorrow, but that's no big deal because I was one of the only two people who did it last time, and you don't even have to memorize it. Jeeze.

One thing I wanna talk about is how I miss America. I don't think you could have convinced me before I left that I would miss the concept of America once I got here. I thought maybe like, things I'm not used to might get annoying, like taking off your shoes or weird cultural things like that, but I'm not really one to get to missing places. I sometimes get to missing my family a lot while I'm at UVa, but that's about it. Lately though I've just been missing the comfort of America, really little things that people seem to do or not do here. For example, for some reason, I feel like people are very very conservative and reserved in public. Like, I feel really out of place if I put my hands in my back pockets, or cross my arms while I'm standing waiting for the train. Or if I had folded my legs up in the chair at the library today, or when I started hitting my stomach at dance practice because I had a side stitch. People just don't seem to goof around or act relaxed here like we do somehow...

I think I also need to get out of Tokyo soon, because I was thinking of how I miss rural southern Illinois, or even Virginia. America is so big that we build out, in Japan they seem to build up. Every time I look out a window, there's a building. There aren't any backyards really, just some small patches of grass. Every space is planned out and filled with concrete. Everyone's flowers are in pots on the side of the street. Even the parks and playgrounds are just pavement and bare dirt. I just want to go run a big field and then sit under a tree and look at the sky.

Appropriately, I started listening to Sufjan Stevens' Illinois album today =) I wouldn't say I miss America in a sad way, but more in an extreme longing kind of way. I think part of it is just that I haven't really connected with Japan on any level yet. It's so hard to meet other Japanese people really and make friends, so I haven't connected socially yet, there's a lot of things about the culture and social mentality that I don't really agree with, so I've had trouble there too. The only analogy I can come up with is from something I read online about studying abroad. It talked about how when you come back to your home country, you might feel "rootless," because you had to uproot yourself, grow new roots, and then you're uprooted again and you're left somewhere in between. Right now I feel like my roots are still firmly planted in America. I was ready to dig them right up, but... it seems for me there's no dirt to plant them in.

I can't really see Japan as being somewhere I would consider working anymore... Part of me is starting to wonder why I'm really studying Japanese or have an interest in Japan. I guess it's because I liked learning the language, and I was into anime and all, those are my only real reasons. Now that I'm here, it's just sort of seeming like another place, but not one that I should have an interest in for any particular reason. Maybe it's like how Mom thinks I deal with other things in life, I find something that's a challenge and I pursue it until it gets boring for me. Learning Japanese was a fun challenge until I came here and found out you don't really need to know any more than I know to get by here, and there's not really anything prompting me to learn more outside my own interest, which seems to be waning. I think I do need to get out of Tokyo before I make any other judgments though. At the very worst, I'm still glad I made the effort to study abroad here. I think it was the head of the religions department at UVa who solemnly advised that I make sure to visit Japan before devoting my life to studying it =)

Anyway, I might write more on those feelings as the semester goes on. Right now I'm just longing for wide open spaces, the way Charlottesville feels in the spring, green grass and trees, the feeling like I can do/wear whatever I want in a public space and still feel comfortable and normal, a normal schedule where I can go home during the day, Nick, a dirt road, and a big house with a piano inside.