2008...2009

[unforth]

Well, it's the new year. I woke up this morning feeling surprisingly good - I've been waking up feeling pretty lousy for a couple of weeks now. I didn't even get all that much sleep - less than 8 hours - but I just feel, well, kind of fine. Anyway, I meant to do this post yesterday, but today will do just as well. :)

Well, before I get to the actual events of 2008, I thought that I'd review the goals I set for myself at the end of 2007. Doing this will, in all likelihood, constitute rather an re-cap of my year anyway. :)
In 2008, I hope to...
1. Increase my responsibilities in the company. This seems inevitable. I intend to take an Educational Statistics course, and improve my qualifications, and take an ever-increasing amount of the work on to my own shoulders, thus allowing mom more peace of mind.

I both succeeded and failed at meeting this goal. I didn't manage to take an Ed Statistics course, but I did manage to do all of the rest of this. I took on a lot of responsibilities in the company - doing reports, meeting with clients, maintaining lines of communication, writing, picking up the slack, making sure everything is getting done - and from what I've been able to tell, this has enabled my mother to have more peace of mind. Much to my frustration, I didn't meet my personal goal of how much I'd like to work - keeping in mind that I'm self-employed, and therefore my schedule is very wonky, and when there is no work I don't have to pretend to be busy, I had set a goal of averaging 20 hours of work per week for the entire year. I didn't quite manage this - though my time sheets are on the busted lap top, I'm right around 18 hours per week. This is close enough to be pretty frustrating. :) Still, it's much, much more than I've worked in every previous year, and I'm making well under what mom says she thinks I should be if my wages are computed hourly (I'm making about half of what she said she thought my hourly pay should be) so that's something.

2. Go to the gym. I don't see any reason this won't be possible.

Not long after I posted this last year, I computed my budget in detail and discovered that this was in fact quite impossible. However, I've done a great deal of other stuff. I've walked a ton, including a few days where I walked more than 15 miles. I spent two months doing a lot of DDR, though I've been a bit lax since mid-November. I took up jogging occasionally, including more than once while I was on vacation. In all, I've made every effort to get in what exercise I could, though I've failed often enough to still be a bit frustrated, on the other hand, even though I'm not as thin on the scale as I'd like, still I have to say that I look better than I used to at the same weight, and that's nice. I'm definitely in better shape than I was previously - though not in as good shape as when I was going to the gym regularly!

3. Be good to Jonie the dog, which is to say that I want the dog to get at least an hour in a dog park every day that weather permits - which is to say that it's not pouring - too cold and too warm and I don't feel like are NOT excuses.

Again, this goal changed. Turns out Jonie the dog isn't well enough behaved in the dog park, generally speaking, so this goal got transmuted into walk the dog for an hour a day. For the most part, I succeeded at that goal admirably - including some days when it was pouring! Generally speaking, up until Thanksgiving I managed to do this an average of 6 times a week. Once the move started, I got a bit lax about it, but just this week I've been getting it back together again, and I've walked her for an hour four times in the last 7 days. I think I can safely say I met this goal. Yay!

4. Make my apartment fabulous. Not in the flamboyant way, but I want to stay within my (currently somewhat limited) budget and still get what I need to live comfortably. I want to unpack quickly, and then tackle meeting the needs I have, and lastly to retrieve the things I left with folks in Bloomington.

I've only partly succeeded at this goal. Again. It took me almost 5 months to fully unpack at the old place, and then I still have somethings that have been left in Bloomington (schenker28 still has some of my manga, with my permission; dyrecorn really, really needs to get me back my DS9 seasons; saracariad has cruelly not managed to get me back my Pride and Prejudice... :) ). Of course, when I wrote this, I never could have predicted that I'd be moving again. That said, I think I've succeeded at this goal better in the new place than in the old - sure, I stuffed some stuff in cabinets rather than actually put it away, and my bedroom is still kind of a mess, but there aren't any boxes left at all, most things that need to be stored are stored, the pictures are hung and for the most part I suspect that no one who wandered in to my apartment would suspect that I moved less than a month ago. It's some what fabulous, too - two rooms painted, and of course my papasan, which I'm super excited to own. :)

5. Make new friends, and continue to reconnect with old friends. Thanks to folks advice, I probably will check out this Changeling game, though it turns out that the first session is on the same day as my move, so I won't be going to that!

