(no subject)
Well it seems that I always post about myself, so I wanted to post on something else for once. I might move on to something else, but I’m going to start off on a topic that’s not about me.
I’ve been trying to word this right for a while, so please do forgive me if it doesn’t make sense or gets circular.- I have this theory/idea that I’ve been wondering about for a while now, and I wanted to see what everyone else thinks. It has to do with the fact that fencer_x translated some Japanese fics by Mitsuru-san (I think, but I could be mixing up the newest translations with the one I’m thinking of) and she said the style in general was quite different. I don’t know the exact post, but it was one where she had translated the fic and it was all dialogue, not the last two she’s done with analineblue. I was wondering why exactly there is such a difference and those fics lack description. I’ve been a part, and still am a part of many communities that are world-wide and have never encountered that before. So it made me curious as to why that was. I started to think about it and what I came up with were manga and doujinshi. My theory is that because those are so prevalent in Japan, they might have influenced how they write fanfiction, especially since a lot of the fanfiction would be based off of the manga. They’re used to reading the dialogue and then the description is drawn out on the page, so that’s influenced them in the way that they write. Since most of what they read is without the description, they leave it off as well.
Now that’s the theory, but I’m not sure how great it is. For one, although I’ve read from many different sources and seen it somewhat, I’m still not sure just how prevalent reading manga is. From what I know, it’s very popular and regular reading material, so my assumptions are based off this. Next I have to address the fact that I pretty much stated all they read is manga, and again that is an assumption. I’m basing that also off the fact that most people I know in real life don’t read books too often. That’s my disclaimer for this theory that could be completely out there. I just found it curious that the styles were so different and that’s what I came up with. Of course, if anyone has anything to add I’d love to hear it.
I’m at work right now thinking on my crazy theories and trying to think of something else to write about. I opened thirty minutes ago and haven’t had a customer yet. Only four and a half more hours to go. It’s also quite cool outside, it feels nothing like spring, and I don’t know how to work the heat in here. I’ve been working at this location for two years now and this building hasn’t ever had heat or air before. We have little space heaters for when it’s cold and a fan for the summer (which is absolutely no help when the humidity’s near a hundred and the heat index is over a hundred). We just had a heater installed though, but no one has told me how to work it. So I’m stuck with the little space heaters; it’s good thing it’s not really cold today.
I’ve just thought of a topic, but unfortunately it deals with me again and my first topic wasn’t even that long. I wanted to make another post about JET when I wasn’t as giddy about it. I think it’s going to be the subject of choice with me for quite a while since I’m just finding out about it and trying to figure out if it’s really something that I want to do.
Now I just said I’m trying to figure out if I want to do it, but right now I most certainly do want to do it. I say what I might do or what I’m thinking about doing because there’s still at least a year before I can apply and I could always change my mind. I have been known to do that. This is different than most of those decisions though and I just can’t imagine passing this up. Being a history major/loving history I’m interested in seeing the world. I don’t know that I want to spend my whole life away from home, but I want to see different places of the world and my own country too. I don’t want my life to be confined to North Carolina. Going to Bosnia last summer taught me that.
Bosnia was the first time I had ever been out of the country, and actually it was the first time I’d even been on a plane. There were ups and downs to the trip, but I loved it. It ended up that I wasn’t really interested in what we were doing. It was repetitive and just not my thing. I approved of it whole-heartedly; I just wanted to be doing something else. Then there was my roommate, the girl I went over there with. We were together 24-7. We could not go anywhere alone, and because of that we spent all of our time together. We lived in a small apartment, which was also the first time I’d ever lived alone. We were good friends, but we just didn’t get along living together too well. It wasn’t that we fought all the time, but that we didn’t get anything out. On the other hand though, experiencing Bosnia firsthand is something that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Learning about the people and the culture by being there was great. We could see the effect the war had on the people and talk to people just a little older than us who had gone through the war. I also had a chance to talk to a Muslim guy, and hearing his views on his religion was really interesting. I knew about his religion in general, but it really struck me how deeply he believes it from talking to him. You don’t get that kind of conviction from a piece of paper. Like, we discussed differences in Christianity and Islam and we found it very hard to get each other to understand. We would try to explain things to him and he would try to explain to us, but we still didn’t always get through to each other. It was eye-opening really. Then we went with that same guy and two of his friends down to a salt lake where they danced and couldn’t believe that America doesn’t have a national dance. I think that was the best day of the whole trip because we saw Bosnia through the eyes of normal people. Not through our translators we normally worked with, or through our hosts, but through a guy and two of his friends that we met by chance and who could all speak English.
