Fridays

Ah, Fridays. I have mixed feelings about Fridays. While standard TGIF applies, this also happens to be the one day a week I go to my elementary. For a variety of reasons, the elementary is the part of my job I enjoy the least (to put it kindly). Chief among these is because I am at a serious lingual disadvantage. What if my supporter, who translates for me, to get sick and miss a day? I'd be left in the Japanese equivalent of lingual Siberia. I think the teachers have all quite given up on talking to me, even, perhaps, grown to dislike me a bit. I can only be paranoid as I listen to them chatter, eyeing them over my coffee as I hear my name battered about.

I have to say studying here is a very rewarding process. I have always found studying language to be exciting and rewarding but... actually living here? Everything is just so much more relevant. I once heard someone describe language learning as a process of "leveling up", as in a video game. This is so true. Even just a little bit of study and my ear perk, catching things I didn't catch a moment before. XP, baby (XP=experience points, for you non-geeks). It's almost absurd how excited I get when I stumble on an explanation for a word or grammar point that I hear literally a hundred times a day.

Today was the perfect example.

At the elementary, I don't generally bring my textbooks with me to study because.... it's annoying, and I don't have a real desk to actually store stuff. However, at the end of the day, I once again had a lot of time on my hands and nothing to do. This is made more awkward because one of the support teachers sits right next to me. He's a nice fellow from as far as I can tell, but we sit less than a foot apart, sharing one desk and neither of us really speaks the other's language (any of them)... so, we have thus far mostly ignored each other out of awkwardness.

Today, he saw me practically stabbing myself through the eye with bordom and offered an olive branch. It was pretty freakin' awkward, I'll give you that, because I simply couldn't think of what to say, but it was a legitimate attempt at friendliness that I could not afford to miss out on. So, when he left for a moment, I whipped my mini dictionary out of my purse and started looking up words. lol. When he returned I expertly (pfffft) offered him a compliment on his excellent study of Japanese (he is Brazilian) which he blushingly denied. Aww. In return, he pulled out his sketchbook and let me look through it. I recognized many of the characters from the popular manga Slam Dunk, which I have never read.

Such moments remind me why struggling with textbooks is worth it.

Cheers,

super-suave Baer