Epic fail. Okay, not quite true - I've succeeding with reconnecting with old friends, meeting up with bakanekotoo and her friends, many of whom I hadn't talked to in ages, and claireon, and ultimabaka, and Aaron P., and my recent joining of Facebook has put me back in touch with a bunch of people from every stage of my life, including Stacey, who I haven't talked to since elementary school and am now reconnecting with, and Kamel, who was my best friend in middle school, but in terms of making new friends...yeah, epic fail pretty much sums it up.

6. Lose weight. Last year was very frustrating, because often times nothing I tried worked at all - I'd eat a reasonable and small amount and yet not lose weight. This year, I have some new ideas, but more than anything I'm trying to ease up on myself about it. I can approximate how much I eat without being strict, and if I do that, and go to the gym, I think I can do well enough, and not worry so much that it makes eating no fun.

This has been a funny year for weight loss. I've had a lot of ups and downs - with a high weight of about 165, though it's hard to know for sure since I don't own a scale. I'm pretty close to the low just now, in the mid 150s (it changes radically from day to day when I check, but recent weigh-ins at moms have been between 156 and 160). That said, rather than tackle my weight, what I really tackled was my attitude. And even though I haven't lost all that much weight, for the most part I feel way better about myself and care way less. It's a pretty nice feeling.

7. Learn to cook. I've already started doing this, and I intend to continue. This includes experimenting with recipes, new foods, and ways of making things healthier.

While I showed early success on this one, the lack of a proper kitchen really killed it.

8. Make ends meet. Probably easy enough, but I have a new expense to worry about ($450 per month in student loan payments for the next 10 years) and I consider it a worth while goal, to manage to live cheaply enough that I can do the things I want to, put some money in savings, and still have some fun.

This ended up being tougher than I expected, and was very draining. I spent the entire year going in to debt and then clawing my way out of it. I enter the new year still in debt, but with much improved prospects. My old apartment was $2150 and I payed the whole thing myself. My new apartment is $1300, and in the short term - and potentially in the long term - mistress_sin will be picking up part of the tab. The math is obvious, and I think I'll be able to over come the money difficulties I had last year. In particular, I've had to deny myself a lot of things that I not only want, but that I'm used to being able to afford, especially manga. This has been upsetting and frustrating (and has caused me to read far less manga over all, in an effort to wean myself). Also annoying has been the binge spending - every once in a while, I just couldn't take it any more (this happened maybe three times last year) and I'd spend a whole bunch of money. In the worst offense - at Gencon - I bought at least one very expensive piece of artwork that, while I love it, I really should have not gotten (for those who saw my purchases, I actually DON'T mean the BIG one - I haven't regretted that for an instant, for all that I couldn't afford it. I mean the next most expensive one, which I do love, and which lovely on my wall, but really I should have shown more self-restraint, especially given that I got some other stuff in addition to both of them.

The binge spending was mostly problematic in that it meant that I didn't have any money for fun stuff any other time, cause all the extra had to go to paying off the credit cards. Still, this is improving. When I first moved in to the apartment on 72nd, I looked at the damage I'd done to my finances and predicted that it'd take a year to recover. This ended up being astonishingly accurate - if I hadn't decided to move, my first month free and clear would have been January. Of course, the move completely crushed this. However, looking at the state of my finances now, I think I'll be green by March - and that's factoring in that I need to save up to overcome a bit of a deficit in how much I managed to put aside for my taxes.

9. Go to more live music. Warped Tour was just the beginning. :)

While I haven't done as much as I thought I would when I made this goal, still I've done enough that I'm satisfied. I went to Warped Tour again, and to three other concerts, all of which were awesome. Man, but I love Alkaline Trio.