That’s enough about Bosnia, but I think it illustrates how there’s good and bad but in the end I wouldn’t take away the experience. I did get homesick, but I think being more interested in what I was doing would have helped there. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but when you aren’t really into what you’re doing, it’s hard not to want to go back home. I’ve never had a problem being away from home before that, so I don’t know.
So what I’m trying to say here is that I really, really want to go. I want to be able to experience firsthand the culture of a country that has always fascinated me. Especially since it is an Eastern culture and is so different from my own. It’s rather funny to look at my course catalog because in the history part it’s divided up into three sections and I have to take at least one course from each section. I had the hardest time picking one I was interested in in the US History section, then I selected pretty much everything in the European history section, and then in the World History I picked all the Asian courses. So I’m going to have to make some choices in the European history section, and I’ll probably end up taking the most in World history (of course I kind of have to since a the classes I picked are all classes that go for my Asian studies minor as well, but they don’t count for my major then).
Another major reason for me wanting to go is to see how the school system works. Education is another thing that I am very interested in outside of the United States. I don’t particularly agree with how education is done here, but that doesn’t mean I’m all against it. As with most everything, there’s good and bad and a lot of it depends on the teacher. I’ve heard quite a few times from varied people that weren’t living in the US (at the time they had to choose a school for their children) that they would send their child to a European school up until college. American colleges are very good, but before that the schools aren’t too impressive. I’d like to see what makes these other schools so great and then compare that to here. I don’t know that I could change anything, but if nothing else, it could help me in my teaching. Now here I could go off on a tangent about foreign language education or standardized testing, but I won’t. I’m already addressing the foreign language education in my next speech, so once I’ve got all of that research done and my speech ready, you’ll probably see a post about it. I won’t even start on standardized testing because I could go on and on in an argument that would start to repeat itself.
That’s all I can really think of to say on why I want to do JET at the moment. You may all get tired of hearing about it and I may repeat myself, but I’m trying to get my thoughts in order. If I’m going to do this I need to know why I’m doing it and I need to be able to say that well, so this is helping me get my thoughts in order. Especially since I haven’t even mentioned this to my parents, who may not be able to prevent me from doing anything, but I do kind of want their approval. I talked about doing something like Bosnia for a year or two before I actually got the opportunity and went there, so I’ll do the same thing with this.
Actually I do have one more thing to say on this topic. I’m very nervous about it. I’ve never applied for like this where I wasn’t pretty certain of getting in. I’ve also never applied for something that I wanted to do so much. That’s why I want to do everything I can now so that if I’m still all for it in a year, when I apply I will look as good as possible to them. I want to be organized in my thoughts so that I express them clearly then, either on paper or in person. I was talking to my sister the other day and I was telling her that if I do this and got as far as interviews, I’d have to drive four-five hours to either Atlanta or Washington (if I read the part about where the interviews are right) and that I’d be a nervous wreck the whole time. It makes me nervous just to think about getting that far now.
Right so I have just been informed by two different people that it actually snowed here and I missed it because I’ve been typing and not paying attention. This post is about to go already two and a half pages, so I’m going to go play Mah Jong now. Hopefully my parents will come by soon with my breakfast.
Well I was going to stop this, but I have something to add. Only about twenty minutes left until I start to close though, so this shouldn’t be too long. This is actually a subject that I talked about with my European history teacher last year that we both agreed on. I don’t even remember what I was talking about (it was an online class so he was treated to my long posts constantly) that started this. What I said was something to the effect of that people just aren’t interested in history and they should be. It’s our past and it really does affect the future. While I was in that class I was so surprised by many things that I learned because I could see how they influenced things today. They gave things more meaning because they don’t just have relevance now; they were influenced by things that happened in that past. Along this line I said that we skip over a lot of history. Asian countries are pretty much excluded from any history unless it deals directly with us. Most of the history we’re taught in school deals with our own country (with some world wars thrown in). I think we need to branch out and learn more. The history of the whole world affects us, especially now with globalization. We can’t just ignore that those countries are there and understanding their past is one of the best ways to understanding those countries.
