My shining future

Friday, I finally get to meet some of the English teachers, and thus I am officially declaring it the first flower after what has proven to be an unusually long and boring 100 degree winter. Week after that is Kagoshima orientation, and a free trip to civilization. And then the real fun starts.

My time at the office, in between being bored and studying Japanese (today's words: to make up for, to get drunk, grandparents, cousin, some island vulgarity which is about the sharpest sounding thing I have ever heard come out of a Japanese persons mouth. It's damn near guttural. I think we'll be hearing a lot of it) is spent trying to find information on what the hell I'm supposed to be doing with my time, particularly since I am a one-shot, and see these kids perhaps once a month.

What these searches keep turning up instead are just about every single disgruntled JET horror story that exists on the planet. Hell, one guy appears to have even compiled all these into one place for easy access. It is both demoralizing and encouraging. Demoralizing because the JET programme as a whole does seem to have some endemic flaws, largely stemming in the fact that JET, as an organization, recruits through a fair deal of propaganda. It's not even necessarily overt, but it is self-selecting. The guys who want to go from college to college in America talking about how great their experiences were had great experiences. And "JET: 85% of you will fail to make a difference, and you will be haunted by it." makes a poor recruiting slogan.

But the silver lining in all of it, is that so far my situation, generally difficult as one-shot visits are, is pretty decent so far. My house, while old, is the charming kind of old, not that "sometimes the water goes out, so we have to do laundry in the river" old. My coworkers, while not culture-bridging super mutants, are all very nice, and generally pretty damn accommodating and laid back. My alarm didn't go off this morning, so I got in about 45 minutes late...and smelly. No one said anything, but I stayed late of my own volition to make up for it (principles!) and the office girls and my boss's boss were sitting around with me for the last bit, killing time, laughing about my obvious inadequacies as a human.

In fact my whole chain-of-command is pretty cool dudes. My boss, Koizumi, is like the smoothest Japanese man I have ever come across. He like...is incapable of panic or something. His boss (I think, it gets confusing) is this just incredibly laid back dude named Masu, who just kind of hangs out at his desk most of the day and laughs at everything. His boss I've mentioned before, the elegant but deadly Harunaga, who has really settled into a good routine as far as the guerrilla English attacks go. The office is not what I would call "fun" but it is certainly getting less awkward.


Edit: Last section removed for personal reasons. Henceforth this blog shall contain no more waxing poetic about my misery. I'm just gonna go do my job, enjoy my life, and tell you about the funny and profound parts. Huzzah! Also maybe photos...but don't hold your breath.

Special replacement paragraph!!!!: While browsing through my predecessors notes earlier today, I found the following printed on one of the lesson plans she received from an Elementary School "ALT greets the students with vigor and excrement!". Underlined in red by Ilsa with the note "I think I'll let Adam decide whether or not to bring this up."