Most of my other goals (write, make things, etc.) are simply continuations of goals I've had for a long time, goals at which I'm succeeding for the most part, and so don't bear repeating.

Interestingly, these other "granted" goals are where I started to slip up. I had a lot of trouble writing this year - in that I got 120,000 words into a novel and then completely stalled. I also worked on two other side projects, and all in all I probably wrote about 150,000 words of fiction, in addition to all the writing I did for work (figure about another 50,000 words). However, I haven't done a word since early November, and even that was picking up from slacking off through out September and October. And it doesn't seem likely to alleviate - I'm still feeling crushed by the loss of my data from the other computer, in that so far the latest backed up draft of Zed that I've been able to find is only 80,000 words. Of course, I haven't really made a serious effort to get my data back yet, but even so, this is upsetting. Fixing this? Top of the list first thing tomorrow.

Making things has also been up and down - I made my halloween costume, which I loved making, and realized how much I've missed sewing costumes. I've got materials to make myself curtains, but for last year, at least, only one costume got made. I also did a bit of cross stitching (I got a bunch done on a project which I haven't been able to find since the move, which is worrisome, and I have another project which I do thankfully know the location of which is done - and has been done since spring - except for the damned back stitching; meanwhile, I got back in the mood to stitch early last week and have done a ton on another project which I started a couple years ago).

Another unstated goal was to read more, and again on this I met with mixed success. It seems like the instant I go on vacation I start reading like a maniac - even at work conferences that are only three days long I often get all the way through a book and a half. And certainly I read more this past year than I have for several years previously. Still, though, only recently have I managed to start to integrate reading back in to my normal, day to day schedule - greatly helped by the fact that now that I live on 171st St., I have to take the train everywhere, which affords me much more reading time. :)

Many of my successes for 2008 were summed up in the above, but just to lay them out:

1. Work. As the main thing that I do, work has for the most part met with success. I wrote 5 grants, and won three of them - but the two that didn't win were long shots from the beginning, where as the three I did win were all for the same grant competition, a competition where only one-in-three submissions were awarded. We also won two that I wrote near the end of last year. All in all, from these awards I earned the company almost three times my current salary, enough that we could hire mistress_sin to help out with all manner of things, and enough that I really feel that I can be proud of myself. Sure, I didn't meet all of my goals in terms of getting work done, but I did everything that I needed to on time and as accurately as I could manage, I got us on track for doing a lot of tasks which in past years had somewhat fallen by the wayside, and when the chips were down I worked my ass off - multiple days over 11 hours, and several weeks approaching 60 hours/week. I've also made a lot of contacts for work, and helped us to generate business...hopefully. It's a slow process. ;)

2. Communication Skills. After my break up, I realized that I had some serious problems with being passive, and at the same time that when I did get it together to open my mouth I had a way of making things worse. I really don't want that to be the way that I communicate with people, and so this year I made a serious effort to over come problems as they arose - to face the interpersonal issues and deal with them. And there have been interpersonal issues - my mother and I fight relatively often, and I've had at least one serious smack down that I truly and actually deserved. However, in the beginning of the year our fights were miserable, and now when we fight I feel that we both come out of it better understanding each other, and now things stay okay for a long time afterwards (our last fight was in...er...October, I think, maybe late September, and things are still largely okay). So while I don't think I'm there yet - I don't think one can ever truly be there with this kind of thing - still I'm proud of the progress that I've made. There have been several other tough conversations on other topics, too, and in these I also think I did better than I would before I started really trying to improve my communication.

3. Getting Culture. I live in one of the greatest cities in the world. And dammit, I should take advantage of it! This year was held back by a lack of funds, and so I mostly relied on mom's memberships to go to the same places - particularly the Met, which is so damn big that it has literally taken me every visit this year to see most of the exhibit halls (I haven't even gone to the American wing yet!) and temporary exhibits that have come through. I've also gone to loads of museums while traveling, and all in all I've really been loving it. Right now, I'm wrestling with the pre-mature disappointment of the photos that are on the laptop that might have been lost (3000+ from Washington DC and NYC museums, Halloween pictures, Thanksgiving pictures, etc.) but I've managed to put together my Flickr page with all of the other pictures, and labeled them, and my shots of various cultural things get a lot of hits, and that makes me happy. All in all, I've been loving going to so many museums and such.

