私が行っているところ (Where I'm Going)
It's been a wild 365 days.
This is what I wrote exactly one year ago.
2011 should be an interesting year as it'll more than likely be my last here and mean a transition back to living in the US. There's still a ton of things I'd love to do while we're still over here: Tokyo Game Show (and Super Battle Opera), Hokkaido, Zamami, Taiwan, Thailand round 2, Australia...and with any luck we'll be able to do them all. As they say, all good things must come to an end.
It didn't quite turn out that way.
If you had told me that I'd be out of a job by the end of March, I would have kindly asked for you to share whatever illicit substance you were partaking in. If you'd have told me I'd be spending the better part of this year trying to string together part time work in order to make ends meet, I would have told you to quit your day job at the psychic hotline. If you had said that I'd contract the flu and pink eye...in both eyes...AT THE SAME TIME, well sir/madam, I would have really thought you had gone off the deep end. Perhaps if you had said that I'd lose my very expensive and (more importantly) sentimentally valuable Tiffany's bracelet at Toyosaki Beach, I would have thought you a crackpot at best; crackhead at worst. And if you said all of my best friends would either move away or stop talking to me out of the blue...well, that wouldn't really surprise me all that much.
Despite all that, though, it would be silly to proclaim 2011 the Worst Year of My Life EVAR. Far from it. Yes, all of the above sucked, especially the prolonged period of unemployment that took an enormous toll on not only myself, but a lot of people around me. But there were some great, memorable things mixed between the bad, and a lot of lessons were learned. Remember that time I got interviewed for Yonabaru Too (and when this blog was back in black)? To me it was not only a highlight of this year, but of my entire time in Okinawa. All that free time I had allowed me to cook more, start doing some rapping, and appreciate Yonabaru and Agarihama a lot more than I previously did. I got to meet and teach a lot of wonderful people, spend more time at the beach than should be allowed, and do a bunch of things that I hadn't done before...like bike riding through Sashiki and over to Naha in the middle of the night to photograph Heiwa Dori. And, in the end, everything worked out. I'm still here, I'm working, and I won an amazing prize at my company's bonenkai the other night. I even finally fixed my watch. Yay for the small victories in life.
On top of all that, I managed to learn some things along the way. Naturally I value money a lot more than I did before and learned how to make a little go a lot farther. I now feel like I'll be more prepared to handle a situation like before should it ever happen again. I also re-learned the importance of relationships, especially here when I don't have any family and nobody is particularly obligated to do anything for me because of DNA allegiances. You don't really realize the impact your actions have on people until the shit has hit the fan and you need help, which I got a lot of over this past year. Would I be here without MaryAnn? No. Would I be here without friends loaning us dough from time to time? No. Would I be here without people hooking me up with part time job after part time job, just when it seemed like things were getting extremely dire? Hell no. And, I guess I learned that I can't always wait around hoping for the best and expecting awesome things to eventually happen. I'm non-chalant about things to a fault sometimes, and if I hadn't been motivated to get out there and go get some damn jobs who's to say what would have happened. The whole experience made me realize what's important in life, who's important in my life, and that in order to get what I want I really do have to focus on achieving shit. Especially now that I'm nearing 30.
Historically even numbered years have always been good to me, so I predict 2012 will be great. How can it not be when I'm taking my first trip back to the US in years? In between all the work that I do, I plan on getting back into rapping more, spending time with people again, and doing things that I've yet to do here. Oh, and how can I forget? I got approached by a literary agent a couple months ago who's a big fan of the blog and proposed turning it into a travelogue style book! So I'll be spending a big chunk of next year writing new content for that, reworking old stuff, trying to figure out a good format, and a bunch of other shit so I can get out in the world and realize my dream of becoming a best selling author. It's an exciting time to be alive.