but thinking about actually leaving makes me unbearably sad.

that said, now that i’m stepping back into normal life, i have a fair amount of social obligations to catch up on. there’s emails to respond to, socializing on facebook to do, and i have no desire to do any of it.

socializing in real life is no problem, because i can just show up to lab or tkd and socializing happens naturally. (well, relatively speaking. there’s only a few people who currently exist in real life who i can socialize with easily. but it’s not premeditated socializing, the type i especially fail at.)

on the other hand, when someone sends me an email, usually it’s something that requires thought, so i set it aside until i have time to put sufficient effort into replying. as time goes by, though, the desire to respond decreases, and it becomes more and more awkward to send a reply, usually weeks/months after the original message was sent.

basically, i feel this huge pressure to be social, something that probably shouldn’t cause all that much pressure in the first place.

then, guy in question looked over and said “hey, she probably doesn’t understand what we’re talking about. do you know what 痔 is?” i responded with a typical “eh?” head tilt. then he tried explaining the concept of hemorrhoids to me in a strange mix of japanese and english, because why would you need to know that in a foreign language? in fact, i’m not entirely sure why he even had the vocabulary to the extent he did on the matter.

on the one hand, TMI. i probably didn’t need to know that, ever. on the other hand, there’s an otherwise all-male social group in japan that has accepted me to the extent that i get awkward things explained to me without prodding. which is kind of awesome.

monday is math day, with 3 hours of exam over a year and a half of math i have taken, as well as up to a year’s worth of math i learned the past month (because bioengineering is the math-lite engineering major). i’m feeling especially sketchy on 18.02 [vector calculus/multivariable calculus], mostly because surface integrals hate me. there’s also the advanced math section, which has fourier series, which i can never evaluate properly, even if i know how to do them,  fourier transforms, which i kind of learned recently but can probably BS, and PDEs, which i probably picked up somewhere, but also didn’t really learn formally.

tuesday is the science section. there’s 8 sections, of which i can choose two. there’s fluid mechanics, which i had to relearn frantically over the past week or two, despite the fact that my research is on fluid mechanics. the other subject is electromagnetism, which is probably okay, though the guys in lab all act amazed when i tell them that that’s the subject i picked..

wednesday morning is an interview. despite reassurances from the lab that it’s only a couple of minutes long and not that bad, i feel like it’s going to somehow going to go horribly wrong. i got the impression that, for foreign master’s students, the interview is supposed to test one’s japanese as well as functioning as a normal interview (which japanese students wear a suit to). one of the guys in lab did say 「ステファニーのようにしゃべれる留学生はいないだろう」which made me feel a little better, but, you know, the lab doesn’t really get many gaijin who know any japanese.

when i’m not studying these days, i’ve been discovering  福山雅治 [fukuyama masaharu], who is pretty awesome. i heard this from several unrelated sources before i finally decided to youtube-stalk him. i only seem to like his recent songs, which are mostly emo-sounding ballads, but are still awesome.

• 想 – new love new world -: the video is awesome. and the song is probably my favorite at the moment because it has lines like 「原子レベルで遺伝子レベルで欲しがる進化のカギ　愛」which i look at and think “oh, genetics! evolution! i know these words!” but it’s a upbeat love song.
• 最愛: the video is related to the little prince? the song is pretty emo and the video is mostly him looking emo (on a spaceship?), but it’s okay.
• はつ恋: also emo, but more raw-painful-emo. it has an edge that the other emo songs don’t have – a “i can’t bear leaving the house because my heart has shattered into a million pieces” video.
• squall: the first time i heard this song, i swear i’d heard it before. i’m half convinced that someone sang this at karaoke once and i remembered the melody because it’s that good. also, he’s wearing glasses. <3 (also, i like to go around belting out parts of the song, like「もう隠せ～～ない ……… 叶えてほ～～しい」because those are the only parts i remember.)

outside, the weather is perfect – rainy, almost cold – but the inside of my room is still hot and humid and sticky. these dorms couldn’t fail much worse at life. i move in two weeks.

i think caffeine has a similar physiological effect on me as alcohol. it’s rather bizarre. but this could begin to explain my inability to study effectively.

