Stephanie

Miserable freezing rain, 3C (-3C)

My go ranking dropped. That's it. No more resigning games. Once I know I'm losing, I'll just play crazy till the other guy passes.

I want to be good at go, damnit! Someone teach me in a language I understand very well and easily....

I want to be good at so many things, but I feel like this is the biggest challenge for me right now.

In other [less significant, mind you,...] news, I signed contracts and got the key for my new apartment today. So much Japanese legalese I couldn't speak or write properly for an hour or so after... Tomorrow I move in. All the utilities except Internet are on. I have to arrange a new contract with NTT [East, remember?].

Tuesday I get my last paycheck from GEOS ; I plan to buy appliances with it.

I also need to get tea towels for introduction gifts to my neighbors. I think I'll go out for that after the boxes are moved and at least the futon and clothes chest is sorted.

No more morning and evening go games for a while. I hope to get a tall, wide bookcase soon (also with Tuesday's pay, but on Rakuten so delivery won't be immediate), then I can unpack my books--including the go ones, and I'll read those again. Maybe this time it'll sink through my hard, thick skull into my brain, where I'll make good use of it.

I'd like to get several things with that paycheck. I hope it's bigger than I'm expecting!

Still no word on two of the parttime jobs I applied to--one already said I live too far away from them. No other ideas for paying tuition, yet.

After another two weeks or so, I should be back online. To various effect.

God help me--on so many fronts.

Mostly clear, 16C (17C)

I had a bad dream. It wasn't bad enough to be a nightmare, but it wasn't good enough to be indifferent so I'll say it was bad. I'll guess it's environmentally/stress induced. It was pretty incredible. I woke up, late, right in the middle of it, so it stayed with my groggy self for longer than dreams usually do. Maybe it would be a nightmare to some people, but it all seemed horrifically normal and predictable to me. This is mildly surprising. I'm glad it's over--at least the slumbering part.

As a kind of therapy I've entered a raffle. Last year I entered this same raffle and all kinds of issues were brought to the fore because of my involvement with it. I've thought about that and the underlying reasons a bit since then. Entering again is rather like a test. Now I shall put it out of my mind and see what happens. I hope only things that I can immediately recognize as good...

Some more details are emerging about what the future in my job might look like--but not really enough. For example ; I now know what the various ranks are paid and how they are defined, but I don't know what my rank in the company would be. Who the hell knows. I'm kindof tired and kindof fed up but also kindof out of ideas and a little too apathetic. Part of me insists it'll all be fine, the other part wonders how the hell that's going to happen.... you see the conflict, I suppose.

Speaking of work, I was magnificently unproductive today during my four-hour lull in teaching--I read wikipedia articles on figures of Sengoku-jidai. Fantastic stuff. I've been rather encouraged lately, as I'm getting more and more of the jokes and references in the anime I watch. This was one of the things I mentioned wanting to acquire in terms of cultural and linguistic literacy that I figured I wasn't going to get in Kawanoe. Freakishly enough, the source for this--anime and cetera were equally available to me in Kawanoe ; I just never accessed them there. But now that I'm in a city it seems wholly more appropriate and becoming to feed my curiosity in these matters. Either way, I'm happy in this one little sphere, at least.

I made reservations at the old samurai house this morning for Kanazawa in July. It was terribly exciting and I'm terribly excited about it all! Thank God for small miracles--like ppl painlessly prodding. Now I have something to look forward to, and I need that. For a healthy change in pace I'll be traveling with another human being (usu I'm solo) : Tsubasa.

I've been thinking a lot about martial arts and such... I think these thoughts are interesting and insightful syntheses. Experience, again, is the final arbiter of learning... I want to play a lot more go but I've been somewhat depressed and my sleep is all messed up... excuses, excuses, I know. I'll let them slide for just a bit longer. Probably the rest of this week.

Also, following a particularly incensing drunken conversation, which I'm sure I only half-understood, I've come to the conclusion that perhaps I have simply become one of those people who are alone for good and for ever. Somehow, this does not bother me so much. I'm reminded of a letter I once wrote in which I begged someone to find some light to dispel their darkness--now I wonder why ; my darkness, at least, is velvety-smooth : perhaps his was as well.