Simple Pleasures 2

There are many things that I wish I could change about my life, but there are very few things that I regret.

That being said, quitting the piano is very possibly my biggest life regret up until now.

Although I'm not the biggest classical music fan, there's something altogether entrancing about the sound of the piano. Though perhaps it's just me.

No one knows this, but that's one of the reasons I love studying at the Caffe Veloce near my place. Each Veloce has a somewhat different soundtrack that plays, but the one closest to where I live plays this wonderful piano music. I never wear headphones when I study there... I'm just so happy to be listening to what they have to offer.

So as I study dreadful Japanese grammar in my tiny dorm room, I drown out the yelling children that surround the maze of apartment complexes with calming music from Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain and am at peace.

Good Feeling, won't you stay with me...

I hate having bad feelings that you just can't shake.

And when you're as self-destructive as I am, you just keep trying to find problems in something that might have gone well.

Hmm.

The yucky rain outside probably doesn't help.

I Don't Wanna Grow Up...

...I'm a Toys 'R' Us Kid.....

or something like that.

No, but seriously, when did everyone grow up?

Lately when doing the usual rounds of facebook stalking old high school peers, I've noticed that everyone looks... well... grown up. And it's just sort of weird.

People are graduating university, going to grad school, doing internships, getting real jobs, moving in with boyfriends, getting married.... And yet I sort of feel like I'm in a completely different world.

In some ways, I almost am, too. Living halfway around the world is hard to imagine. Not because it's so alien and foreign, but for the exact opposite reason: it's the same. Sure, things are different, but not enough for me to really realize how far away I live from everything I've ever known. Every now and then I have the horrifying realization that I live in Asia. I don't mean 'horrifying' in a bad way though. But 'horrifying' in a I-can't-believe-I'm-literally-on-the-opposite-side-of-the-world way. Maybe it's because no matter where you are, you're always with yourself, so you can't really feel the distance. Or maybe it's just me.

What I've come to learn about life is that people live different kinds of lives, and there's no real right or wrong way to go about it. I obviously sometimes feel jealous of the girls I went to high school with who look their age and seem like they're carelessly enjoying their twenties, when here I am, conflicted over what the next step should be for me in the great game of life. But at the same time, I'm sort of happy that my life is so different from theirs. It's a sort of source of pride, I guess you could say.

So perhaps I don't look like I'm twenty-three. But so what. I'll look hot at fifty.

I'm My Own Best Friend!

Maybe I'm better off alone.

Hear me out before you judge this.

I met a guy I really liked and found out through mega creepage that he liked me back. I didn't see him for a week, and when we did see each other it was sorta awkward. And I felt like shit afterwards. And I've pondered and pondered and pondered about how I felt towards him since. And I'm still pondering. And now I really just don't know.

I felt very alone today. But in a good way. In a it's-alright-to-be-alone way.

When talking with a new friend today I feel like I was better able to sum up these feelings.

I'm extremely lost in life right now. I don't know what I want in any part of my life. I don't know what to do with my future. I don't know what to do with my present. I don't know how to deal with my past. And I don't know if I want to drag someone along for the ride.

This isn't one of those self-torturing-let-me-live-my-life-alone-and-cry-in-a-corner-forever things. It's a let-me-try-to-prioritize-my-life thing.

Having people in your life is both negative and positive. In some ways, it makes you feel more complete, it allows you to have meaningful conversations, be comforted when problems arise. But in other ways it can be negative: people pushing you in the wrong direction, getting advice at the wrong time, feeling the need to censor yourself, becoming dependent.

I'm not going to rule out relationships, or said guy in question. But I also need to think about myself right now and I don't know if I can afford high-commitment distractions.

So, as one of the co-ordinators at my school told me, as I gave her my current life story in a nutshell yesterday: "Well, you've always got Kimutaku, right?" Right. Kimutaku has helped me thus far along my journey in the East. And as I continue to ride on the wings of my imaginary celebrity marriage, I am strangely satisfied.

I can't believe it's already midterm time! The semester is going by so fast!

It's amazing how much material we cover in only a few weeks! And it's even more amazing that I believe I can cover all of said material in a day... But that's besides the point.

I got a package from home today, which is always exciting~! It was jam-packed with microwave popcorn and other edible goodies :) I really like getting mail~! Though I'm not gonna lie, it does make me slightly homesick. But only slightly.

It's hard to say where my "home" is these days. I really like it here. And I'm having a lot of trouble dealing with the fact that in a few short months, I'm to go back to Montreal.

