Investing in Relationships

Yesterday I felt pretty bad when I wasn’t teaching, and I was quite busy too. But today I feel much better. I went to sleep right around ten last night and woke up just before six feeling well-rested. Since I had plenty of time and felt mentally adept, I decided to try to sort out my admissions situation with Liberty. In about ten minutes I received the message that I was officially accepted into the program. The person helping me also registered me for classes in the spring, but it seems that I will need to send my transcripts to a particular email address in order to have my transfer credits evaluated. Oh well; it’s progress.

Despite my cold, I managed to finish the pong tutorial yesterday. I started the snake tutorial, but the new presenter is much faster, less methodical, and to be honest I find his code to be a bit messy. So it’s not going as well, but even worse is that I can’t figure out how to properly run the program. Because I’m using the pygame library now, I apparently can’t use Python’s built-in debugger, but when I try to use the command prompt it only compiles without running. It should be an easy fix, but not one that I can do while short on patience. I also received my JLPT ticket yesterday, but I didn’t study Japanese at all.

I’ve been meaning to write about a kind of realization I had this past weekend by talking with Big D. He was complaining that girls don’t seem willing to invest in a relationship, but I think it’s fairly natural to be cautious about investing in a person that you don’t know well. After all, with a typical online relationship, one person could very easily cut off all communication, which would destroy any investment made. Or the person might turn out to be troublesome, or even bad, and it’s very difficult to know this until one has spent a good amount of time around them or have familiarity with them in a context outside of dating.

I think I have made a mistake related to this. I thought I was being genuine and interesting by divulging deep thoughts and personal revelations to girls that I was interested in. But with the tables turned, I realize that one needs to be more familiar with a person’s context—what they’re like in a normal situation—before these thoughts and revelations can really have meaning. Without the context, they’re kind of intimidating and can come off as overly dramatic, and I think at least one of my romantic failures can be attributed to this. I’m not sure that this problem and the one above are necessarily the same, but I think they are at least related because in both cases time spent together is lacking.

So the solution to a solid relationship, I’ve decided, is spending a good amount of time together. But dates get boring and can be too ceremonial, stressful, and intimidating. Therefore, church is a good supplementary activity, or being a part of the same group doing activities together, or even working together. I think in the past I expected too much in too little time, because at school couples naturally spent a lot of time together, and dating co-workers in other countries made it easy to casually spend time together frequently. So I think if I find another person I want to date, after two or three dates I will try to set up some kind of regular meeting that is convenient and inexpensive and where the other person isn't the primary focus of the activity.

A cold and Python

As I experienced strong sinus pressure last night, I realized that what I thought was allergies must be a cold. It was confusing because other than a slightly dry throat, I only experienced severe allergy symptoms up until that point, and they were almost entirely absent on Saturday. But it explains why my allergy medicine was completely ineffective. It’s not a good thing, but I do feel glad that I have an excuse for not going climbing.

After determining my priority goals, I went on to completely disregard them and do programming after all. I started a game programming tutorial in Python, and created almost a complete game of pong. It was quite enjoyable, and it made me wonder if I’m working too hard to avoid making games. Maybe if I made a game or two, it would make me familiar and confident enough to go on to other projects. It’s undeniably better than playing games.

I did also read a bit of Japanese, but it was clear that I hadn’t done so in weeks—I had a lot of difficulty concentrating. I really need to get a haircut, but I don’t want to do that while I’m sick. I have five lessons today but no meeting, so I’m hoping that I will be able to go home early.

Willpower and Babies

I almost got hit this morning. I was riding my bike down the road in front of my apartment building—it’s very residential and narrow—when a small utility vehicle came barreling down a connecting gravel road. He was going really fast for being on a gravel road and having to make a fairly sharp turn at the end of it. The visibility was fine and yet he still didn’t stop when he got to the main road, so I had to swerve to the other side to avoid being hit. Somehow I was really calm as it was happening, but after ten seconds or so I replayed the scene in my head and was dumbfounded.

On Thursday night I woke up sneezing at midnight and wasn’t able to go back to sleep until 4:30. As a result I felt miserable on Friday, and the allergies are still sticking around three days later. In November! What the heck! I spent the majority of the weekend reading a very long fanfiction that put Emiya Shirou from Fate/Stay Night into the Mass Effect world. It was really good although overly wordy, and I really did spend too much time on it. I skipped the gym completely (it has now been over a week since I went). But the weekend wasn’t a total wash because I also took the Matsumoto Castle tour and went to a bar with Big D in the evening.

