El Año Pasado
A little over a year ago, I left Japan (July 25th I believe) after a crazy hectic whirlwind two weeks of cleaning, packing, sayonara parties, last minute teaching, organizing tax papers (which I have yet to turn in. God I'm lazy!), attending summer festivals, and generally saying goodbye to two years worth of the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful of life in J-land.I know that a lot of you remember how much I struggled, especially in the last 6 months or so, but as it is with most bad/painful memories, time heals all wounds and I can hardly remember what exactly it was that I resented about living in Mie-ken. All I remember now are how much fun I had with my friends there, how rewarding teaching CAN be (these memories are probably left over from the classes I taught at the "good" school, not the two evil ones), how much I miss takoyaki and ramen, and how I loved having the freedoms of a job that pays decently yet still gives you tons of vacation time (living a student life on a student budget in student housing is NO FUN). I'm feeling a little nostalgic because over the weekend, I went down to Kent to see my friend Charlie. She came to Japan at the same time I did, but decided to leave after her first year, so it has been over two years since I last saw her. She was having a good old fashion BBQ/garden party and had invited a bunch of other ex-JETs whom I also haven't seen in years. It was good to catch up with them, but most of all, it feels good to reminisce about Japan in a way I can't do with people who haven't lived the experience before.
It's been a whole year, but I feel as though I've only been away from Japan for a few weeks. Like I'm on a really long vacation and I'll go back soon to resume my life where I left off. It seems particularly crazy to me that in what my mind perceived as being an incredibly short time, I've been living in the UK for nearly a year and I've almost completed my masters course. In 5 weeks I will have to turn in my dissertation (oh NO!) and in only 6 weeks, I will be travelling around Eastern Europe with Kim and all I've prepared for that trip is my flight there and back from Manchester. A month after that, I will be on my way back home and will have to resume the next stage in my life: tricking someone into thinking I'm qualified for the kind of job I want to do.
So much is going to change in the next couple of months and I'm feeling the same way I did a year ago when I was getting ready to leave Japan and thinking of getting ready for grad school. I must say, after all of this, all I want is to settle down in one place for a looooong while, with a stable job, a nice apartment, and just see what it's like to live a normal life. I have moved every year since 1999 (with one exception between by junior and senior year at Cal), and with 3 of those moves havaing been international, all I can think is that it's time to sit down, relax, and enjoy having a place to call my own. But who knows, maybe I'll get itchy feet and need to take off again. We'll see.
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