What I'm Doing Next...

As I wrote once before, no matter what point we are at in our lives, we always seem to be answering the same few questions over and over again. The Past few months, everybody has been asking me over and over again: “So, almost finished with your job in Japan, huh? What are you going to do next?”

I have 3 different answers I’ve been using for this, depending on what mood I’m in. Sometimes I use all 3, and say I’m still weighing my options.

1. Vice-President of the United States. I’ve been using this joke for a long time now, ever since I was still in Ajimu.
2. Join the French Foreign Legion. I know this is the oldest joke in the world, and the very phrase evokes images of snoopy wondering if the French Foreign legion takes beagles, and a million other pop culture clichés. But in Japan the phrase doesn’t have the same cliché sound to it, so I’ve been able to use this quite successfully. According to the Japan Times there are actually a surprising number of Japanese people in the French Foreign legion, but apparently this hasn’t seeped down into the mainstream popular lexicon yet, because most Japanese people I talk to don’t even know what the “French Foreign Legion” is, even though I went through the trouble of learning the Japanese word for it (Furansu Gaijin Butai).
3. Just take a year off and do a lot of drugs. (I tried not to use this 3rd one too much when I was at the junior high school).

Seriously though, I have no clue what I am going to do when I get back home to the USA. I have a long list of things I don’t want to do, but have trouble thinking of something I want to do.

As I mentioned a few times in this blog, I’ve been thinking about going into graduate school for history. I still have a lot of doubts about that, but I guess until I can think of something else you might call this a tentative plan.

There are right now bouncing around in my head about a hundred reasons why I should go into graduate school, and a hundred reasons why I shouldn’t. For one thing I’m well aware that there are more people currently in academia than the market can support at the moment anyway. I know that it’s 4 years of school, and then no guarantee of a job at the end of it. I worry about my already excessive near-sightedness, and wonder if all that studying would really be good for me.

On the other hand, the past 5 years I’ve been out of school I seem to be addicted to history books anyway, so maybe I should just go ahead and get a degree out of it. I have a geekish fascination with primary sources and old books (provided it’s a subject I’m interested in). I’m much more comfortable reading and writing than I am talking to people. I’m absent minded, have limited social skills, and can’t do anything practical, all of which I think fits the criteria of people who usually go into academia….

As you can see I’m still sorting all of this out. But if you were to press me for a tentative plan, I guess the tentative plan would be to apply for graduate school over the next year while I work some mindless job. I hear it’s about a yearlong application process, and besides I need to learn some more languages to study history at the graduate level. So I could use that year to learn French or German or something anyway. Maybe take a couple classes at the community college or something.

Again, I stress this is all tentative. I’m just kind of thinking aloud on this weblog. I really don’t know what I want to do for certain.

Another complicating factor is that Shoko and I have decided to get married. (Actually that’s kind of a big announcement. Very devious of me to sneak that into the middle of the post just to see if you were paying attention, isn’t it?) I’m sure that will complicate the hell out of things, and may nix the possibility of graduate school, but we’ll see what happens.

There was no big dramatic moment when I proposed to Shoko. Rather it was something that just came about. We had been talking about it for a while. At one point I think we were lying in bed, and I said, “I’m not going to stay in Japan much longer, but I’d like to continue our relationship.”
And she said, “I’m not going to move to America unless we get married.”
And I said, “Yeah, that’s what I meant. I mean I assumed that.”
And she said, “Oh. Okay then.”

Or something like that. As Brett said in an e-mail to me, “What’s with Camelot Boys and nonchalant proposals?” So I guess I’m not the only one. (“Camelot” for those not in the know, is the name of the apartment complex where me and the boys spent our last year at Calvin College.)

International marriage is a huge headache of paper work and filling out forms, and I’d be lying if I said I knew what I was doing. I’m currently in the middle of seeking advice from friends who have already been through the process.

Shoko is worried, and probably with good cause, that her limited English will result in limited employment opportunities in the US. The job she has now pays very well, and once you leave a job in Japan, you can’t come back to it. So she wants to stay one more year at her current job to save up money. She’ll be eligible for an employee bonus in July of next summer, so she wants to stay until then. Afterwards she has agreed to quit and move to the US.

That’s a year and 4 months away, which is obviously a bit of a stress on the relationship. The past year and a half, things have already been long distance, because I was up in Gifu, and she was down in Oita. (Get out your maps if you need to.)

So, now that I’m finished with the job in Gifu, I’m staying at her place in Oita for the next month or so. That is, depending on how you look at it, an incredibly long amount of time or an incredibly short amount.

Considering we may be apart for a while after this, one month is obviously a short time. On the other hand, it’s a long time for me just to be hanging around doing nothing. I was very bored when I was here for the summer, and that was when I still had a car. Now that the job is over, and I’ve returned the car back, I’m pretty much stranded in Shoko’s apartment while she’s away at work. (I wrote before about what a mess public transport is in Oita).

So my goal is to spend the next month productively, and not waste most of it in front of the TV like I did last summer. In fact my goal is to not watch any TV or videos, and instead use my free time to crack down on my reading list. Watch for more book reviews on this site.

Other projects are to
*Get in shape (I’ve really let myself go the past couple months)
*Fill out all the forms necessary for pension refund and insurance refund
*Research this international marriage thing a bit more
*Buy a plane ticket home

One final note: I know I’m behind on e-mail again. Although I have a lot of time now, it’s not the amount of time that counts but the amount of internet time. I’m trying really hard not to spend a fortune on internet cafes this month. Obviously time I spend on this blog, and time I spend researching some of the above projects, is going to come out of e-mail time. I’ll do my best though. Should probably be home in about a month, so I’ll see you all then.

Link of the Day
Check out this cartoon from Guam's Website. I couldn't agree more.