My mother told some of her friends that I was thinking about becoming an electrician, and they were confident that they knew people who could give me a job very quickly. That feels good and I was happy about it. I still think it would be a great job because even if I don’t stick with it, it gives me practical skills, and if I try to move to embedded systems I think it would be an asset. However, if I decide I have to live overseas, it won’t do me any good and I will have to start over again. Plus, if I make that my main plan on coming home but find out that for some reason I can’t do it, that will be at least six months lost that could have gone into the teaching degree. If I do the teaching degree, worst case scenario I trade $18k and a year of my life for a master’s degree that I don’t put to use. I don’t see that as such a bad trade, and furthermore I can’t see myself never finding the degree useful. Maybe in twenty or thirty years I will want to change jobs and teach, possibly at a community college. And as much as I enjoy learning, I think it’s a waste to not have some kind of higher education degree (I realize that’s a flimsy reason, though).

I think I need to work on setting weekly goals. Maybe one problem with my lack of motivation is that I have so many goals that I am overwhelmed. So let’s think about what is important. I have a Japanese test in three weeks, so I should really study for that, but lately I’ve not been motivated. I should go to the gym (or do exercise) for the sake of my physical and mental health. I want to get up earlier and try to do devotions. I want to try working on my memory program. I need to get a haircut. I think that covers all the more urgent tasks. Programming isn’t really urgent—I want to try, but I suspect that it will require more willpower than I expect, which I should use for more urgent things. A haircut needs to happen ASAP—maybe I’ll do that today and call it a day as far as willpower goes. For the rest of the week then I will just focus on Japanese and exercise. Maybe if I make a deal with myself to do HIIT at home, then I won’t have to go to the gym, and I will have the willpower to study. But it seems more likely that I will simply give up on exercising altogether if that happens, alas.

It might be clear to see that I’ve been thinking about willpower lately. It would be nice to quantify it and how much each task requires. I thought about making a program for it, even though it probably doesn’t have much relation to reality at all.

My parents and I talked about a family member having a baby without even being engaged much less married, and how my brother didn’t understand how that was a bad thing. I felt like I needed an analogy and I didn’t come up with anything that fit very well, but here were the two that worked to some extent:

Imagine your friend gets into and decides to attend an Ivy League school (or maybe Duke to make it closer to home). That’s a great thing because education is good and it’s prestigious for your friend. But your friend has no money for tuition and won’t receive scholarships, and plus they will study art history. Can you be happy for your friend when there’s a good chance that they will carry the student debt for decades? Of course out-of-wedlock birth is worse because you’re making a decision that affects another person, one that you’re supposed to care for and protect.

So another analogy—your friend tells you that they adopted a big dog from the pound. That’s a good thing, right? But your friend lives in a small apartment and frequently works late and goes on business trips. It seems unlikely that the dog will get the care it needs, so is it really a good thing?

In both of these cases, the basic action is good, but the circumstances make it potentially tragic. I think I could come up with better analogies, but it’s hard to appeal to a culture that is so essentially individualistic.

On a happier note, I saw a cute pun today: A hundred years ago everyone had horses and only the rich had cars. Now everyone has cars and only the rich have horses. Oh how the stables have turned.

Triple Fire Drill

I experienced a Japanese fire drill three days in a row this week. At the elementary schools, it was reasonably short and smooth. At the junior high school though, there was a problem finding one of the students, and some of the teachers weren’t sure where to go or what to do, so it was rather stressful. It’s hardly my first time doing an evacuation drill in Japan, so there isn’t anything particularly notable about it. But I am always struck by how military it is. Each homeroom teacher reports to the head teacher of their grade, and then that person reports to the head teacher of the school (kind of the vice principal), who then reports to the principal. They try to make their reports in very loud voices, using set phrases.

In other news, last week the teacher with whom I have the most trouble asked me what my job responsibilities were as an ALT. It’s a fair enough question, but to ask it now, in the middle of the semester, implies that my work is unsatisfactory. Well, to be honest I agree that my work is unsatisfactory, but since she makes the least use of me in classes that I attend, I would think she would want to expand that area before she asks me what else I can do. But I suspect that she doesn’t know how to do this.