One way in particular I have of illustrating this is with (oh I’ve just remembered that I was commenting on Russia to him) Russia and then Asian countries. My mom was the one who really brought out Russia to me. I was telling her that I found Russia to be very interesting and she said she could care less about it. When a lot of Americans think about Russia they think about the USSR and the Cold War. That’s not all Russia is though, that was only a brief period of history, but that’s all we focus on here. We don’t bother to tell about the rest of Russia’s history and try to combat the bad name it’s been given. Now Asian countries are a different story; I don’t think we try to understand them at all. Here I’m basing it more off of my thoughts before I starting learning more about Asian countries, which is how I think most other people think of them (I haven’t taken a poll though, so forgive me if I’m wrong). I think we tend to lump all of the Asian countries together because their culture is so foreign to us. They aren’t Western, they’re Eastern, so we stick them all together and don’t think about the fact that they are different countries. I swear before I started listening to a lot of Japanese and getting more interested, I would have said Asian countries pretty much speak the same language. Now I’m still not very educated on the subject and I don’t know how much the language differs, but I do know they are separate languages. That’s just one example of how I used to think, and I think other people do lump those countries together. Besides that, we really don’t learn about the smaller Asian countries at all. I still don’t know much about any Asian country besides China or Japan. I’m not saying we have to know every detail, but before you go criticizing a country, maybe you should try to understand it first.
That’s why I want to teach history. I want to somehow get all of this into students’ minds and teach them these things. I don’t know how I’ll do it and I don’t know how I’m going to make it interesting so they won’t go to sleep because it’s history and history’s boring but I’m going to try. I want to get rid of history being boring too (at least in my class), but hey I’m taking it one step at a time. First I have to get through college and I’ll go from there (hopefully to Japan for a while).
Note: I typed this while I was at work and so that’s why I’m talking about early morning even though I’m posting it in the afternoon. And now I’m going to go start cleaning out my room. I might even get around to cleaning out all of the various things under my bed.
I’ve been trying to word this right for a while, so please do forgive me if it doesn’t make sense or gets circular.- I have this theory/idea that I’ve been wondering about for a while now, and I wanted to see what everyone else thinks. It has to do with the fact that fencer_x translated some Japanese fics by Mitsuru-san (I think, but I could be mixing up the newest translations with the one I’m thinking of) and she said the style in general was quite different. I don’t know the exact post, but it was one where she had translated the fic and it was all dialogue, not the last two she’s done with analineblue. I was wondering why exactly there is such a difference and those fics lack description. I’ve been a part, and still am a part of many communities that are world-wide and have never encountered that before. So it made me curious as to why that was. I started to think about it and what I came up with were manga and doujinshi. My theory is that because those are so prevalent in Japan, they might have influenced how they write fanfiction, especially since a lot of the fanfiction would be based off of the manga. They’re used to reading the dialogue and then the description is drawn out on the page, so that’s influenced them in the way that they write. Since most of what they read is without the description, they leave it off as well.
Now that’s the theory, but I’m not sure how great it is. For one, although I’ve read from many different sources and seen it somewhat, I’m still not sure just how prevalent reading manga is. From what I know, it’s very popular and regular reading material, so my assumptions are based off this. Next I have to address the fact that I pretty much stated all they read is manga, and again that is an assumption. I’m basing that also off the fact that most people I know in real life don’t read books too often. That’s my disclaimer for this theory that could be completely out there. I just found it curious that the styles were so different and that’s what I came up with. Of course, if anyone has anything to add I’d love to hear it.
I’m at work right now thinking on my crazy theories and trying to think of something else to write about. I opened thirty minutes ago and haven’t had a customer yet. Only four and a half more hours to go. It’s also quite cool outside, it feels nothing like spring, and I don’t know how to work the heat in here. I’ve been working at this location for two years now and this building hasn’t ever had heat or air before. We have little space heaters for when it’s cold and a fan for the summer (which is absolutely no help when the humidity’s near a hundred and the heat index is over a hundred). We just had a heater installed though, but no one has told me how to work it. So I’m stuck with the little space heaters; it’s good thing it’s not really cold today.
