Monday, March 12, 2012

Graduation and 311

And so I graduated from KCP. As expected, I cried like a motherfucker. But I'm not going to lie, I was pretty much doomed from the start.

An old classmate and I were chosen to emcee a part of the ceremony, and so we had to show up earlier that day to practice our spiel. Because we were part of the show, that morning the teachers decided to show us the video that they had prepared for the ceremony, because we wouldn't be able to see it well from behind the curtains. Although they meant well, the video itself made me just sort of break down, and the entire practice session that followed was just a big teary mess. Luckily my partner was a really great guy, and pretty much took care of me the entire day.

Although I was able to put myself back together in time for the graduation itself, the second we all sat down in the big auditorium, and the official school people started giving their speeches, somehow I lost my control and just started crying again, on and off the entire ceremony.

Now, on the outside, I'm sure I just looked like some weird oversensitive girl, crying for some bizarre reasons at something that wasn't really all that sad to begin with. But there was a lot more behind it.

I started school at KCP in January 2011, and roughly two months after I started my first semester, the earthquake happened, and everything I thought about life changed completely. I was at school that day. And if it wasn't for the teachers and staff, I don't know how I would have survived emotionally on the day of the earthquake, or the many days to follow. The teachers stayed with us during the many aftershocks, and some of them that were stranded stayed with the students overnight. The man who eventually became my main teacher for six months guided my entire dorm home by foot that night, a journey that took almost three hours in the cold. Without him, I would have had to stay overnight as well, and although I didn't know what was going to be waiting for me back home, the fact that I could even go home made everything just a little less terrifying.

Following March 11th, classes were made optional and everybody left. Everybody. I continued to go to class because that was all I could do to keep my life somewhat normal, in a world that had literally lost all sense of stability. I had almost no friends left, almost no housemates, absolutely no family, and was emotionally cut off from the world. And throughout the months that followed, going to school was one of the only things that kept me sane.

So graduating from KCP wasn't just graduating from a language school. For me, it was leaving behind all the people who helped me through the most difficult period of my life.

So even though I'm absolutely the type to get emotional at any sort of parting of ways, somehow I had never had such an emotionally charged ending before. And so there was no way I wasn't going to cry.


みんな、お疲れさまでした〜!卒業おめでとうございます!また会いましょう♡
もう独りで歩けない

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

L'éclipse

I've fallen in love once again. With a song.

No reason to explain how or why. Just listen to it and be happy.


(Though, not gonna lie, my new love for this song is totally thanks to Akane, who reminded me of Mathieu Chedid's existence in one of her own blog posts last week or so. Sankyuuuu~! ♡)


In other news, today I was asked to be one of the MC's at our graduation ceremony on Friday. As much as I have pretty much no time to prepare for it, I've gotten sort of used to talking at these events, that I wasn't going to say no. Plus, I'm pretty much continuing my role from this summer's Speech Contest, so I guess everyone will be happy to see me on stage again.

This will be my third graduation ceremony at which I speak. I was the valedictorian in high school, the salutatorian in CEGEP, and now some sort of comic relief this time around. As much as I'm worried I might just cry in front of everyone (which would be horrible), it's always kind of nice to be asked to do such things. And they wrote the script for me, so there's almost no effort to be put in. Yay.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Another Day to Myself

I took another day for me today.

I was supposed to go to some fashion event. And truth be told, I thought it was going to be a really interesting event too. But for the last couple of days I had been sort of out of it, so I thought it best to just take some time for myself again. Spent hours in a coffee shop near my place, then jetted off to my friend's end of town for some more coffee and katsudon. And I was content.

It still hasn't quite sunk in that Friday is my graduation from my language school. And that a month from now I'm going to be starting another chapter of my academic life. And that that new chapter will be all kinds of terrifying... But at this exact moment I'm really too zen to stress out about that.

In other news, I've really gotten into Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood. It took me forever to get through the first book (it's separated into two volumes in the Japanese version), but near the end of the first volume I started to really like it, and I've been speeding through the second one. If you know anything about me and books, you'd know that I don't read. Ever. So this is some sort of huge deal lol. But that being said, as I reach the end of the book I can't help but feel sort of sad, and sort of reluctant to try and read more of it right now. I could probably finish it tonight if I wanted to, but do I want to deal with the sadness that comes with finishing a book (especially because I know that the end of this one isn't particularly happy)? Granted, I guess it's better to finish it at home than speed-reading it in the train... hmm... (though talking about reading in a train, this book is filled with way more sex than I had originally anticipated, which makes reading it on the train a little awkward haha). Well it's either reading or FB for the next couple of hours, so I guess I'll try and get a few more pages in before calling it a night. おやすみ〜!☆