Long time now see yet again. It's been May since I last wrote one of these posts, but I won't bother much with apologies. I've been doing that every time I write one of these lately.
If anyone's bothering to read this, you may also have noticed that I've posted a couple other posts recently. Those posts were all written back in 2017 before I'd even moved to Japan. They'd been sitting in drafts waiting to be edited, and now they finally have been. I'll be trying to write more in the future. I have a lot of books and TV shows that I've been watching the last year and a half that I want to talk about.
For instance, I just finished the first season of Star Trek: Discovery. While various Star Trek series were often on TV at our house when I was a kid, I never sat down to pay attention to them, which means I know a lot of random details about them but don't fully understand the universe. I kept getting interested about details of the universe while watching Discovery that would send me down a rabbit hole researching more. I got really into the show, so I definitely want to talk about it in more depth at some point.
I'm now in my second year of teaching in Japan, and from the lack of activity on this blog, you can probably guess that it keeps me busy. Our New Year's holiday is coming up next week, and I've made the decision not to travel for it this year. I need some time to get things in order at home. My apartment needs a serious cleaning from top to bottom (not just quick, casual stuff), and there's so much other stuff I want to do, not least of which is get some stuff written for this blog again. We'll see what I manage to do. I shouldn't have many distractions, since everyone will be with their families or traveling.
All that being said, things are really good here. I really like my job, even when it's stressful. To be quite honest, when I was preparing to come to Japan, I had to keep warning myself that things might be terrible. I didn't want to expect things to be amazing only to be disappointed, and in the process, I kind of thing I made myself come in with zero expectations.
That might have been a good thing, but it didn't turn out to be necessary. While I'm definitely still living in reality (I'd never say things are perfect), I'm really lucky that I chose a great school in a great city with great co-workers and great students. After some stuff that's happened recently, I've gotten particularly cheesy about how much I appreciate all of that. I know some people come to Japan to work at a school they've never visited before and have much worse experiences with the job or their co-workers.
Part (though not the entire) reason I've been thinking that lately is because I've been thinking about how close things could have been to being different for me. I was very close to requesting working in a certain city when I got my job, but I fully understand now how different working in a large city would be compared to where I work now, and I think it would have greatly impacted my enjoyment of the job for the worse. I'm so happy I've ended up where I did.
Woah. I totally didn't intend to go there with this post, but that's kind of a trend with these posts too, I suppose. Along with the long gaps between posting them. Like I said, I've been thinking about that a lot recently, so it's not too big of a surprise. I guess the end of the year is as good a time as any to reflect on what I appreciate in life. Since I'm not in America, I didn't have Thanksgiving for that.
No comments:
Post a Comment