I’ve just thought of a topic, but unfortunately it deals with me again and my first topic wasn’t even that long. I wanted to make another post about JET when I wasn’t as giddy about it. I think it’s going to be the subject of choice with me for quite a while since I’m just finding out about it and trying to figure out if it’s really something that I want to do.
Now I just said I’m trying to figure out if I want to do it, but right now I most certainly do want to do it. I say what I might do or what I’m thinking about doing because there’s still at least a year before I can apply and I could always change my mind. I have been known to do that. This is different than most of those decisions though and I just can’t imagine passing this up. Being a history major/loving history I’m interested in seeing the world. I don’t know that I want to spend my whole life away from home, but I want to see different places of the world and my own country too. I don’t want my life to be confined to North Carolina. Going to Bosnia last summer taught me that.
Bosnia was the first time I had ever been out of the country, and actually it was the first time I’d even been on a plane. There were ups and downs to the trip, but I loved it. It ended up that I wasn’t really interested in what we were doing. It was repetitive and just not my thing. I approved of it whole-heartedly; I just wanted to be doing something else. Then there was my roommate, the girl I went over there with. We were together 24-7. We could not go anywhere alone, and because of that we spent all of our time together. We lived in a small apartment, which was also the first time I’d ever lived alone. We were good friends, but we just didn’t get along living together too well. It wasn’t that we fought all the time, but that we didn’t get anything out. On the other hand though, experiencing Bosnia firsthand is something that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Learning about the people and the culture by being there was great. We could see the effect the war had on the people and talk to people just a little older than us who had gone through the war. I also had a chance to talk to a Muslim guy, and hearing his views on his religion was really interesting. I knew about his religion in general, but it really struck me how deeply he believes it from talking to him. You don’t get that kind of conviction from a piece of paper. Like, we discussed differences in Christianity and Islam and we found it very hard to get each other to understand. We would try to explain things to him and he would try to explain to us, but we still didn’t always get through to each other. It was eye-opening really. Then we went with that same guy and two of his friends down to a salt lake where they danced and couldn’t believe that America doesn’t have a national dance. I think that was the best day of the whole trip because we saw Bosnia through the eyes of normal people. Not through our translators we normally worked with, or through our hosts, but through a guy and two of his friends that we met by chance and who could all speak English.
That’s enough about Bosnia, but I think it illustrates how there’s good and bad but in the end I wouldn’t take away the experience. I did get homesick, but I think being more interested in what I was doing would have helped there. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but when you aren’t really into what you’re doing, it’s hard not to want to go back home. I’ve never had a problem being away from home before that, so I don’t know.
So what I’m trying to say here is that I really, really want to go. I want to be able to experience firsthand the culture of a country that has always fascinated me. Especially since it is an Eastern culture and is so different from my own. It’s rather funny to look at my course catalog because in the history part it’s divided up into three sections and I have to take at least one course from each section. I had the hardest time picking one I was interested in in the US History section, then I selected pretty much everything in the European history section, and then in the World History I picked all the Asian courses. So I’m going to have to make some choices in the European history section, and I’ll probably end up taking the most in World history (of course I kind of have to since a the classes I picked are all classes that go for my Asian studies minor as well, but they don’t count for my major then).
Another major reason for me wanting to go is to see how the school system works. Education is another thing that I am very interested in outside of the United States. I don’t particularly agree with how education is done here, but that doesn’t mean I’m all against it. As with most everything, there’s good and bad and a lot of it depends on the teacher. I’ve heard quite a few times from varied people that weren’t living in the US (at the time they had to choose a school for their children) that they would send their child to a European school up until college. American colleges are very good, but before that the schools aren’t too impressive. I’d like to see what makes these other schools so great and then compare that to here. I don’t know that I could change anything, but if nothing else, it could help me in my teaching. Now here I could go off on a tangent about foreign language education or standardized testing, but I won’t. I’m already addressing the foreign language education in my next speech, so once I’ve got all of that research done and my speech ready, you’ll probably see a post about it. I won’t even start on standardized testing because I could go on and on in an argument that would start to repeat itself.