4. Attitude Adjustment. Last year - 2007 - I was being very hard on myself. I have high self-confidence about my intellect and very low self-confidence about my appearance. I've made a lot of headway on this. Also, last year I wanted nothing so much as a damned boy friend. Now, don't get me wrong - I still want a boy friend - but I feel way better about it, and much more laid back. I'm much closer now to being the kind of person I'd like to be than I was a year ago. I look forward to making more progress.

5. Be Happy. For the most part, I've been happy - even though there have been some points when this year has been very rough, especially in the past couple of months.

6. Turned 26. Yay, not dying for another year!

7. Food!! After a life long struggle, I'm prepared to call this battle won, with honors and laurels. I'll try most things now, and while there are still items I don't like, they are discreet and identifiable (like bananas, ew!!). I can go in to any restaurant and find something I like. If I don't find something I like, I can at least find something that I'm willing to try - and I usually like the things that I try! I've also succeeded in making increasingly healthy choices - I've switched to high-fiber and whole wheat without a hitch; I eat a salad every single day just about, and I enjoy it, too! Sure, there's more to be done - less yogurt, more fruit!! - but I'm very happy with this progress.

8. Travel. I've come to really understand just how much I love to travel, especially by myself. I added three countries to the list this year: Netherlands (Amsterdam), Germany (Cologne), and the Czech Republic (Prague). I also got to go back to London. Sure, two of these stops were only for two days, but I had a great time at all of them, and I really see now that this is something that I want to be a part of my life for many years to come.

9. Explored My Relationship with the Universe. I've spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do with myself, who I want to be, up to and including re-examining my religion. I haven't made any decisions yet, but I think it's important to keep thinking about it. :)

10. Drove to Texas. I really like to drive, and I really want to drive across the country. With gas prices this year, that didn't happen, but I did get to drive from the north to the south of the country - New Hampshire to Texas! :)

I think any other successes were largely covered.

Failures of 2008:
1. Meeting People. Epic fucking fail. I haven't made a single new friend, unless you count Shanna, a woman I met at a work conference earlier this month, with whom I really hit it off - except we'll never see each other, cause she lives in Utah. Or Gina, my step-mother's niece, who I actually already knew. That kind of thing. This needs to happen. Period.

2. Going Back to School. Maybe it's not right to call this a failure - I just really don't want to. So I didn't.

3. Taking Chances. In the past year, I've rather re-trenched. I did a lot of things, but most of them were what, for me, constitutes safe. I need to overcome those self-imposed barriers! I know I can, too. As cliched as it sounds...this year is gonna be different. I just know it.

4. Keeping in Touch. I need to call moonartemis72. I need to call sapphohestia. I need to call buzzermccain. And others. There are people I really want to keep in touch with, and I've really done a piss-poor job at it.

Can that really be all of my failures? That seems like a paltry list. If I think of more, I'll add them. Of course, I really don't want to dwell too much on the failures...cause over all, I think it's been a pretty good year!


2009 Goals:
The theme of this years goals is MORE. I have so much time that I squander, and I know that if I'm just a bit more efficient, I can pack in more of just about everything. I know I'm setting goals that I can't meet, but that's okay. :)

1. More Work. I have a personal goal of 25 hours/week this year, and some plans on how to meet it. I have a bunch of stuff that's optional that I really, really want to manage to do, and some stuff that's required that I don't want to allow to fall through the cracks.

2. More Different Culture. I want to go to the movies more, I want to go to live music more, I want to go to all the museums I haven't been to in the city, all that kind of thing.

