Point one: I am faltering in my commitment to NaNoWriMo. Well, perhaps I could phrase that better. My attempt at NaNoWriMo is faltering. I still really, really want to do it and desperately wish I could pound out the 50k by the end of the month. But unfortunately, I'm about 10k behind where I should be right now. And that's just following the 1666 words a day that they recommend, not the 2000 words a day I was aiming at.
Why has this happened? Well, to be frank, I got a little slammed by life. Spent multiple long nights preparing stuff for classes, then played host over a weekend to some visitors. Then there was the daimyo parade that I'd committed to go to a long time before. And then there was the speech that I had to give. All of this sort of took away any free time I had to do writing. Because, as it stands, I still have my normal work hours, during which I can't really write for the most part, and I have to go to Judo twice a week.
I did get a little writing done at work between classes on Friday, but Friday is the only day I can do that. Tuesday to Thursday, I don't have a computer at work and Monday I have classes back to back all day.
Okay, so I do have some time on Thursday (today) that I could be writing. My excuse for not writing is as follows: in spite of my long sleep last night, I'm still mentally exhausted and could not muster the effort to write prose. As well, my momentum has been completely shot. Which means that getting myself going on this writing thing every day is an uphill battle that I pretty much consistently lose. And today, all that effort has gone into this blog post.
On a happier note, though, this blog is writing. That means that I may be developing a little momentum that I can carry into the weekend. I have no big plans this weekend (except a short trip to the nearby mall that shouldn't interfere with writing), so I have the time. It's just a matter of getting the motivation and energy together to get it done.
Which brings me to Point Two: I mentioned it earlier, but I had to give a speech recently. It was... an interesting affair. Let me describe what happened.
About a week ago, a rather influential townsperson came into the office (my desk is in city hall) and asked the board of education to set aside some time for me to give a speech to the local rotary club. After they had agreed that I had the time to do it, they called me over and asked me to do it. Which meant, of course, that I had no choice in the matter as they had decided without me.
No matter, I would have agreed to do it anyway. But then it was strongly suggested that I do the speech in Japanese. Now, my Japanese is definitely not strong enough to give a decent speech. And on top of that, they said I could talk about anything I wanted. Yay lack of direction.
I ended up talking to another ALT in my town who had given such a speech already and she suggested I basically translate the statement of purpose I had written to get into the JET programme in the first place. So I looked at my statement of purpose, then promptly realized it would make a terrible speech and that I had no idea how to translate half the stuff in it anyway. So instead I stayed up writing something else until the wee hours of the morning, just a few hours before actually giving the speech. Basically, I wrote about internationalization and how I thought it was important. Whatever.
After my last class ended at my morning school, the aforementioned influential townsperson picked me up in her car and drove me to the rotary club. Now, I've never been to a rotary club before, so I didn't really know what to expect. I knew there would be lots of rich people. As far as I knew, the Rotary Club is just a club for rich people to gather and pretend they have a social life. Or something. I really don't know.
Turned out to be pretty much exactly that. It was 95% male and over 60. They all wore blazers and sat in their chair with an air of comfortable indifference. The meeting started with a chorus of voices singing the Rotary Club Anthem (or, what I'm guessing was the Rotary Club Anthem - it was in Japanese). That was kind of surprising. I tried (and largely failed) to follow along. Then we sat down, had an excellent and very typically Japanese bento lunch.
Then there was this other thing that I thought was kinda weird. Anyone who wanted to stand up and say what they were thankful for could do so, provided they pay 1000 yen (about $13). Pretty much everyone went for it. Totally don't understand what that was about, but whatever. Maybe it was just an excuse to donate money to the club? I don't know.
Anyway, after that, I gave me speech, answered a few questions, got paid, and left. Oh yeah, I got paid. That was cool. Kinda makes me wish I gave a better speech. Actually, makes me wish I wrote the speech in English because, guess what? There was a TRANSLATOR! Yay for telling me to speak Japanese when I could have done a better job in English! -_-
No, I'm not bitter. Not at all.
Haha, I kid. At the end of the day, I don't really care that much. But given that they paid to see me speak, I wish I could have done a better job. Oh well.
Time's up. I was going to post a translation of my speech, but I gotta go to my evening classes. Ciao!
~Jeffles
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