A personal review of 2012
2012, for me, was a year of quiet engagement. It was a year without bombast or fanfare, but one in which I accomplished many small things, to the point that I am at this moment regretfully recalling stray moments of achievement, weighed down by the notion that they are evidence that I have forgotten more.
I did precious little professionally. The teaching of English as a second language overseas is a career blessedly free of ambition, and although that fact when remembered sometimes evokes a paranoid anxiety about the direction of my life, for a person like me where ambition is a natural state to be in, to be in this halted place is a strange sort of benefit. Although I am terrified for my prospects after my time here, for the time being knowing that my horizon is perfectly flat in some ways frees me from the pressure to excel.
This is not to say that I'm doing poorly at my job. Rather the opposite. And, in fact, at the big prefecture-wide conference to spread knowledge and experience to other English teachers, I was asked to present an unprecedented four times out of six time slots. I also presented twice at the orientation for new teachers arriving to the prefecture. Important people somewhere are noticing my talents in this sphere, which is more validation than I expected, and enough that I can subside off of that for a while.
Socially, my experience here has improved, as well. Although the local expat community is marked by a certain Mean Girls style cattiness and cliquishness, I've managed to slowly make connections with native English speakers who aren't terrible at life. I tend to drift around at a distance from people, with an aloofness that is a learned skill that I don't particularly like having as a natural pattern. With the pool of potential acquaintances so incestually tiny, forging a decent social life here was one of my biggest challenges when arriving in Japan. I'm glad that things have improved on that front, although the transient social dynamics of the region make things far from stable here.
Still, with this group I've not only made friends but also collaborated on some projects. For example, I helped produce and performed in a dramatic reading of a set of one act plays to benefit tsunami recovery efforts on the anniversary of the Touhoku Earthquake. It was kind of a big deal, as a local effort in what was a global network of people using these professional pieces in like capacity. It involved organizing a ton of people, both expats and native Okinawans, acting as a liason with the theatre-festival organizers who donated the space but didn't speak any English.
One of my major goals for the year was to improve my Japanese ability, and I've certainly done that. I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test at the N3 level and passed. This test is probably the best-known benchmark for Japanese language abilities, and the N3 level is where it's assumed that you leave the "studied in college" area and head into "actually somewhat capable" territory. I'm capable! And my real-world experience with the language validates the test results. Although my spoken abilities have certainly improved, the biggest increase in skills have come in reading Chinese characters. Although I'm far from mastering the 3000 characters in the language, I've come a long way in transforming the opaque symbols around me into actual information. And literacy feels really good. I feel like much less of a child in this society, and I have so much more context now for so many things.
I've also modestly achieved in the area of physical exercise, as well. As anyone who had seen me physically before I left for Japan can attest, I had put on quite a bit of weight, becoming the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I wanted to change that. I also didn't say anything about this goal, because I didn't want to be one of those people who announce loudly that they are going to change their habits, then quietly fail to do anything useful. At first, I was doing marathon training, but that proved unsustainable; although a younger me could have handled it, my body quite literally stopped me from continuing, and there was a good couple of weeks where walking had become a challenge. Despite that, throughout this year, I have managed to run 2-3 times a week pretty consistently. There have been a couple of periods where I slacked off, but those didn't last too long and I started back with only a bit of effort (and a lot of whining, but I still got back into it).
I think what I'm most proud of is a relatively recent development: I started freelance writing for a video game. I'm not making a lot of money, and it's for a small indie game, and the level of expected output is immense (think NaNoWriMo level of writing speed) but there are a couple of cool things about it. For one, it's the sequel to Academagia, which is a life sim set in Hogwarts a wizard academy. It's narrative-based, and fairly well-regarded, despite being a very niche title. Although you can't but point out the dementor elephant in the room, the game actually stands strong on its own without any feeling of being derivative. It's a title that I thoroughly enjoyed, and so getting to work on the sequel is really nice and a lot of fun. Plus, I'm getting paid to write for a video game.
So where do I stand going forward into 2013? Well, I feel that the way I went about my quiet accomplishments in 2013 represents a big change in the way I normally do things, providing not only a greater sense of responsibility and follow through over my former practice of talking about things I want to do and not following through, but also a sense of momentum. I'm happy with this change, and I'd like to continue it, including with some of the patterns and goals I started from last year, but there are also some other focused goals I'd like to work on, too.
