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| EVERYONE! I am leaving for Japan tomorrow! Therefore, I now have a new blog on LiveJournal to record my adventures in Japan, so you can now find me there. No more Xanga.
Here's the link:
http://kyleinjapan.livejournal.com
THANK YOU! | | |
| Today marked 28 days till I leave for Japan. These are gonna be some long weeks, just like any other time before going on a much anticipated trip. After this Saturday, I'll only have 3 more weeks of work at K-mart!!!! It's possible that I'm more excited about that than going to Japan. (Not really, who am I kidding here???) I actually accomplished some things this week that I've been meaning to do. I finally submitted by last 2 forms to I Know I Can for me Last Dollar Grant. Oh yeah, $1,200 in the bag. I ran down to the University Registrar to force them to ACTUALLY SEND MY FUCKING TRANSCRIPT!!!! I ordered it online back in June, they didn't send it. I called them and they said they'd send it again. Never got it. So this time I went down in person and she assured me that it would be sent the following day, and if I didn't get it by monday I could just come down there and they'd print me out one and hand it to me there. This is the 2nd time this whole thing has happened too. bastards. Anyway, once I get that transcript I can drop it off at The Columbus Dispatch and then i'll be receiving a check from them for $1,250. Oh yeah!
Money matters aside, last Saturday I was working 1-10 and I wasn't really sure if I was gonna do anything that night even though I had been invited to a couple parties. I was really tired and just felt like sleeping. Then I called Wi-fi up to see how the Tango class thing was that I had to miss, and she told me that they were about to go to a club called Axis. I told her that I wasn't really sure if I felt like going out and then I learned that Axis is a gay bar. "FUCK IT, I'M IN!" I told her. lol. Look, I'm not gay, but I'm not a conservative anti-gay macho-typical American guy either. I've been invited to a couple gay bars in the past but I had never been able to go for whatever reason. I wanted to check one out to see what it's like, so I took the opportunity. Plus she told me that we weren't gonna tell one of my friends that we were going to a gay bar and we were just gonna see how long it took him to figure it out. So ya, I was all in. I called up my Japanese friend Yuki and invited him along too since I told him that I would hang out with him the previous night anyway. Although, I did wait until after I picked him up to tell him that we were going to a gay bar. lol. Anyway, it was REALLY fun. The music was really good and it was basicly just a lot of dancing with friends, which is fun when you're drunk. Well, it's fun if you aren't too. But ya, good times.
Ok, so, I have a new conversation partner through the American Langauge Program, and now I'm going to have another conversation partner through this Shizuoka exchange-student program thingy. So I'm going to have 2 Japanese English conversation partners. What should I do? Should I tell them that I have another english convo partner? Will they get jealous? Will they kill me? Should I introduce them? Would that only lead to one of them dead? Am I worth fighting over? (I think the last one is definite yes, lol) I really don't know how I'm going to make time for both of them, but we'll see I suppose. Oh yeah, that reminds me. Since my current convo parter Shuhei is going to be here for 5 years doing his Ph.D. in econ, I've been teaching him all about Ohio State football. I think this coming week we're going to watch the 2003 Fiesta Bowl on DVD so that I can show him a little bit of the history behind our amazing team. I can't wait to watch it again, it still gets me excited.
Anything else..........hmmm........oh yeah! I e-mailed my good friend Toshi who's back in Tokyo now and asked if it was ok for me to stay with him for the 3 days I have in Tokyo before I have to report to my university. I didn't really ask him and I wasn't going to, but his girlfriend, and my friend, Rina insisted that I ask him and she even asked before I could. Anyway, he said yes! No having to pay money for a hostel! So I'll be spending my first 3 nights in Tokyo in the wonderful suburb of Ikegami. I can't wait to explore it some more. JAPAN!
