A Long One.

Well, I've been at this gig for a couple of weeks now. Here are some of my thoughts:

Getting up at 5:45 is, in fact, possible. It's not entirely pleasant, but, I've hacked through it the times I've had to. Hasn't been all that often, but, when I sub at a school I've never been to, and have to be at the station around 7:40 to get to the school by 8 since I don't actually know the time when I can waltz in, it usually means I have to get up around then to make it out there, since invariably I have to go out to the middle of nowhere on three or four different trains. The place I'm going to tomorrow isn't that far from my normal school, but all the same that's when I'm up tomorrow. It's only 15 minutes earlier than I would otherwise wake up, and 6 isn't that fantastic either, but it's still 6 and not 5 something, so, it feels different. And it's still dark out at 5:45. By 6, there's visible light. Odd how quickly dawn spreads across the Earth. It's cold out, freezing actually, but some of the most pretty things I've seen so far have been in those early twilight hours walking to Minami Nagareyama station. There have been a couple times where there was snow on the ground at that time that I never would have otherwise seen. Maybe the tiniest remnants later that morning, but were I still working for Nova, I would never have seen it since it would have been noon by the time I saw the ground for the first time.

I've turned into Greg, in the sense that I finish work, come home, and all I wanna do is have a beer and go to bed. The alcohol part of it kinda bothers me, I'm so pooped by the time I walk in I really do just wanna have a few drinks to put me out and go to sleep. But, other than that I go to bed around 10 every night now, and that's had a weird effect on my view on life. I know that what's happening now is going to, hopefully not permanently change my outlook on life. Last night Saki and I met up to have dinner, and Bryan invited us to go to a movie that started at 9:15, and we had to turn it down because it would get out at 11:30 and that's way too late for either of us to be finishing up something and making our way home, having to get up when we do. I used to finish work at 9. Hell, before that I used to finish at 11:30. Now at 9 I'm getting ready to call it a night, and by 11:30 I'm fast asleep. I remember my first though upon getting his text was, "why does he have to start everything so late?" and it struck me that it's not late at all, I'm just on a completely different schedule now. Richard seems to be much better at it than I, we both get up around the same time, and work the same hours, but he stays up till midnight or later every night. I just, and Ty's with me on this, need 8 hours of sleep. Maybe that's just my age talking, or maybe it's that it's winter and it's not light out when I wake up, but if I went to bed any later, I would be completely wrecked when I walked out the door. By the time I arrived at my school, I would still be asleep and it would be written all over my face. Personally, I don't want to have to deal with constant "Are you tired?"s at work. I get it enough as it is from my head English teacher at Ouji ES, just cause when I'm not in the classroom I'm very, very toned down. I guess it's just hard for some people to recognize that it's entirely possible to go from calm and tranquil to nonstop energy, not only possible but necessary to pull either off. Anyway, I need 8 hours of sleep, so, by the time I have to wake up, my body is sick of being in bed and I have to get up. As is, I have never once, not on one night since starting, slept the whole night till my alarm. Part of that is the winter factor, where either it's so cold in my room I wake up or because the heater is too close to me and I wake up to push the heater away a bit, only to wake up again as soon as I get cold enough for the previous to apply. I thought the head pad I purchased and started using recently would have remedied that, but it's really only ensured I wake up at least once or twice to adjust the temperature of all my various heating devices in order to get back to sleep. Not only that, but I wake up to my roommates coming home all the time, especially on Sunday night, when Dave has the day off the next day, like I used to. It also doesn't help that Dave basically never sleeps. I wake up to him talking over in-game voice chat all the time at 1 or 2 or 4 in the morning, but what really gets me is when I get woken up by something in the middle of the night only to look at my phone and have it be 11:56pm. It's depressing and almost funny that I'm asleep at that hour to be woken up by something. But I don't complain. As soon as my schedule becomes more regular, and the sun starts coming up sooner, my schedule will adjust itself and I'll be able to go to sleep much later and wake up at the same time. Dave gets about 4 hours or sleep a night, much like the rest of Japan, and while I'll probably never reach that I'm sure I'll start going to bed at midnight come spring.

The part of it that kinda bothers me is that now on my weekends, instead of waking up at 8, like I had already started to about a year ago, I now wake up at 6 or 7, such that even on my days off I'm tired by 10pm, and it's hard to stay out. I don't ever want to go to bed at 10pm on a Friday or Saturday. But, assuming I'm not with Saki or out with my friends, there's a good chance that would happen just because my internal clock has been set to that time, and re-adjusting it every weekend would just make Monday morning all the worse. Ugh.

