Long blog posts are bad for sleep but good for soul...

Today was a sort of mixed day.

It started off not especially well and I feel like it's ending on a somewhat uneasy note as well. But the yuckiness sandwiches the fun afternoon I had. So it wasn't all bad.

This morning started off like every morning for the last few weeks. Which is to say, I slept in later than I should. I still get to school on time... but it's becoming more and more ギリギリ.

Because I got to school later than I usually do, I decided to skip my coffee, which is always a bad idea. So this being said, the first half of class was especially difficult to get through. So as I tried my best to pretend to be interested in what was going on in class through foggy, uncaffeinated eyes, my teacher started talking about how she isn't too happy with our class. I think it was meant to be some sort of "get your act together" pep talk, but it totally had the opposite effect on me. She said that most of us aren't improving, which kind of hurt.

Now, I don't think she was really directing this towards me. It was probably meant for the people who barely show up to class, who never hand in homework, who don't participate. But lately my grades have gone slightly down, I'm not getting enough sleep, I skip out on some of the homework and I have very little motivation.

And I don't feel like my Japanese is improving on a regular basis. So hearing my teacher tell the class that we aren't improving was not a good start to the day.

We break for recess, and I get my much needed coffee and meet up with a friend. Over the weekend, him and some other girl in his class apparently told the beautiful Korean guy that I've been pining over for months now about said pining. Oh well, whatever, I thought at first. But of course, this friend doesn't like to just leave things as is... He somehow always finds a way to make me feel like shit. So that being said, he continues the story. "He said he didn't really notice... cause he doesn't notice girls who don't confess [their feelings] to him. And that he doesn't really care for girls who can't confess to his face.... Oh, and btw, he doesn't like virgins. He likes girls with experience."

HUH? Since when is it okay to make assumptions about my sexual history? Do we want to go there? Really?

But then it got me to thinking, are all guys of a certain age like this? Did I miss the "let's get a ton of sexual experience" boat? Fuck, finding a boyfriend really is like finding a job, no? No one wants to hire someone without experience. Though, no one really wants to hire someone who's overqualified either, right...?

So between the "you're not good enough at Japanese" quasi-pep talk, and the "your lame and are clearly not qualified to date SJ" reminder, I was in a wonderful mood during class today...

The afternoon turned out to be surprisingly fun though. A girl from my class was going the same way as me as I was leaving, so we metro'ed together to Ikebukuro, went to the candy shop she wanted to, then went to a cafe to study. In reality, I got very little school work done. But I had a really good time hanging out with her, and got to speak Japanese pretty much the whole time too.

What I like about this girl is that she's sort of like me, in the sense that, there aren't many people of her nationality in school. She's Malaysian, but is often grouped together with the Chinese students, because she speaks Chinese too. Her Japanese isn't perfect, but she has a large vocabulary, and is super friendly.

What is difficult about talking to the Koreans in my class (i.e. the majority of my classmates) is that they're all multiple times better than me at Japanese, so not only do I feel embarrassed by the quality of my own Japanese, but I honestly can't understand them half the time (due to said higher quality language abilities). This girl is definitely better than me at Japanese, but she makes mistakes too, and that's somewhat comforting. And she speaks English too, so when I need to use an English word or expression, it works out. I hope I get to hang out with her more in the coming semester :)

What made tonight somewhat yucky was trying to write my speech for Wednesday's class. I have to talk about some sort of social news thing of my choice, and I was going to do it on PTSD in post-earthquake Japan... but not only can I not find any real concrete facts (if they even exist) about the number of people that have been effected by the 3/11 quake, but just reading the info sort of makes me feel uneasy. Because it really is PTSD that I'm going through.

Reading through the symptoms makes me wonder if my whole lack of motivation is somewhat related to that. Or am I just blaming too many things on one single event? It's really hard to tell, and just thinking about it makes me somewhat uneasy.

I wish everything in life were clear sometimes. Can't I just pee on a stick and it can turn one colour for PTSD and another colour for "it's just you"?