Gah! It’s already 2017! It feels like just yesterday that a bright and shiny 2016 arrived at my door with promises of awesome things to come, but now it’s gone into that cold, dark night where time disappears to when one is not looking.
One of my pet peeves on about living in Japan is just how hard it can be sometimes to get things done when you have a middle name.
One of my enduring loves is music. I’ve always been fascinated by music’s ability to change your mood, whether it be lifting you up out of sad times or bringing back sad memories of past losses.
Whenever September rolls around I scramble on the first day of the month to be one of the first people to order my Hobonichi Techo for the following year. Now if you don’t know what a Hobonichi Techo is then I wouldn’t be surprised. A Hobonichi Techo is really just a Japanese planner or diary, but at the same time it’s a book that prides itself on being a vessel for your thoughts, your life, and anything you want to use it for. If you look at the usage examples on their website you’ll find a million and one ways that people around the world have customized to fit their lifestyles. For a quick refresher you can also read my initial impressions and see what I thought of it when I first started using it back in 2015.
So after a long break that started at the end of July when JET contract ended, I’ve had to finally get back into the groove of waking up early and going in to work.
Five years on the JET programme has now officially passed with my final JET contract coming to an end at the end of July this year. Whenever you come to the end of five years in any sort of job it is a big adjustment to move on to the next thing in your life.
You remember a while back when I wrote about my frustrations with Konami?
April is a time of year in Japanese schools that I’ve written about before, but despite that it still hasn’t gotten any easier every year to see teachers I’ve come to know well move on to other schools.
My recent trips to Canada and South Africa as well as a pretty great Christmas have seen me come to the not surprising revelation that I need to get out of my current rut and get my butt into gear so that by this summer I haven’t turned into some sort of gelatinous blob that is barely describable as human-shaped.
Sometimes living in Japan does have it’s perks, as in this case when students at Tama Art University in Japan decided that the best way for them to make their graduation ceremony memorable was to dress up as Immortan Joe and his War Boys.