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feeling: ugh
listening to: nothing
You are Shinya Terachi!
What Dir en Grey Band Member are you?
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You are 'le ciel' by Malice Mizer!
Which sad j-rock song are you?
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Today at noon, I was watching TV, having been awake for about half an hour, when my dad came up to my room carrying a wooden tray upon which was a plate bearing a fresh waffle which had been made in a waffle iron shaped like Snoopy's head. Plus butter and syrup. I later discovered that he even made a bunch of them until he got one that looked just right. Why the trouble? Why the service? What occasion? I don't know. As if that wasn't enough, for dinner tonight, he actually made a banana pizza, after I had only barely mentioned the novelty on a whim yesterday as we were driving home. God, I love my dad.
Good news. As of right now I'm projecting at least 3 out of my 4 classes this quarter to end in an A. In 2 1/2 years I've never gotten lower than that in Japanese, and this quarter's proving to be no exception... exam curves should bump me into the low A range in psych... and my geology professor and TA are pushovers, and they don't care if you get the answers right, as long as it looks like you tried. The only thing that still looms over my head snapping giant bloody jaws of death is literature. The teacher's still a piece of cake, but... ok, our midterm is this Tuesday, and she gave us a review sheet for the thing, right? The thing is COVERED, front and back, with names and dates and readings and topics to master for the exam. Plus this stupid "project" due at the end of the quarter is going to eat me. I barely have an idea about my personal topic and my group's overall objective, and we're supposed to turn in a bibilography this coming week, and I have zero sources. I don't project much success finding reliable resources about sequential autumn-themed poetry in classical Japan. Plus, she emailed the same list of possible sources to me and to a guy in my group, and he said he checked them all out already, which means none will be left in the library for me. I hate major projects.
I was thinking... if I really knew what was good for me regarding my course of study, I'd go to grad school next year. But that idea just makes me want to curl up in a fetal position and suck my thumb. All the research work, projects, dissertations (sp?)... I could never pull that off. I even went through special pains to avoid doing a senior thesis, and looking back, that was an extremely wise choice - this year has already given me an ulcer, and the worst is yet to come. Plus, paying off these past 4 years is gonna be enough of a crunch... even if I were to pull some scholarships, I don't know how I could afford grad school, unless I worked as a teaching assistant. And frankly, I refuse to do that. I am not the teaching type. So if not grad school, then what? Either I immediately forget everything I've worked these past few years to learn, and end up mucking out cages in a pet store for the rest of my life, or I immediately find a job, probably permanent, that puts my Japanese to use and forces me to not forget it all. Or I go to Japan. Personally, I would love to do that, but... there's that whole leaving everything behind and starting over in another world concept. And the money thing too. If I weren't graduating this year, I'd probably have signed up to spend spring quarter in Kobe with some other people from my class...
But either way, sitting around doing nothing for more than a few months after graduation is out of the question. You forget foreign languages in no time flat when you stop learning and using them. I took up through Spanish 104, for example, and I might remember no more than a few dozen words now, 2 years later. Over the three months of last summer I forgot at least half of the 300 or so kanji I'd learned by then. If I want to get anything out of my degree, I need to either go to grad school, go to Japan, or get a job using Japanese very soon after graduation.
I can't picture ANY of this. At all. I try to... I sit there and think and ponder and deliberate and chew my nails to nubs over the whole thing... but I can't see anything. It's like there's not even a future out there for me to consider. Like I subconsciously (and mistakenly, of course) know that everything will just fall into place no matter what I decide. I don't know where I'll be 5 years from now, or even 5 months from now. Watch with me, everyone, as my bachelor's sits in some box rotting away for the rest of my life while I flip burgers or clean up animal excretion to pay the monthly rent on my cardboard box, giving blank looks to any Japanese customers I encounter while only the occasional 'hai' or 'arigatou' or 'baka' registers in my memory.
...yeeeeeah... don't ask me where all that came from... it's been a weird few days. I'm gonna go now. Ugh.
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dragged from Becky's stream of consciousness at 2/15/2004 12:30:00 AM
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