I got less than four hours of sleep last night, so when my parents and my little brother came to visit, my nerves frayed more quickly than usual. We also spent most of the day engaged in less-than-amusing pursuits: Dad and I went to two very boring Parents' Weekend lectures, and then we went out to get me a comfy office chair. We stopped at an Ikea first but couldn't get a chair there (for reasons that are too complicated to explain), then went to an Office Depot and found a good one, which should be here in a week. Mom and Dad also got me a new watch. We had dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant. I'm afraid I was too frazzled to properly enjoy the sushi.
Mom kept bringing up a subject that annoyed me. I'm applying for the Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme - if I get accepted, I will go live in Japan for a year and help high school students learn English. I'll be helping an actual English teacher - my job will just be to speak to the students in my native tongue and come up with activities and excercises that will help them learn. One doesn't even need to know Japanese for this job, just good English. Anyway, there are a number of possible locations (cities, prefectures) an applicant can request assignment to, and I hear someone usually gets a place they put on the list. Mom wants me to go to a place where there will be other Americans for me to socialize with, which probably means either Tokyo (where I don't want to go) or Osaka (which is more interesting, but will probably be a popular choice and therefore difficult to get into).
Ideally, in this program, one goes to a part of Japan where there aren't that many native English speakers around. I keep trying to tell Mom that the idea is for me to become friends with the students and people who live near me. I also think that actively seeking out other Americans to socialize with sort of defeats the purpose of the program (I should have told her that, but I didn't). She seems to think that my social life has been completely blown out of the water since I don't have a boyfriend anymore, which is just ridiculous, and she's concerned that if I go to Japan I won't have an adequate level of social interaction or something like that. Well, not having other English speakers around will be just one more reason for me to learn Japanese while I'm there. If she brings up that subject again and logical argument fails, things are going to get ugly.
On the bright side, I got an idea for an original story. We stopped in a liquor store to see if they had this special, hard-to-find kind of soda that my brother likes. There were lots of pretty bottles there, of course - some of you may know that I like to collect bottles. That gave me an idea for something to write. Then I can publish it in the literary magazine!
I think I'll go to bed early tonight. Been a long day.
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