Odds and Ends

The next weekend I had to work on Saturday because the entrance exam and interviews for the graduate school were happening. Apparently, part of the interview (i.e. the last 30 seconds-2 minutes) consists of an English proficiency check, by way of a few random questions. They suggested I start off with an easy question and progressively ramp up the difficulty. So I started off asking "What city are you from and what is it famous for?" A surprising number of them couldn't understand the word "city" and even more couldn't understand "for" at the end of the sentence and what function it served. An unforeseen potentially awkward situation came up when one of the applicants was from Hiroshima. For the sake of consistency, I had to ask the same questions. Thankfully, the dude ignored the elephant in the room and said Hiroshima is famous for okonomiyaki (japanese savory "pancake" mess). After that interview, though, one of the professor on the panel asked me it sounded weird to say Hiroshima is famous for the atomic bomb. "No, no it's not. You definitely wouldn't say that." He seemed to already have an idea that something was fishy about the statement, and was asking for corroboration, but still...awkward.

The day went by relatively quickly, as the rest of the interview period was the applicant giving a presentation on what they hope to do research about, or what type of art they hope to create. There were folks from many fields and it was semi-entertaining to try and grasp what they were going for. Everything from flash animators, to photographers, a programmer who created real time feeds of twitter posts and display them in interesting manners, to musicians...with one lady in particular wanting to create music from a female's perspective that captures their sense of eroticism. Good luck with that. Sadly, once she mentioned eroticism in music, all I could think of was music by "Peaches," but maybe she's going for something a little more subtle, and a little less raw. Far too many of the presentations, though, seemed to lack a point or true direction. I though this may just be the scientist in me, but even the professors on the panel were quite skeptical of some of the applicants. Still, though, an interesting enough day at the office, and I get to take a vacation day off later for coming in on Saturday. So I'll be using this to help create a four and a half day weekend and go visit Wallin in Korea. Woot!

The next weekend was Halloween, which ended up being pretty low key. A number of folks were going to a bar in West Gifu that I didn't particularly enjoy the first time I went there, and as is the case every year, I didn't really have a costume prepared, so it would have been odd in that sense. I later found out a few folks went into Nagoya for some all you can eat/drink party at some bar. It turns out I could have had some really drunk J-girls hitting on me (as was the case for Rock and Ozzy)...dang, guess I missed out. Grandpa Collin was out in full force and so I just went out to eat with Jon, Sarah, and Anna at...drumroll please...Stamina-taro. So we again stuffed ourselves silly. I threw on the mask Wallin gave me from Korea for some makeshift Halloween attire, and that thing is NOT comfortable to wear. After the meal we took some Halloween puri-kura (picture booths) and got some spooky pictures. My green shirt, however, was the approximately the same shade as the green screen background, which made for some especially odd photos.

That next Tuesday, we had the day off for culture day, and it turned out that Nanzan University (where I studied abroad in Nagoya three years ago) was having an event for past study abroad students along with their homecoming festival. I wouldn't have gone, but my friend Pao, who I studied abroad with, is back in Japan for grad school in Osaka and was coming into Nagoya, so we decided to go together. She also had got in contact with our Japanese language teacher from that year, and so we met up with her as well. We chilled a bit at the event and then our teacher treated us to lunch at an Italian place near the campus. It was a bit odd to talk with her outside of a class context, and it was much less stressful now that we weren't her students. I actually rather enjoyed the conversation overall. She was oddly adamant, though, about me not abandoning my chemistry major to do work strictly related to Japanese. She insisted if I did so, I would "become just like everybody else." This seems like a bit of an overstatement, but I think I have an idea about what she was trying to say. I really do enjoy chemistry as well, but I can't see myself abandoning Japanese and working in a lab all day long. She suggested a interesting idea to me...going to grad school for chemistry-in Japan. Now this thought had occurred to me before, but she said I could apply for the Ministry of Education scholarship to pay for my Masters Degree studies, and it is more of an opportunity to meet a professor, who will have a network of folks he can introduce me to, which could turn into a job. I have been trying to figure out how to properly marry my two major into some job I enjoy doing, and this seems like a more promising path to that end than I have been able to come up with on my own thus far. I'm just not entirely sure I wouldn't be miserable doing grad school without some folks to properly vent to. I think the natural depression that coincides with grad school coupled with the fact that one never quite feels like they belong in the society and that it's hard (at least for me) to make friends with Japanese people (I will go into this in a later post...).
At the very least, that is one possible pathway I am considering at the moment. The rest of the day, Pao and I hung out around Nagoya and did some shopping in Osu. All in all, it was great to catch up with an old friend and a solid trip to Nagoya. Yes, I realize there are no pictures in this update. As Captain Murphy would say "Too bad."

Next Post: Mid-year CIR training conference (a.k.a. A giant waste of my time)

Current Update: I've had some distressing news today. One of my good friends here is going to have to leave the program early and is in fact heading back to the U.S. next Monday. This is coupled with the recent news that ALT positions in the prefecture will be cut from 30-something to 7 next year due to a lack of budget. This means that should I stay here another year on JET, all of my current friends will be gone, or at least relatively far away. This has been weighing somewhat heavily on my mind this past week. More on these unfortunately developments later. In lighter news, I went to Nagoya today and got to eat at my favorite Italian place from when I studied abroad. Nothing like food to make you feel better!