The future is really starting to stress me out. On one hand, I never want to leave Japan. On the other hand, to be able to live and work here, I pretty much legally have to leave to acquire visas and other bureaucratic legal stuff. But what kind of job do I even want to do? Can't I just marry Kimura Takuya already and just live off his fame and fortune? (And of course be extremely happy being married to one of the most famous men in Japan...?)

In order to avoid a semi-emo rant about life and its stresses and worries and uncertainties, I'm just going to leave it at that. I assure you that the little wheels in my head are turning and turning and on their way to establishing some sort of plan. Let's just hope it's a good one!

Simple Pleasures

When you're a foreigner living in Japan, the three questions you are probably most asked are: Where are you from?, How long have you been in Japan? and Why do you study Japanese/like Japan?

Now, the first two questions are answered easily enough. I'm from Canada. I've been here four months. but the third question is always a tough one to answer.

Why do I like Japan? Why do I study Japanese?

Sometimes I wish there was a simple answer to this, just so I don't have to go into petty details and life stories.

Well, boys and girls, this book here (and books like it) is the reason I study Japanese.

It's called 振仮名の歴史, or The History of Furigana. A professor back at McGill lent me this book back in University while I was writing a paper on stuff like this. Unfortunately my Japanese was not at a high enough level to make enough sense out of this book, so I couldn't really use it for anything. Well, today while poking around a bookstore I had never been to, I accidentally stumbled upon it, and after reading (and understand!) parts of the forward, I said 'what the hell', and bought it. Then I sat in the cafe right next to the bookstore and just drank tea and read. Happiness.

I love this kind of stuff. Most people, Japanese or foreign, probably don't give a shit about furigana, or think twice about where it comes from or why it's used. But it's one of the coolest things ever when you think about it. Depending on how much I get out of this comprehension-wise, I might try to see if I can start reading Nihonjinron books. That's another thing I find fascinating. Aah knowledge :3

Coincidentally, I met up with the aforementioned professor last week. He's currently teaching at the university right next to my place. I love how small the world is sometimes :)

Unilingualism is Boring

Living in a foreign country where the language of majority is a world away from my mother tongue, I am forced to think about the importance of language on a daily basis.

Language has always fascinated me, and it has always been one of my biggest interests. But the relationship I have had with language is somewhat of a love-hate one, because as much as I love learning things about language and learning new languages, it's not something I'm particularly good at, and it takes me longer than most people to achieve any sort of proficiency. But that's not what this post is about.

When living in Montreal, the language of the majority was, once again, not my mother tongue. So although I would speak English with my friends and family, listen to English music, watch English TV, and be an all-round English person, the world outside my front door was conducted in a different language altogether. And because of this, I believe my sense of language is a little warped.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.

A few months ago, a French friend and I were walking around Tokyo and talking about the annoyances of being automatically assumed as English-speaking Americans just because we're white. According to her, such assumptions are upsetting because she's not supposed to speak English, because she's not even from an English-speaking country. I, on the other hand, am supposed to be a bilingual individual.

The more I think about it, the more she really has a point in what she was saying.

Growing up in Montreal, I have become dependant on two languages. I am significantly more dependant on my mother tongue, however, I am incapable of limiting my thoughts and emotions to one language. There are some things I can only say in French, and others which I can only say in English.

But these last few months, because I have almost no French-speaking friends, I have had to think more in English than ever before, which is sort of weird.

At the same time, much like things were not in English back home, because of my constant exposure to Japanese everywhere I go, I'm having a lot of trouble expressing myself in English these days. I watch TV in Japanese. I listen to Japanese music. All the signs around me are in Japanese. People speaking in the street are speaking Japanese. Although the output is still mainly English, the input is almost exclusively Japanese. Due to the lack of exposure, English words are no longer readily-available to me, and my brain thinks in Japanese sentence structure. With my friends here, I jokingly speak Japlish and get my message across quite well, but when it comes to speaking to friends and family back home, all of a sudden I feel somewhat distressed.

I remember back in my Language Acquisition class back in university learning about kids who could hear, but had two deaf parents. Even if they left the TV on all day, that would never be enough exposure to a language to make it the child's mother tongue or for the child to really acquire it. This being said, I feel like that's what's happened to me all my life. I was never exposed to enough English for me to be able to rely on it 100% to express myself. There has always been another language in my life to provide a supplementary list of vocabulary.

I wonder if it's possible for someone who has been exposed to multiple languages since childhood to fully rely on one language. I feel like my English is not 100% as natural as the English that my friends speak and there are a lot of commonly used English words and expressions that I honestly do not understand. But because of my abilities to use other languages, I believe that I haven't quite missed out. Because if you combine all the words I know in all my languages, I must have enough to make up one complete language, right? Who says my way of speaking has to be comprehensible by others?