Teaching in schools is different, but not so different that I don't already feel like I've been doing it for ages. In a sense, I have. Every Nova Kids lesson I ever taught got me ready for this, because of everything from experience with Japanese kids to teaching lessons with a complete and utter lack of preparation to teaching the same lesson three or four times a week, to getting everything ready a week in advance so I can just waltz in and do whatever feels good. All the dynamics that make a good of bad lesson are exactly the same, except here I can just use Japanese if I have to, and I have a teacher in there to throw in some discipline if things get out of hand. It's basically, it's everything I wanted out of Nova Kids. The only bad part is that, uh, huh, well whatever I was going to say just left me so I guess there's not really a bad part. Another thing I like is that I get to see the kids in their safe zone. At Nova, they were in a small intimate group, and that was good, I really enjoyed that because my influence was very personal, but at school they're at their second home. School is your life as a kid, everything of any real importance happens there, and the people and routines you see and have there are basically your reality, and that's huge. As a public school teacher, I'm a part of that reality, and more than that I'm a part of what is safe and normal and real to them. At Nova kids could always say, "this isn't school so I can just fuck off and not care" but in schools, while it's still present, it's there to a much lesser extent. I've really enjoyed seeing what life is like for Japanese kids. It's also really interesting to see what goes on behind the scenes, how schools are actually run. I got called Sensei at Nova by my students, but, even though I'm something of a novelty still with this job, I really am Sensei.

I was having my regular inane and thusly mandatory Japanese style teacher's meeting this afternoon after school got out, and I was talking to the 6th grade teachers, whose classes last time I taught a lesson about family members' abilities e.g. "My mother can play the piano". The first class, with a teacher who doesn't speak English really at all, ended with a game I wasn't really able to explain very well, such that when they were doing their game, their partners were saying yes and no to statements, rather than questions, and didn't realize that was the case. So, after class, I took the teacher aside, and told her in Japanese that unfortunately my last game was poorly explained, and that many of the students perhaps didn't understand what they were supposed to do, and that I was sorry for that. The next class I skipped a game I had done earlier and worked with my teacher to make sure that the students understood the instructions via English and Japanese, and the game went just fine. Anyway, she told this story to the other teacher, and how surprised (good) she was that I went out of my way to apologize to her for this. She also told me, through the other teacher translating, that the students all like me very much, and that I'm very popular with all the kids in school. I could have guessed this by the way I get chased around the school constantly and and am bombarded nonstop from sunrise to sundown in the halls with hellos and "Deibito-sensei!"s, but hearing it from the teachers made my day. Especially to hear it from a teacher I didn't really think liked me all that much. Koala-sensei(Furukawara-sensei) told me after my last lesson with him that my lesson was Ichiban (the best), and I was just tickled pink. I'm so happy to hear that they like what I'm doing, even if I still think I'm hacking through it most of the time. Today, I didn't really think my lessons went all that well, but it's fast easy learning what does and doesn't work. Sometimes I don't like dumbing down lessons, but all parties involved enjoy it a lot more when everyone can accomplish an entire lesson's worth of material, even if that involves only teaching 1/3rd of the material originally planned. Compared to the other meetings I've had so far, today's were about 1/4th the time, because my lesson plans for next week are much, much more simple. Intro, song, review, vocab and a game. Boom. Done. If, somehow, for some strange reason, I have extra time, we can just play games. I constantly draw big lines through lesson materials as I'm realizing some things are just way too much for kids. I wanna give them a one liner they can bust out in a game, and really hammer down before they leave. Anything other than that is just gonna get lost, and nothing at all will stick.

I went to Iidabashi on Wednesday, a white day, to pick up my passport, after receiving an email from Interac telling me my visa stuff was finished. I was happy to see I'd received another 3 year visa, after worrying it would be downgraded to a 1 year. I also got a bunch of info about Junior High School from Jason, and talked to him about my transfer. He finished my sentence for me saying it was already taken care of, and mentioned Matsudo when I was listing the cities I was interested in working in. So, either I'm working in Matsudo from April, or I'm gonna be in this area at least. I'm happy to hear that. I really hope it's somewhere the commute isn't so bad. What I really hope is that it's somewhere I can move close to. I'm kinda looking forward to moving closer to a school, I just want it to be somewhere near a hub, so I can still go out and see my friends. I think ideally I would be able to get there easily from Shin Matsudo, so I could get an apartment there with Saki. Somewhere on the Noda line would be ok too. Whatever the case is though, I can now start a countdown to moving. I could be living with Saki 4 or 5 months from now. How weird is that?

She and I went out last night after she got off work, and we were bitching to each other about how, thanks to work schedules, we haven't had sex in like three weeks. It's driving the both of us nuts. She asked last night before we got on our trains why were weren't living together dangit. I just want more intimate time with her dangit. She's coming over on Saturday night, but, it's a bad time of the month so that's a no-go. It doesn't really bother me, sex isn't really that important to me anymore so much as just getting to be close and in private with her, but, still. It would be nice.

Anyway, in terms of reflections on my first couple weeks, it's been fine. Xiao's been bitching a lot about this and that, but I really can't complain. She's still getting used to classes not going how she wants, I've long since let go of trying to control kids. She's still being bothered by teachers that need control, I've long since let them have it. It's just stuff you learn how to do. You can throw yourself against these walls all you want, they're not coming down for anything. They're the fabric of reality. I learned a long time ago, if you have a problem with something, and you want it to go away, YOU have to change. It's YOUR problem. I guess that's a hard one to learn.