That’s all I can really think of to say on why I want to do JET at the moment. You may all get tired of hearing about it and I may repeat myself, but I’m trying to get my thoughts in order. If I’m going to do this I need to know why I’m doing it and I need to be able to say that well, so this is helping me get my thoughts in order. Especially since I haven’t even mentioned this to my parents, who may not be able to prevent me from doing anything, but I do kind of want their approval. I talked about doing something like Bosnia for a year or two before I actually got the opportunity and went there, so I’ll do the same thing with this.
Actually I do have one more thing to say on this topic. I’m very nervous about it. I’ve never applied for like this where I wasn’t pretty certain of getting in. I’ve also never applied for something that I wanted to do so much. That’s why I want to do everything I can now so that if I’m still all for it in a year, when I apply I will look as good as possible to them. I want to be organized in my thoughts so that I express them clearly then, either on paper or in person. I was talking to my sister the other day and I was telling her that if I do this and got as far as interviews, I’d have to drive four-five hours to either Atlanta or Washington (if I read the part about where the interviews are right) and that I’d be a nervous wreck the whole time. It makes me nervous just to think about getting that far now.
Right so I have just been informed by two different people that it actually snowed here and I missed it because I’ve been typing and not paying attention. This post is about to go already two and a half pages, so I’m going to go play Mah Jong now. Hopefully my parents will come by soon with my breakfast.
Well I was going to stop this, but I have something to add. Only about twenty minutes left until I start to close though, so this shouldn’t be too long. This is actually a subject that I talked about with my European history teacher last year that we both agreed on. I don’t even remember what I was talking about (it was an online class so he was treated to my long posts constantly) that started this. What I said was something to the effect of that people just aren’t interested in history and they should be. It’s our past and it really does affect the future. While I was in that class I was so surprised by many things that I learned because I could see how they influenced things today. They gave things more meaning because they don’t just have relevance now; they were influenced by things that happened in that past. Along this line I said that we skip over a lot of history. Asian countries are pretty much excluded from any history unless it deals directly with us. Most of the history we’re taught in school deals with our own country (with some world wars thrown in). I think we need to branch out and learn more. The history of the whole world affects us, especially now with globalization. We can’t just ignore that those countries are there and understanding their past is one of the best ways to understanding those countries.
One way in particular I have of illustrating this is with (oh I’ve just remembered that I was commenting on Russia to him) Russia and then Asian countries. My mom was the one who really brought out Russia to me. I was telling her that I found Russia to be very interesting and she said she could care less about it. When a lot of Americans think about Russia they think about the USSR and the Cold War. That’s not all Russia is though, that was only a brief period of history, but that’s all we focus on here. We don’t bother to tell about the rest of Russia’s history and try to combat the bad name it’s been given. Now Asian countries are a different story; I don’t think we try to understand them at all. Here I’m basing it more off of my thoughts before I starting learning more about Asian countries, which is how I think most other people think of them (I haven’t taken a poll though, so forgive me if I’m wrong). I think we tend to lump all of the Asian countries together because their culture is so foreign to us. They aren’t Western, they’re Eastern, so we stick them all together and don’t think about the fact that they are different countries. I swear before I started listening to a lot of Japanese and getting more interested, I would have said Asian countries pretty much speak the same language. Now I’m still not very educated on the subject and I don’t know how much the language differs, but I do know they are separate languages. That’s just one example of how I used to think, and I think other people do lump those countries together. Besides that, we really don’t learn about the smaller Asian countries at all. I still don’t know much about any Asian country besides China or Japan. I’m not saying we have to know every detail, but before you go criticizing a country, maybe you should try to understand it first.
That’s why I want to teach history. I want to somehow get all of this into students’ minds and teach them these things. I don’t know how I’ll do it and I don’t know how I’m going to make it interesting so they won’t go to sleep because it’s history and history’s boring but I’m going to try. I want to get rid of history being boring too (at least in my class), but hey I’m taking it one step at a time. First I have to get through college and I’ll go from there (hopefully to Japan for a while).
Note: I typed this while I was at work and so that’s why I’m talking about early morning even though I’m posting it in the afternoon. And now I’m going to go start cleaning out my room. I might even get around to cleaning out all of the various things under my bed.