What can I do, in my position? I have no authority, no say in the curriculum, so I can’t see a way that I would be able to do lesson planning independently. Doing it together with teachers seems presumptuous at best, as well as likely disruptive to the busier teachers if it’s even possible with my schedule. As far as leading a part of class, I would have to be designated a part of the lesson, and I would have to know how to conduct that part in advance, which means the teacher must either explain it to me (unlikely) or leave me to come up with the content of that part of the lesson. If I’m not leading a part of the lesson, I can be an dialogue partner (if my word usage isn’t too important), or, with a bit of preparation, a demonstration partner. In short, the best way for me to have a role in the class is to give me routine duties (greetings), guided duties (reading, dialogue partner), or the freedom to come up with my own activity. Outside of class, I work as a language consultant, homework and writing checker, and very occasionally a source of inspiration for activities. For the latter, since I have very little experience doing activities in this context, I need at least an hour usually, which tends to render me useless to the teachers. And that’s my job in a nutshell.

On Tuesday night there were a couple of games on sale at a very low price. These games are classics that I have wanted to play, so I decided to buy them. I spent half an hour making a character in Dragon Age: Origins last night, but aside from that I haven't played them because of lack of time. I really need to go to the gym tonight, but I'd also like to take advantage of having these games. I don't think I'll have much time on the weekend, because most of my Saturday will be spent in Matsumoto, and I'm planning to finally go to church on Sunday morning, and do climbing in the afternoon. Also, tomorrow I want to get a haircut. I need to work on my memory program, at least get started so that I can do some work at school, and maybe look more into embedded programming. Also, I should study for my Japanese exam which will take place in three and a half weeks. Why would I buy time-wasters when I'm so busy!

Programming job prospects revisited

I talked with my Nagoya friend a bit about her job and my job prospects. Thinking back on our conversation now, I feel like her attitude toward me might have changed a bit (for the worse) during this time or maybe in the restaurant. I probably didn’t come off as very attractive in the areas of competence or confidence when we talked about careers.

Anyway, because of our conversation I thought more about programming. Last night I opened up Eclipse, looked at the project I was working on, and decided that I needed to start over on the controller part of the program because I didn’t really understand it. The data classes (model) are probably fine, though, and I never really got started on the view part. Also, I need to do a better job with setting up the debugging.

Then today I looked at some jobs. There were some good-looking jobs, but I felt almost no interest in them. Why? I have no idea what the job would involve—why can I write it off as something that wouldn’t work for me? I think I’m just lacking too much confidence. How can I gain confidence, then? In the first place, I don’t really understand what the jobs involve. If I can gain confidence in my programming skills, that should be enough. Also, since I’m interested in embedded programming, I should look more into that—what kind of projects would demonstrate a familiarity with field?

Then I can’t help but wonder, do I even want to stay in Japan and do such a job? Because if I don’t have that desire, I probably don’t have the motivation to work toward these possibilities in the first place.

Nagoya Trip

I had planned to go to Nagoya on Saturday, but it turned out that I couldn’t find a place to stay for that night, and also my friend wasn’t available until Monday, and I didn’t have so many places that I wanted to see that I felt like I would be able to fill up three days. So I had a fairly relaxing and normal Saturday, cleaning, climbing, and reading. On Saturday I woke up at 5:30 to catch the 6:50 train to Nagoya. It was really painless—uncrowded, cheap, and relaxing.

From Nagoya station I went to the train museum, which is rated as the best museum in Nagoya if I remember correctly. Maybe it is if you know and love trains, but I don’t really. It was interesting, but I only spent about an hour there, and I felt like I didn’t understand a lot because I don’t know anything about trains. If I could go there with someone who was passionate about trains, I’m sure it would be a good experience, but outside of that I wouldn’t recommend it.

From there I went to the Tokugawa garden. It was a really nice garden that had a single Japanese style, unlike the enormous Shinjuku Gyoen in Tokyo. I’m sure I would really like it if I lived there. As it was, it was a nice place to visit, but not particularly memorable. From there I walked for an hour to the Toyota museum. On the way I got lunch from the convenience store, including a vanilla butter coffee. It was too sweet, but I enjoyed it. I’m pretty sure it made me dehydrated though. The Toyota museum was just as good as I remembered. I only had an hour before it closed, but I used almost all of it. I still missed a couple of exhibits, so I wouldn’t mind going back. Plus, it was only $5 to enter.

