nothing left to give
I finally got through the speech contest last Sunday. I won first place in the advanced division! I really wanted to win, which is unusual, normally I just want things like this to be over without making a fool of myself, but this time, I wanted to win, and I did. Pretty cool. (Now, there was only one other guy in my division, but still, he wasn't exactly a pushover, and I did make a few mistakes. My teacher's convinced I would've won even if there had been more people in the same division.)
As per usual with this sort of thing, most people talked about Japan, their experience learning Japanese, or about their families. A few talked about more specific Japanese things, like pachinko, and one Indonesian guy did a really nice speech about anime. I was glad someone addressed that no, you're not going to be fluent in Japanese by watching anime, but it can help you get a better feel for intonation and expand your vocab. I don't like when people just get up there and outright bash the entire thing, because it's like, "Hey, maybe you're embarrassed that you started out by liking anime, but didn't most of us do the same thing?" I have always been really grateful toward the things that have changed my life, and if saying anime changed my life makes me sound pathetic, fine. It's the truth, and I'm not ashamed, which is why I did my speech on fantasy, cosplay, and how it inspires and empowers me.
There turned out to be a few people I knew there, who talked to me during the break before the judging. Others found out about it after the fact, because there was an article about the contest in the newspaper a few days later. They had a picture of me and a little blurb about my speech and everything! It's really cool, I've made the (local) news twice here in Niihama now, and once when I did my homestay in Nagano six years ago. XD
...So, that was good. But now that that's over, all the motivation for me to do much of anything completely disappeared, and the JLPT is in a little over a week. I have a lot of studying and drills left to do, but it's so hard when I just want to enjoy my victory over the speech contest. Plus, I have yet another morning ceremony thing to do tomorrow. I have the thing all written out, but I don't like it nearly as much as the other two I did, this one doesn't feel as relevant, but it was the best I could come up with while dealing with, uh, much more important things than a 3-minute morning speech that no one listens to anyway. I don't listen to anyone else's speeches, why would they listen to mine? None of us want to be up this early listening to someone else's shit about what they thought of the reading for the day. I hope this is the last one I have to do, I'm really tired of trying to come up with stuff to say to these people. Every passing day of exchanging pleasantries with people feels like more and more bullshit. They keep asking me, "Naremashita ka?" which means something like, "So, are you all settled in?" and it's like, "I've been here for over six months! Of course I'm settled in!(But I still hate everything.)" I mean, I was settled in or at least used to the way things work (or, most often in my case, don't work) after about four or five months, but that was also the point where I was tired of it. I never got to the point where I felt totally comfortable where I am, where I felt cool and in control of stuff again. The closest I've gotten is "Okay, now I know how to do this, even though it sucks, at least there's only X more months of dealing with it."
Every year at school, starting mid-May and pretty much never stopping until June, I reach a point where I'm so sick of being busy, and being bothered by people I don't like, and being pulled away from the things that are important to me, that unless I get away for a while, I start to feel like I want to hit anything that talks. I am way past that point here. But it's not like college, where if I got tired of campus I could jump on the bus and go to the Borders far enough away from school that I could almost convince myself I was back home. I could spend a few hours there at the cafe, in relative quiet, or at least, not-football-related noise, and go back refreshed. Here, my problem is Japan, and I can't get away from that no matter how far I ride my bike. Because everything talks in Japan. Everything. Buildings, vehicles, maps, even the lottery ticket stand. And they all come with the most annoying background music. No matter where I go, I still can't escape cafes full of tobacco smoke, or bookstores full of books I can't read, or stores blaring the same annoying MIDI versions of old songs, or worse, commercial jingles on repeat. (There is seriously a grocery store where they play a song in the meat section that literally just sings "niku" (meat) over and over again. That's it. For hours. I don't know why I'm the only person who seems to be going mad here.)
I know there are people who are going to tell me, "That's life," but at least when you have a real home, hopefully you at least have someone to come home to, or someone you can call, or a pet, or whatever, with whom you can confide in. And when you talk to them, you feel that maybe the world isn't completely insane. I don't always have that here. I have a few friends, but I can't be with them all the time. I can't call my parents or my brother. If I have an awful day, I have to wait until the weekend to tell them about it on Skype.
I know I'm going to bawl like a baby when I finally get to see my family again. No one's touched me in weeks, maybe months, and I feel so disconnected from everything. I'm quickly realizing, with this bullshit job and all the chores and studying I have to do, that the fun I do have, while it is good for me, is fleeting, and my achievements will be forgotten as soon as they're finished, to make room for the next thing I have to do. Maybe it's true what they say, the only thing that means anything in the end is love.