3. More Travel. There are already trips being planned for this year - mom and I hope to get to Puerto Rico for a week or two in early February, and the family is going with my grandfather to London and Paris next summer. I'd also like to get back to Japan - desperately, frantically would like to, I miss it so much - and I have some domestic travel I'm hoping to accomplish as well. It's a lot - more than I'll be able to actually do, I expect - but it'll be fun either way.

4. More Reading. I'm already succeeding at this, I just have to keep it up.

5. More Writing. Or at least an equal amount of it!

6. More Crafts.

7. Volunteer. I really want to volunteer. I just haven't been able to figure out where! This year, I will figure it out, and I will get off my ass and help someone just because I can. :)

8. More Exercise. Wii Fit, how I want thee!

9. Learn to cook! Seriously!

10. Continue trying to figure out what I want to do with myself.

11. Study More Japanese.

12. And the big one...MAKE FRIENDS. I can do it! Dammit!
Well, that's all I can think of for now. (Edit - I have thought of more and added it. ;) )

Happy New Year, everyone.

Comments

[milbrcrsan.livejournal.com]

Happy New Year and good goals for the new year! And even though there were some goals from '08 you missed...I pretty much dodged all of mine. *headdesk* I've never been very good at keeping resolutions or goals. Meh.

And due to an...interesting idea my fiance and I came up with last night, I was curious about your three month stay in Japan. Did you really like it there? :)

[unforth.livejournal.com]

I loved it - I miss it tons. What do you want to know? I'd be happy to share.

[milbrcrsan.livejournal.com]

Well...for lack of a better question that hasn't come in my mind yet :p, what is it like there? And which city did you stay in?

In all honesty, my fiance brought up the idea of moving to Japan one time on New Year's Eve and since then I've just been obsessed with the idea - I even added learning Japanese to my resolution this year! I actually don't really know that much about Japan, but the idea intrigues me heavily. :p

[unforth.livejournal.com]

Well, I lived in Tokyo. This link (http://www.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=111597561292716184963.0004389b1bf5f7a4f4f7a&ll=35.715925,139.789653&spn=0.012335,0.020342&t=h&z=16) shows where. It's kind of hard to explain what's like. If you've been to a big city (New York City, Chicago, London, Hong Kong, and to lesser extent San Francisco, Boston, Paris, Singapore, Amsterdam... - there are certainly others that qualify but not that I've been to) then you have a beginning sense. However, much like all of these cities, Tokyo has it's own flavors. Where I lived was very old fashioned - mostly two story family houses (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389551856/in/set-72157602041321989/) with thin walls, and you can hear what's going on in the streets - which isn't much, because of the way Tokyo is laid out, people rarely drive on the side streets, which have no side walks and are very narrow. Most of the noise I got was people talking or working (I was across from a carpenter) outside.

Unlike a city like New York or Chicago which is built around one central "metropolis" area - ie, the Loop in Chicago, midtown and downtown Manhattan - Tokyo, which is much larger population wise and as a result physically than either of these places, has multiple city centers. The primary ones that I visited are at Shinjuku (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1307699212/) (which has one of the largest and most active train stations in the world, 2 million+ passengers per day), Shibuya (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389670608/") (many of the shots in Lost in Translation are shot at Shibuya), Ueno (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389542534/), Roppongi (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1436799407/) (which is the only one on this list not on the Yamanote JR Train Line), and Ikebukuro (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389561230/).

Tokyo is active in a way that only a big city can be. The side streets are quiet, the main streets are often quite crowded, and the tourist areas - of which there are many - are great places to hear many different languages. It's a relatively open city, though, and used to foreigners. From what I hear, in at least some other parts of the country racism is a bigger problem - as it was, I had to deal with only a little. Speaking a bit of Japanese helps a lot - and reading some Japanese, even if it's just hiragana and katakana, is exceptionally helpful. While in tourist areas you can often get menus in English, many places don't have them, and if you can't read そば (soba) as opposed to らめん (ramen), you don't know what kind of noodles you're getting - and you don't get anything like an authentic experience with out that kind of thing.