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| Ok, so, this whole situation in Israel and Lebanon is really getting out of hand. I hope it will end soon, but I don't want it to just be a quick fix that will just result in more violence later on. Ahhh! So aggrevating. Religion is killing the world. I truely think that humans have reached a point where we can no longer move forward together as a species, and it's because of religion. I'm not saying one religion is better than another, I'm saying ALL religion is bad. It accomplishes nothing and only proves to divide humans amongst themselves even more. It's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people, but I think it's the truth. Only when we are able to shed ourselves of the burden of religion can we then move forward. Ok, i'm not sure if I can talk about this anymore tonight, maybe later.
Only 29 days till I leave for Japan. Yay. Too tired to write. Goodnight.
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| Ok, I know, it's been over 2 months since I've written on here. I've just been kind of busy lately and I haven't really found the time or the motivation to update this. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up as often as possible when I'm in Japan so all of you still here in America can keep tabs on me ('cause I know you want to).
So much time and so many things have happened since I last wrote on here that I don't even know where to start. Well, I guess I can start with school. The end of the quarter went better than I thought, but it was still my worst quarter ever. Not to say it was a bad quarter, just my worst. Everyone says that Psych 100 is easy, but the midterms and finals contained so much detailed information that you really had to study, A LOT. I think that's what hurt me the most. I skipped that class more than any class I've taken here so far at OSU. So ya, I got a B+. Not a horrible grade, but I definitely could've done better if I had gone to class more and studied more. What can I do, eh? No sense worrying about it anymore. Honestly, I don't worry about it, but I'm just kinda reliving the moments of last month in order to deliver a more honest blog entry. lol. Besides that, Japanese went pretty well even though I could've studied a lot more, and Anthropology was kind of a let down like Biology. I can't wait for the easy classes I should be taking in Japan. Also, towards the end of the quarter I found out I received another scholarship, the Gilman. It's $5,000 and I have to do a service project afterwards to spread the word about studying abroad and the scholarship iteself. It sucks, but I'll gladly do it for $5,000.
Unfortunatly, I didn't receive the Freeman or the JASSO scholarship, but I've accepted it now and I'm going to have more than enough money anyway. So whatever, it's no big deal. If i can work as much as I want to in Japan, it shouldn't matter. I actually already have one tutoring job lined up in Tsukuba, curtosy of Mr. John Burns. He's the OSU student at Tsukuba right now and he's passing on one of his tutoring gigs to me. It's only once every 2 weeks, for one hour, but it pays 3,000yen per hour!!! (For all you non-Japanese-ers out there, that's about $26/hour.) He also informed me that a woman is looking for teachers to work at an English school 9 hours a week, and that pay would be 2,000-3,000yen per hour. (115 yen = $1, you figure it out) So if I can do that, I should be set for all the traveling that I want to do.
That reminds me! Back in June I decided to buy my plane ticket early for winter break. From December 22-30 I'll be in Seoul, South Korea! Oh ya! The ticket was relatively cheap, I have a friend there who's letting me stay at her apartmen, so I decided there was no sense in waiting. So, I'll be spending my first christmas outside of the United State in S. Korea. It should be interesting. (Not like I really care, being the athiest Jew that I am) I'm really excited to go there though, it seems like a really cool city, but I made sure that I'll be back in Japan for new years, because I absolutely don't want to miss that. New Years is the most important time of the year in Japan, so since I've been devoting my life to Japan and Japanese these past 2 years, I feel it's important that I experience it while I'm there.
If you didn't think buying my winter break plane ticket 6 months in advance was crazy enough for you, I decided this past Saturday to go ahead and buy my plane ticket for spring break as well. INSANITY! I know...... maybe I should be stopped. Seriously though, I know that I want to go to a certain place, the ticket is cheap now, I know what times I'll have off, why wait? I realize I'm arguing with myself here, but I'm just launching a pre-emptive strike against all the travel-haters out there. So anyway, I'll be going to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore from March 8-25. I'm soooooo excited about this trip. I've wanted to go to Thailand, and SE Asia in general, for a long time now. Obviously I love to travel, so it makes me really happy to know that I'm actually making all these things happen for myself. I'm flying from Tokyo to Bangkok, and I'll be flying back from Singapore to Tokyo. The ticket was only $606..... pretty cheap if you ask me. ne?
