no explosions and no surprises

november in ehime is warm and the air feels very crisp. the mornings and nights get chilly, but the daytime heat invites you to shed your scarves and jackets and enjoy the japanese sun. i do like it here. nomura is comfortable and peaceful. i have grown to love driving the winding (single lane) roads of ehime. they might be slow as hell, but the are interesting. there is a bakery down the street that serves the best pumpkin rolls ever! going to the post office can be an adventure in itself - last week i met with some mom of one of my 3rd graders (9th grader) from nomura middle, who professed her daughter's love of my english class to me -- much to her daughter's shagrin.

i like it here, but i don't like to be alone. i also don't like that i don't teach english. i teach the "ALT english class" i.e. the "fun english" class i.e. the "joke english" class. i have been recruited to play games with kids all day that may or may not reinforce english ability. i conduct my classes almost exclusively in japanese. this is very good for my japanese. this is not so good for their english. when i speak in english no one understands basic vocabulary/structures, which has led to my increased japanese classroom vocab. my kids still treat me well and love to interact with me, but the staff do treat me like a temp. as they should, i am a temp afterall. but sometimes it hurts when i'm the ONLY one in the staff room and no one informed me there is an all-important meeting happening somewhere in the school.

all of this is weighing on my mind as i'm debating on leaving early. being in my (forced) isolation from the rest of the world/english speakers, has allowed me to do a lot of thinking. i realize that coming here on a free ticket and taking a leisurely year off is just my way of delaying making bigger decisions. in a way it was easy to quit nursing knowing i has some plan. I was going to Japan. solid plan, ne? i didn't think past that, really.

now that i'm here i can see really, it is a house of cards. its not really providing me with real direction. its just me being randomly in japan (alone). i don't think that i want to keep putting off the rest of my life. it was fun being here, and it definitely satiated my desire to live in a foreign counrty, but when is enough enough?

at the moment i am expecting to break early and come home after christmas sometime in early january. i still have to cement my decision but as of tomorrow, james will be taking some of my excessive stuff back to the 'burgh with him to help with shipping costs.

when i come home, if i come home, i will be taking time off to work on myself. much like what james just finsihed doing before i came to japan. right now my eye is on comp ling, and if i have aspirations of getting into a program, say, at CMU, i have much work ahead of me. much more serious stuff than playing variations of snakes and ladders and modified rock-paper-scissors games.