Backlog 3

In June, well to be honest my memory of June is a little fuzzy, I can't really remember anything special going on in June, but I'll try to put something down anyway.

June....June...hmm. Ya. Got nothing. I'm sure I did something interesting...yeesh, this is embarassing. An entire month of my life, and nothing memorable enough to clearly remember 4 months later. Hmm. Guess we gotta skip to July.

*EDIT* Wait! I remembered! Starting in June, I became a member of Megalos, the gym that Saki and her family are members of. I decided it was finally time to, if only once in my life, get in good shape, and have a body I could be proud of. That, and, I suppose it's fair to say that I'm getting to bear near that age when I should consider taking better care of myself than I have in the past. So, Monday through Thursday after work I'd head straight to the gym, and I gotta be honest it's a weird feeling. Especially after hating on meatheads for so long, the last thing I've ever really wanted to be was that guy that goes to the gym and talks weights all day. So, I decided that, as with apparently all things in life, some degree of compromise was necessary, and I started working out. I don't want to get buff, I don't want to lift record weights, and I don't wanna be cocky about it either. I just wanna get some muscle tone and lose some of this gut. Well, the gut is dietary, so, I guess the point of the gym is just to get regular excercise. Anyway, ya, that's June. If I remember anything else, well, I'll just edit it in later. *EDIT*

On July 5th Richard and I went to try our hands again at the JLTP (Japaense Language Proficiency Test). Both of us navigated the maze of alleyways and residential sidestreets that made up the neigborhood near the test site campus, and somehow, as if by sheer luck or divine providence, found the place in time to take the test. After the first section, vocabulary and kanji, we both stepped outside to consult about our impressions. We both had the same look on our faces, that of the sheer exhaustion that only comes with spending a long time looking at a midterm or final exam and not knowing what on God's green Earth is written on the pages. It was hard. Much harder than the test we both took in December, even though we failed that one too. Richard looked about ready to give up and go home, I had to prod him to stay.

We finished it up though, and I think, at least for me, the last half of the test went much better than the first. The same though, cannot be said for Richard, unfortunately.

As it turns out, I passed the test this time around by the same margin with which I failed the test last time. Richard on the other hand, got the worst score of all the many times he's taken the test, and I wonder about the effect that's had on him. Maybe it will finally encourage him to study, or maybe it will discourage him and he'll give up. Maybe nothing will change at all. Who knows. But it appears that the time I put in studying in the months between December and July paid off. So now I am officially a Level 2 speaker of Japanese.

I'd be more excited about it except that for all intents and purposes you have to be Level 1 to really do anything. It used to be that you could get a job that required Japanese if you had Level 2, but increasingly 1 is needed to get anything halfway resembling normal. So, I guess from here it's back to the books to get ready for that nightmare of a test.