Perhaps I'll post tomorrow about that.
I did precious little professionally. The teaching of English as a second language overseas is a career blessedly free of ambition, and although that fact when remembered sometimes evokes a paranoid anxiety about the direction of my life, for a person like me where ambition is a natural state to be in, to be in this halted place is a strange sort of benefit. Although I am terrified for my prospects after my time here, for the time being knowing that my horizon is perfectly flat in some ways frees me from the pressure to excel.
This is not to say that I'm doing poorly at my job. Rather the opposite. And, in fact, at the big prefecture-wide conference to spread knowledge and experience to other English teachers, I was asked to present an unprecedented four times out of six time slots. I also presented twice at the orientation for new teachers arriving to the prefecture. Important people somewhere are noticing my talents in this sphere, which is more validation than I expected, and enough that I can subside off of that for a while.
Socially, my experience here has improved, as well. Although the local expat community is marked by a certain Mean Girls style cattiness and cliquishness, I've managed to slowly make connections with native English speakers who aren't terrible at life. I tend to drift around at a distance from people, with an aloofness that is a learned skill that I don't particularly like having as a natural pattern. With the pool of potential acquaintances so incestually tiny, forging a decent social life here was one of my biggest challenges when arriving in Japan. I'm glad that things have improved on that front, although the transient social dynamics of the region make things far from stable here.
Still, with this group I've not only made friends but also collaborated on some projects. For example, I helped produce and performed in a dramatic reading of a set of one act plays to benefit tsunami recovery efforts on the anniversary of the Touhoku Earthquake. It was kind of a big deal, as a local effort in what was a global network of people using these professional pieces in like capacity. It involved organizing a ton of people, both expats and native Okinawans, acting as a liason with the theatre-festival organizers who donated the space but didn't speak any English.
One of my major goals for the year was to improve my Japanese ability, and I've certainly done that. I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test at the N3 level and passed. This test is probably the best-known benchmark for Japanese language abilities, and the N3 level is where it's assumed that you leave the "studied in college" area and head into "actually somewhat capable" territory. I'm capable! And my real-world experience with the language validates the test results. Although my spoken abilities have certainly improved, the biggest increase in skills have come in reading Chinese characters. Although I'm far from mastering the 3000 characters in the language, I've come a long way in transforming the opaque symbols around me into actual information. And literacy feels really good. I feel like much less of a child in this society, and I have so much more context now for so many things.
I've also modestly achieved in the area of physical exercise, as well. As anyone who had seen me physically before I left for Japan can attest, I had put on quite a bit of weight, becoming the heaviest I have ever been in my life. I wanted to change that. I also didn't say anything about this goal, because I didn't want to be one of those people who announce loudly that they are going to change their habits, then quietly fail to do anything useful. At first, I was doing marathon training, but that proved unsustainable; although a younger me could have handled it, my body quite literally stopped me from continuing, and there was a good couple of weeks where walking had become a challenge. Despite that, throughout this year, I have managed to run 2-3 times a week pretty consistently. There have been a couple of periods where I slacked off, but those didn't last too long and I started back with only a bit of effort (and a lot of whining, but I still got back into it).
I think what I'm most proud of is a relatively recent development: I started freelance writing for a video game. I'm not making a lot of money, and it's for a small indie game, and the level of expected output is immense (think NaNoWriMo level of writing speed) but there are a couple of cool things about it. For one, it's the sequel to Academagia, which is a life sim set in Hogwarts a wizard academy. It's narrative-based, and fairly well-regarded, despite being a very niche title. Although you can't but point out the dementor elephant in the room, the game actually stands strong on its own without any feeling of being derivative. It's a title that I thoroughly enjoyed, and so getting to work on the sequel is really nice and a lot of fun. Plus, I'm getting paid to write for a video game.
So where do I stand going forward into 2013? Well, I feel that the way I went about my quiet accomplishments in 2013 represents a big change in the way I normally do things, providing not only a greater sense of responsibility and follow through over my former practice of talking about things I want to do and not following through, but also a sense of momentum. I'm happy with this change, and I'd like to continue it, including with some of the patterns and goals I started from last year, but there are also some other focused goals I'd like to work on, too.
Perhaps I'll post tomorrow about that.