[unforth.livejournal.com]

It was suggested to me before I went that the Japanese in general were really good at English. This isn't true. Most people there know a bit, but often accents were almost indecipherably thick. I had much better luck speaking with my broken Japanese than I did attempting to talk to people in English - even if I only could understand some of what they said, and what I said was nearly indecipherable, はい (hai - yes) was generally acceptable response to most things that were said to me. ;) That said, there were some memorable flops - I went to the Ueno Keisei train station, trying to get to Narita airport. I didn't know which platform I needed, and I was lugging around a heavy bag, so I asked a lady who worked there something along the lines of どんな 電車 は 成田 へ 行きます か. (Donna densha wa Narita e ikimasu ka - Which train goes to Narita?) She politely told me - 三 (san - three) and I went to the train and got on the one she said. But it was the wrong train - she didn't assume I meant Narita AIRPORT - which I hadn't asked because at the time, I couldn't remember the word for Airport (it's 空港 - kuukou - I've now memorized it) and I was on the wrong train, and it was a huge pain in the end, I barely made a flight that I'd left myself three hours to get to. So yeah. But over all, the language stuff got easier with time, mostly because I have good reading skills in Japanese, though poor listening comprehension. Note that I studied Japanese for five years, though I was almost two years out of practice when I went.


I lived in a Japanese style apartment (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1388649533/in/set-72157602041321989/) which I rented through Sakura House (http://www.sakura-house.com/), which was really great even though I had to share a bath room. I would live there again in a heartbeat, or in one of their other properties if that one wasn't available.

It's worth noting that I love big cities - I'm from Manhattan, and I thrive on the energy, the noise, the light, and every thing else in big cities. However, there are lots of other types of places - unfortunately, I don't know loads about them, cause I didn't get out of Tokyo.

I went on a tourist visa. It's VERY difficult to get a visa to work once you arrive, and a tourist visa is only good for three months; if you leave the country and come back again you can get another three months, though they gave me a hard time when I returned trying to get at what I was going to do on my second stay, and if you don't have an obvious means of supporting yourself they are very suspicious. If you want to stay for a long time, it's much better to get a job, preferably before you go. The main job for American's is, unsurprisingly, teaching English. Anyone who has graduated from college is eligible for a job teaching English, and though it helps if your background is in education, it ultimately doesn't matter much. Jet (http://www.jetprogramme.org/) is the main program that I know of - I have three friends at least who have done it and all have good experiences. The downside is that you don't really get to pick where you go - you can end up in a very small little middle of no where place - and, of course, you have to work!

The other easy way to get a visa is as a student - especially one studying Japanese. You'd have to speak to a university of your choice in order to do a study abroad program, though.

Note that many of these programs - both to teach and to be taught - have long application processes that have to be begun way in advance.

So that's all I can think of on a first go through - questions?

[unforth.livejournal.com]

(feel free to ask away - I love talking about Japan, it serves to remind me of how much I want to go back...)

[milbrcrsan.livejournal.com]

That apartment is so cute! lol I also love your little pile of manga in the corner. :p And it's amazing to see an actual store for anime/manga. Even when I was living in the city, you had to go to the bookstore for that, but I suppose they are the creators of it.

Ah, right, you were still working on grants for your mother while there, correct?

And how did it feel living in a new place with limited knowledge of their language? Of course, if we do decide to move there or visit there in a few years, I'd definitely want to learn as much Japanese as I could to get the full effect of it. :p

[unforth.livejournal.com]

I went on the hunt for manga and anime stores - a lot of them are marked on that map I posted - my favorite was definitely the branch of Mandarake in Ikebukuro (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389613190/), which specializes in doujinshi, especially shounen-ai doujinshi (maybe I shouldn't admit that ;) ). Animate (http://www.flickr.com/photos/unforth/1389612160/) is pretty awesome, too - I know at least two (the picture is the one in Ikebukuro, but the main branch is Akihabara) - lots of pencil boards, which I love, and manga.

