October Dreams

Fall is here, but barely in Kumamoto. It has felt like mid-summer the whole week, almost blazingly hot, until yesterday. Yesterday, it started to feel cooler and a bit chilly at night. I'm glad October is here. Besides the beautiful change of leaves, October brings with it, for me, many happy memories of the past, and of my culture.

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, as many people know. Once a year for four years now, I've enjoyed pulling out my copy of October Dreams and reading a few stories from the spooky anthology . It has some of my favorite authors from when I was younger telling stories and recounting their Halloweens past. It brings me back...

Halloween is not traditionally celebrated by Japanese here in Japan, but there are still lots of "trick-or-treat" displays, and little green and orange pumpkins can be found in shopping malls, as well as plenty of darling Halloween crafts and treats to buy, which can be hard to resist... ahem. Large pumpkins are more rare to come by, and expensive too.

As for me, my blood tingles with anticipation of Halloween every year, regardless of costumes or pumpkins. The season, the history of the holiday, the colors, the fun, and of course, the treats(!), make me feel glad we have a holiday such as this one. Happy Halloween to all!!

I plan to dress up and go to a costume party, like I did last year. Last year, I was Crouching Tiger and my friend was Hidden Dragon. I'm not into the new sexy-style costumes(thanks, Linda) that have be getting popular over in the US recently. I think they take away the fun in a lot of ways, so I'm going to stick to traditional and maybe be an only semi-cute, but formidable Batwoman. (Batgirl, now back and more grown up than ever.) I'm not sure yet. I usually wait til a couple days before to decide.

I had my third Jodo class today, and so far I'm just loving it so much. It's not all that exciting, just repeating strikes and short forms over and over again, but there are so many precise details to follow, and I feel like I'm eating it up so far, albeit my brain is all mixed up and full with stuff I was taught. Aikido class afterwards was, as usual, good. I finally started keeping notes on my practice -- a technical notebook, for stuff I want to remember. No reflections or anything; I only do that here. ;-)

Also, I took a practice Japanese test today for the one in December. I took two parts out of the three parts of the test, and when we added my score, I was only one point from passing, without any points from the third part! I was psyched, because that means I'll definitely pass. Now, I'm going to challenge myself, and see if I can't raise my own score a lot higher than I did today. By no means have I mastered the material yet, but I'm working hard to at least work off of a strong foundation.

School has been just fine recently. I've been coaching students for a few different speech contests for a couple of months, and I was surprised and pleased that two of the students I had coached came in first and second at their competitions. We've been working hard almost every day so that they can give it their best for the national competition in Tokyo in January.

Regular teaching is still difficult, but I'm starting to see that if I went through the textbook(it's the one I chose, remember, so I can't complain; I love the book, actually! Here's the lesson we're on now...) for another year, it might start being easier and maybe the Japanese teachers I teach alongside with and I could enjoy our classes more. I've been doing a lot of work in school getting lesson plans made and in order for the end of second term. I wish I could express how much I want to be a part of classes that motivate and inspire the students, but as long as my grasp of Japanese is so minimal, I have to side-step actually teaching sometimes, because, due to my inexperience with Japanese, I can't explain anything much complicated to them. Some of them have started to get more interested, though, and makes me think there's hope for us. Maybe by the end of this school year(March) I'll have my act fully together. That's my goal, anyway.

Lastly, I want to say that I've been going through a lot of changes in my personal life recently. I think my cousin getting married had something to do with it, but that was just a small(but significant!) part of the big 'puzzle.' Things are getting clearer, and I'm embracing the changes okay, I believe.

I can't believe I wrote so much!! It's been a long time.

Best to you all out there.