The hostel that I stayed at was reasonably nice. At first I got in the bed and was upset that there weren’t any sheets. “But at least there’s a nice body pillow, that’s nearly as good,” I thought. Then after about an hour, I realized that the body pillow was actually the sheets rolled up. Hah. The beds were capsule-like, which is comfortable but a little hot and stuffy even when the temperature is around 10 degrees Celsius outside. At some point someone turned on the heat, which was completely unnecessary in my opinion, so I didn’t get to sleep in but I probably managed 6 hours of sleep.

In the morning I walked to Tokyo station and put my stuff in a locker. I was then barely ten minutes early to the café where I was meeting my friend instead of the thirty minutes that I had planned. We met and drank coffee I had a salty honey latte, which was… very salty. Not bad, but I wouldn’t have it again. Next we went to a hitsumabushi restaurant. This is an eel dish, probably the most famous dish from Nagoya. It was fantastic, but we ended up waiting an hour and a half for it. After lunch I had planned to go to a castle outside of the city, but I decided that since the afternoon was nearly spent already I should probably just go home, and that’s what I did.

Thoughts on attraction

I'mma get philosophical here, but first let's look at my point of departure.

I met a girl through OKCupid. I've been chatting with her for... well okay, basically two months, which isn't that long, but it felt like a long time. Today I met her in person. She's cute, easy to talk to, interesting, speaks fluent English but uses Japanese too. We seem to have similar values and ideas, from the things that we discussed. She's an incredibly positive person, which is very important to me. In short, she checks a whole bunch of the boxes, and I also feel like we have good やり取り(exchange in English, but that sounds weird).

Do we have chemistry? I don't know. When I think of being attracted to someone, two girls come to mind, both from my university days. Most likely I was idealizing them--I certainly was never comfortable enough to talk with them very well during those days. There was another girl that I was super attracted to, but mainly in the physical sense. I couldn't talk to her either, not because I was idealizing her but because I projected that she was popular and apathetic about school, whereas I was nerdy and outcast. (Wow, I didn't even need to go to high school to be part of a clique--I mostly created those stereotypes all by myself.)

What about girls that I enjoyed spending time with, and could have married? I would say that none of the three were exactly my type--making my breath catch and thoughts blur. But I also can't say that they would be incapable of that at certain moments. And isn't that more normal, and to be honest, less stressful? Physical attraction is exciting, but a physical sight will eventually become normal, or it will wear out. I think it's like a roller coaster--it only lasts for a short time, and then you have to get in line and wait for the next ride. Some people get tired of waiting. I like that analogy.

Anyway, the point is that I should stop expecting a Disney-style love-at-first-sight-instant-connection because it has never actually happened to me. Not that I was really expecting this, but if not this then what? With those three girls, there was a lot of talking, and with two of them especially, shared experiences. The third one had more shared values which made up for our lack of shared experiences. Thinking about my parents, their many games of golf--days of friendship--were undeniably indispensable to their romantic relationship. So essentially, I need to find a girl that I think could eventually fit, and even if I don't feel a connection, invest in a friendship to see if it can develop into more.

Okay, but then why did the thing last year with the girl from church fizzle out? We went out a couple times, we had some fun together, why did I give up? I think I just couldn't feel that relationship developing. Our conversations were always superficial, and if I tried to dig deeper, she didn't respond in turn. So essentially I would say that while I enjoyed spending time with another human being rather than her specifically. Maybe.

So how about this girl I met today? I don't think it's going to work, unfortunately. The main reason should be because she isn't a Christian (I don't think a Christian would go to the temple on New Year's Day, plus it's generally a safe assumption about Japanese people). But I don't think that would be reason enough if it weren't for the other two. First, despite my lack of progress on my application, I'm 95% committed to getting an MAT at Liberty, which means I have less than five months left in Japan, and the next two will be very busy for her. Second, she lives kind of far away. It's an expensive and time-consuming trip, and she also seems to work a lot and doesn't have much free time. And just messaging her without meeting is dangerous because in the past it has led to idealization, so distance is a big factor. She is unquestionably the most interesting Japanese person I have met, and I'm kind of angry at the situation. If I had met her three months ago, things might be different. But maybe that is exactly why I'm meeting her now--it's too late to do something, because I'm not meant to do anything. Ugh, depressing. And what do I say to her from here?