Today was my Japanese lesson. Today was also rain. That means I take the bus to the train station, and walk back after the lesson. A good 25 mins the rain - the all surrounding white noise. Good for thinking and musing.
My Japanese lesson has only 4 people in it since it began in September - a Romanian, a Thai, an Israeli, and myself. That number alone hinted to me that perhaps folks just don’t care to learn Japanese. Or maybe once they’re this far along, they stop going to class and just learn day to day as they converse with others. In addition, half of them are married and living in Japan. That was another flag telling what sort of peers I’ve come to be surrounded by.
I don’t want to live here long term, and seeing married folks in my class, learning the same things I’m learning, made me feel like I was headed down that path. The historic culture is great, the food tasty. The trains are the cleanest public transport I have ever seen (tho, I suppose my experiences in NY, Melbourne, and Chicago slightly tipped the scales). You can get on a train that could be 15 years old, and it looks about 6 years old. I saw a woman picking up trash at the station, completely voluntarily. It just needed to be done, so she took it upon herself to do it. Praiseworthy.
And, having properly set up some reservations, I will henceforth commence. I can’t deal with the style of emoting. People are distant and cold. There’s an ever-present glass wall between everyone I meet and me. Even if I were fluent, it’d be the same. It goes beyond the language barrier. There’s a deliberate withdrawal from connecting in an openly emotive way.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for me is the job. I’m not learning anything. Learning has been the most important thing for me for a long time. My job has been entirely vacant of learning, there’s no self-improvement going on. I learn about how the school system works, but learning a new set of rules isn’t what I want. That doesn’t engage my mind, and I feel non-human. A drone mechanically repeating the same unwavering circuit. So I’ve started making a film, started writing open source applications, started learning how to knit.
I need more free time; my mind has begun to atrophy from suboptimum use. I stay up later to accomplish things, as completing a task is a big part of feeling alive to me. But this is counter productive - sleeping less dulls my alertness which lowers the quality of my work. Last night I spent 45 minutes debugging the simplest error in xml documentation - it wasn’t even a bloody program, just some tags and rule misuse.
Where will I find time? When will I find time?