Other than all that fun stuff, I've just been working a fuckload lately. Around 35 hours a week at K-mart and another 6 hours of tutoring on top of that. It's been really hard to find time to keep up with studying Japanese since I'm usually too tired when I'm not working. I just can't wait to not have to work at Kmart anymore. I really hate that place. It's not so bad, but it's just starting to really annoy me and I just don't want to do it anymore. I think I deserve better, lol.
Tonight, Felice and I went to a sneak preview of "Lady in the Water", it's the new movie from that crazy director of The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, etc. So naturally, I was expecting a super twist ending, but actually there was no twist at all. I liked the movie, up until the ending, or I should say, the lack there of. There was no real ending to this movie. What you thought was going to happen, happened. There were no real surprises and the movie just left you searching for the point. Everything that was accomplished up until that point was wiped away all at once. How could they make a movie like this? So disappointing. After that, we went to Skye Bar to watch the premier of ESPN's "The Contender", which is sort of like a boxing reality show. My friend Michael Clark was on it, so I was there to watch it with him and the little party that was thrown for him for it. I was really surprised because he was pretty much the star of the show up until the end of the 1st episode. Unfortuneatly he went up against this huge guy and he barely lost, and now he's off the show. I was so shocked and disappointed. It was so hard to watch it while he was sitting in the room. How must he have felt? I mean, obviously he knew that he was going to lose, but no one else knew because he wasn't allowed to tell anyone due to his contract. Man, it sucked. I felt so bad for him.
Well, that's about it for this update. I'm going to try to update this more often, but who knows. Goodnight....
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| Wow, I really haven't updated this in a long time. I've just been kind of busy lately and I haven't been able to find the motivation for any of this. So what's happened since I last wrote on here.....?
Well, probably the best news was when I found out I was given an interview for the Huntington International Fellowship scholarship. It turns out that only 8 people were given interviews, and it was open to any student studying abroad. My interview was April 14 with 4 people from the university and Huntington bank. They were all pretty high up people, so I was a little nervous, but the interview went amazingly well. I left the room with almost no doubt that I would receive at least some money. A few hours later the woman called me personally to tell me that they were giving me $6,000. SCORE! So, that's $6,000 from Huntington and $2,000 from the Wolfe Scholarship. 2 for 2 so far and $8,000 total. I'm still waiting for word on 4 more scholarship. Cross your fingers for me!
That same weekend was the Japanese Spring Festival. I never planned on volunteering for it, but I ended up having creating an entire table for Japanese travel by myself. Let's just say I didn't have the most helpful group members. It's not really their fault though, the whole thing was kind of last minute. The festival was nice though, it was just unfortuneate that it had to be on Easter weekend. Campus was dead, and therefore our turnout wasn't as big as what was hoped for. The highlight of the day was definitely the afterparty at Liu Pon Xi. It started out kind of slow, but then a lot of people started showing up, and since JSO rented out the place for the night, there weren't any weird people or a lot of strangers. All in all a pretty fun day.
There was a luncheon last Tuesday for the Wolfe scholarship recipients. It was at the faculty club and the owner of The Columbus Dispatch (John Wolfe) and Preisdent Holbrook was there. It was a nice event and I was able to speak with lots of relatively important people within the university, including the president. Maybe she can write me a reccomendation on day.....hmmmm. Instant job. Ahh.....I'm in the middle of another midterm week. I just had my Psych 100 midterm today, and I have an Anthro midterm tomorrow. Wish me luck! I hate both these classes.....
Only 3 and a half months till I leave for Japan. YES!
Dear August 24th,
Please come soon! Thank you.
Kyle
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