As for jobs, yes - while I was there I was working for my mother long distance. It was awkward to say the least, but it enabled me to make a living.

It was tough to live in a new place with limited knowledge of the language. When I decided to go, I spent the summer refreshing what I'd learned in earlier Japanese courses, but I still speak Japanese at about a kindergarten level, and read at a second or third grade level (maybe 4th - it's hard to gauge that sort of thing - with a dictionary, I can read books aimed at young adults very slowly but with pretty thorough comprehension, though nuanced grammar is still out of my league). It was very isolating, and a lot of my time in Japan I was pretty lonely. It's compounded by the time difference - obviously the first thing to do when lonely is find someone to talk to, but during day light savings time the time difference is 14 hours - so at 9 PM on Monday night EST, it's 11 AM Tuesday morning in Japan (I think I have that right). Thus, in the middle of the day, it's the middle of the night for your friends in America, and when it's evening for you, it's morning for them - and, at least with my friends, that meant that they were mostly still asleep.

The result was that I found it basically impossible to make friends with locals - though part of this was lack of effort on my part. A lot of people are interested in language exchange, and if I were a bit more extroverted, this is a very viable option - people who want to practice their English advertise that they're looking for a speaking partner, and in exchange they'll help you practice your Japanese. It's generally accepted, from what I can tell, that your partner will be the same gender as you, which helps keep it from seeming weird - like, a lot of 20 something Japanese women are looking for language exchange. Of course, so are a lot of weirdo guys. Without an outlet like that, most of my interaction with people was at business, and thus that's the language that I became most proficient at. It got to be that I considered it a good day if I managed to have a conversation in which I was mostly understood and in which I comprehended what was said to me.

My way around the loneliness ended up being making local friends. Through an entirely fortuitous chance, I found a listing by an American who was looking for English speaking gamers to join a D&D game. I'm a gamer, and so this was perfect for me, so I got in touch with her and we decided to meet up. I ended up joining the group and getting to know the other people in it. It wasn't a large circle, and aside from the other girl in the group I didn't get to know any of them that well, but it meant that I had some people to talk to and spend time with in person. I had people to go eat Thanksgiving dinner with when it looked like I'd be on my own in a country where they could care less about Thanksgiving.

[unforth.livejournal.com]

Speaking of which, that's one thing I didn't expect - food! A lot of the foods I was used to eating regularly are hard to come by there. For example? Pizza. When they say pizza, what they mean isn't quite what we mean. Hamburgers. Hamburgers there are small and the meat low quality - and/or they're expensive (the best burger I had there...the only good burger I had there...was at Wolfgang Pucks Lunch restaurant at Takashimaya Times Square, and with desert it was about 2500 yen - or about $25). If you're willing to eat fast food, you'll be fine - there's McDonalds, and Wendys, etc., and there are some grocery stores that have a decent selection of some western food, but a lot of stuff - like cheese - will cost you way more than you'd expect. Most of the Department Stores (Matsuzakaya, etc.) have selections in their basements that are fancy, but oddly selective. Like, it took me three months to find Cream of Tartar.

But right - the more Japanese you have, the more fun I think it'd be - but the basics are the keys. Being able to talk to store clerks or waiters. Being able to read menus and train schedules and other signs. That's the stuff that are helpful to get around. But the more you know, the more you'll get out of the experience. I wish I'd known more.

[bakanekotoo.livejournal.com]

Good luck with your resolutions! I'm sure you can do it :-) If you want Wii Fit, you can borrow mine. I don't use it anymore, I got tired of it.

[unforth.livejournal.com]

That is REALLY good to know. I definitely want a Wii and a Wii Fit. So once I have the money for the game system, I'll get in touch. Thank you!

Happy new year!

[galiyah.livejournal.com]

Really, it sounds like you've had a good year. I hope 2009 is even better for you. Japan sounds like a lot of fun, at least to visit. I hope you get a chance to go back.

[unforth.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I don't know if Tokyo would be for everyone, but I'm gonna really try to go back in 2009. Here's hoping.

I hope you have a great year! :)