It’s Cyclical!

I leave Japan tomorrow, and I can’t really say that I’m looking forward to it. I’ve really fallen off with the blog posts, so I wanted to apologize about that. I’ve been distracted the past couple of months by being genuinely happy about where I am, or rather was, in my life. I’m trying not to be bitter about coming home, especially since I think I’m just grumpy about the transition. There are of course a lot of things I’m going to enjoy about being back home again, it’s just hard to think about those things right now. It doesn’t help that I’ve spent the last three weeks saying good bye to some people that I grew really close to. Anyway, I’m trying not to be pessimistic, I’m pretty sure things will be pretty good when I get back. Unfortunately, at the moment, I’m somewhat caught in limbo, in that all my friends have left and I’ve spent the last day and a half sitting alone in a hotel room.
I’ve been exceptionally busy the last couple of months. At first it was just my classes all gearing up for finals. I took a short trip to Sendai with a couple of friends, and that was a lot of fun. Sendai is known for cow tongue, so I had a lot of that. It was amazing. Cow tongue is now very close to the top of my list of favorite things to eat. That trip was wonderful in that it was carried out in exactly the way that I like to take vacations. We did almost zero sightseeing, and instead focused our days around our meal times. We filled the time in between we aimless wandering and napping, as well as the occasional game of go. All in all it was a great trip, and I’m really glad I managed to make it work.
After that though, I really did have to buckle down and focus on finals, which I think went pretty well, with the exception of Japanese. The problem with this exam was, though I was more prepared for it then I was for most of the previous exams, the final section was on something we had barely covered in class. Apparently, the other section did focus on it, so it made it into the final. Unfortunately, that meant that me and the majority of my classmates got shafted in the arrangement. I’m not that bitter about it though, as I do really feel like I’ve been improving. I would like to continue to study, as it is my intention to return to Japan at some point in the next few years. The other finals weren’t that big of a deal, though I did spend a fair amount of time studying for them. In the end, I feel like I learned a lot from my classes, with the exception of Taiwanese Society, which was a joke.
Once finals were over things became, if anything, busier. With everyone gearing up to leave people were doing things all the time, and I actually found myself having a hard time divvying up all of my time. Watching my friends leave was a sad and painful process, but I don’t feel so bad about it now that I’ve had the chance to talk to some of them that have made it home. I’ll be able to keep in touch with them and hopefully see a lot of them again. A lot of these people feel like friends I’m going to have for a long time, and I’m determined to make the effort to keep in touch with them.
All in all I would call this year a smashing success, and I’m really glad I decided to come for the full year and not just a semester. I watched the people that came just for the semester programs and it seems really unfortunate. Most of them didn’t get the chance to really find their groove here before their time was up and they were forced to leave. I also think it’s hard to really learn anything meaningful from an experience like this if it’s not for a period longer than three or four months. I didn’t really find my groove until April, which is part of the reason I fell so bad about leaving now. That being said, if I were staying it wouldn’t really be the same, though a lot of the people I was closest to were Japanese in the end. I have a greater concept of who I am and I feel like I understand what I want from my life a little better than I did before I came here, though I’m still exceptionally cynical and sarcastic (not to mention handsome, genius, and infinitely talented). Overall, I don’t really have anything negative to say about how I’ve spent my year. I had some regrets about how I was spending my time and the things that I was doing early on, but they all ended up leading me to a point where I was happy, and for a sustained period of time. Now that I know what that feels like, I’m going to be trying to get it back, and I finally feel like I have an idea about what needs to be done for that to happen.
Anyway, I can’t really think of anything else to say at this juncture. I look forward to seeing everyone back home soon.