12/26/2010

i am really afraid. i don’t know a lick of japanese. and in one month i’ll arrive in tokyo. i’ll be met by someone who doesn’t really speak english. that person will guide me onto either another plane or a train that will take me to yamagata prefecture and maybe they’ll deposit me at my new home and let me be but it’s also possible that they will want me to meet some people, or go to the bank and set up an account, or talk to the board of education, or get drunk. i hear there’s a lot of spontaneous drunk-getting. i’m not even really very good at that! although it does make me a lot more social so that could probably really only be a good thing. i bet i can make people laugh, even if i don’t speak japanese. especially because i don’t speak japanese.

i am so excited. especially when i see pictures of classrooms full of kids. i really like kids. i can’t wait to hang out with a bunch of 5th and 6th graders all the time. i can’t wait to meet the other JET’s in the area and i am excited to go to hot springs and mountains and rivers and see cherry blossoms and i can’t wait to give gifts to people who are helpful to me and i really can’t wait until i start learning another language. learning languages is so cool. it’s a big challenge for me but i find it fascinating and i think it helps me gain insight into the world and how people across the globe interpret their existence. tonight i just wrote out half of the katakana, which are the written characters they use to express words that have been assimilated into japanese but are still foreign (like u-i-su-ki =whisky). it made me exhausted just to make flash cards of them. but at the same time i found myself remembering being a little girl and making up coded alphabet after coded alphabet. i always got pretty good with them in a short amount of time, good enough that i could write in an alphabet comprised of completely made up symbols just as quickly as i could write in the normal alphabet only about a day after making it up and practicing with it.

i really think i can do this. i feel like i’ve become so much more well-rounded and complete this year. i painted pictures for christmas and i was really proud of how they turned out. i’m starting to take myself more seriously and recognize the value in myself that other people have always seen as inherent in me. it sounds silly typing it out but that’s really the crux of what i’ve left this year with. a lot more confidence in my natural skills and abilities and a little bit more of the patience it takes to develop them. thank god i’m doing this JET thing at 25 and not 21, right after i got out of school. there’s no way i would have been able to handle it back then. i had way too much pride but not nearly enough confidence. does that even make sense? now i am so much more willing to make a fool out of myself if it means i will learn something from the situation. it feels like i have peeled back a few layers of the walls that i have been constructing around myself since who knows what age. i am finally really ready to live without them. but i think that also explains why being at home is so difficult for me right now. because, those walls were formed in this house, in direct response to my father and even my mother and this town and to be back here without them can be pretty scary and it feels really raw, sometimes. tonight my father told me that he and my brother are going to buy some property together and he is going to make sure my brother gets the largest share of the land in the will because he knows, “joe won’t let you girls sell the land and piss all the money away.”

sweet, thanks dad. love you, too!

i can’t even get started on my father. there’s too much.

midnight, i just received this email:

Dear clea

How do you do!
I am board of education city staff.
My name is .
From now on, we’re pleased to meet you.
We wait you come to our city.
When you come to city, we will pick
up you at nearby station.
Probably travel shop staff guide you to ride by
shinkansen.
I want to ask you!
U.S. JET participants can be exemption from
taxation.
So please bring Form 6166.
It’s issued by the IRS.

Next time, I will send new information for you.
if you have question about ALT job, city,
or us, please send mail for me.

bye now!

this email both increases my anxiety ten-fold and eases my tension and makes me smile.

<3clea