but afterwards, we were walking back, and, once to a main road, took cabs back to the dorms. while cabbing it back, american guy mentioned that japanese guy started getting really nervous about his friend, and that’s why he insisted on taking cabs back. (the dorms were seriously within walking distance – at least as far as i was concerned – and cabs in japan are pretty expensive.) japanese guy had mentioned that the way that his friend walked was dangerous or something [but i didn't really take him seriously at the time]. also, according to american guy, the other guy was making the surrounding japanese people pretty nervous. me, being me, totally didn’t notice until it was brought up after the fact. (looking at the guy afterwards, he looks kind of like a military type – buzz cut, kinda built. and maybe that kind of guy makes japanese people nervous. i seriously don’t know.)

just a reminder that, after a year living in japan and, even understanding a reasonable amount of japanese, there are still times when i have no clue what’s going on.

石 is also applying, but to the doctorate program. Sometimes I make him solve problems for me that I can’t do on my own (but actually, I can’t do most of the problems on my own in a reasonable amount of time; it’s rather depressing). Every time someone shows him a problem, he’s all 「超簡単」 [sooo easy], but then when he’s actually asked to solve the problem, it becomes 「ちょっと待って」[... wait a minute]. It’s nice having a なかま, and I feel a little bit better knowing that the problems are hard for other people besides me. (中 claims he has no idea how to do them, but supposedly gets 100s in his classes. i bet he secretly knows.)

In any case, I am currently the most boring person in the world for another month, unless studying at Mister Donut makes one interesting. (it doesn’t. lots of people do it.) Which is what I’ll be doing soon. Blogging + being in lab is probably enough distraction for one day. (lab temp << dorm temp; can’t concentrate in 30 c and humid)

after some thinking, i realized i could summarize half a page in one sentence:

i like things that are difficult.

so simple, yet it describes so much about me and my motivations. in case anyone was curious.

i go through phases where i do a few things that are pretty awesome fairly close to one another, so people get the false impression that i’m actually decent at soccer. (in actuality, the only reason i haven’t failed too obviously is because of tkd.) but then i miss easy balls, and i feel bad. someone noticed that i’m left-footed, but then everyone was confused when i said that i was left-footed “sometimes.” i think tkd has made me right-footed in certain situations, but i’m definitely more comfortable kicking and stuff with my left leg. i think.

soccer is a lot like basketball, actually. except with feet. i kinda fail at basketball, too. but i fail less at kicking things.

then, i finally made myself to go tkd, two weeks after returning to sendai. it was probably not the best timing (out of shape, playing soccer, being generally sore), but it felt right being there once i got there. near the dojang, i ran into 王-chan. not literally. but it was pretty shocking actually seeing him at tkd again. apparently there’s a few new adults, but none of them were at practice. still, there were quite a few people there, so that was rather happy. until i had to spar. i practiced throwing a few reverse turning kicks, though, even though none of them really came close to landing. i think.

also, 源-chan has a real black belt/uniform! but he didn’t stick around for practice – all the kids had already finished practice when we started. i’m glad he wasn’t around to spar though – i’m already beat up enough, and i usually end up the most beat up after sparring him. even though it’s also the most fun.

a couple of people asked me if i was testing at the next belt test here. i guess there’s a belt test soon? i don’t know how i feel about testing for 2nd dan, much less in japan. i still feel like a baby black belt, especially after being in boston recently (where even the 1st dans – and color belts – are pretty awesome). ironically, i feel like testing for 2nd dan is a bigger step than testing for 1st dan, especially since i tested really fast up to my black belt. i definitely need more time to settle into my tkd before i feel comfortable testing.

it was more fun than i expected, playing for the first time. (of course, my lab doesn’t know that it was my first time… i think.) i even scored a couple of goals! the first one, i think 中 was being nice because i’d made a lot of shots and hadn’t gotten anything in (and 中 has this weird ability to make goals), so he passed the ball about a meter or something to me, in front of the goal, and it was a pretty straightforward shot from there. the second, 今-sensei, i think, was making a corner shot, and i caught it with my chest and kicked it in, and it was very awesome-looking. i think i earned quite a few cool points with my lab, because they all seemed quite impressed.

i also ran smack into 石 trying to get the ball from him. that was kinda fun.

everyone was complaining afterwards, but it was the best exercise i’ve had since i got back.