Okay, I Missed You

I guess I didn’t truly realize until now how few people around me are actually ‘like’ me. By ‘like’ I mean people who had a least a few of the same experiences growing up as I did – TCK kinda stuff. I’m in the country I grew up in, yes, but nearly all my high school classmates, or any classmates, for that matter, are not here. They’re in America or elsewhere.

My circles, presently, consist of family, work, Hi-B.A., and church. Family is hardly a circle, but I included it because I realized it’s not actually a given. I was away from them last year and I will be next year. So I’m enjoying it now (that’s the proper thing to say). But it’s only my parents, and while I like them a lot, I don’t make myself vulnerable to them. That may sound like a weird way to say it. What I mean is that I talk a lot about what I’m passionate about, and they indulge me by listening, but I don’t share what I struggle with.

Work is teaching English at Gaba. My ‘clients’ range from university students to housewives to businessmen. The conversations are interesting, but it’s not about me, it’s about them – they’re paying to learn. I try to get as much as I can out of the conversations while still meeting their needs, and at the same time, I try to give them as much as possible without overstepping my bounds. It’s a good time, considering I’m getting paid for it. I wouldn’t call them friends. My coworkers are a hugely diverse lot, and quite different from me. Though I enjoy them immensely and share my experiences while listening to theirs, the connections are fairly light at this point. It’s limited to our interactions during mutual work hours, though that may change in the future.

Hi-B.A. is probably the closest company to where I came from (it is at the high school I graduated from, after all). But on the other hand, the students are all younger than me and the staff are all older.

I feel I need to add at this point, at least for my own relief, that I’m not complaining. Each of the circles I’m describing are basically how they should be. I’m not pointing out faults, I’m just explaining a need I realized I have and why it’s not being met at present. I hope you understand.

When I’m at Hi-B.A. I feel I have a purpose to accomplish, that is, the spiritual strengthening of the students who come. Not that that’s up to me, but I try to play a part. Not to say that I don’t merely enjoy their company as well. I do. But it’s a different company than my own friends.

And church is…unsatisfactory. It feels really old to me. Even though it has more young people than most Japanese churches, the young people feel old to me in the sense that they fit in to what has already been established and don’t seem to seek to change it. I’m not so much of a rebel (take that statement with a grain of salt), but I do want to see people being fulfilled in their identity rather than fitting themselves into someone else’s paradigm.

I want to go to a Japanese church because I want to be involved in the ministry instead of remaining within a foreign, Christian bubble (not to say that’s what certain people are doing). My place is in the field. But I don’t think that means sacrificing my worship, fellowship, and learning needs. There’s a medium, no, there’s a third option somewhere. I haven’t found it yet.

I don’t think it would be right for me to leave the church without at least proposing some changes. And that doesn’t sit well with me because I’m hardwired to run away from problems. But I will devote some thought to what I would like to see happen, keeping in mind that it’s not about me, it’s about God.

Those are my circles, and none of them identify with me particularly well.

This isn’t a self-pity party! I promise! You can say “Suck it up” if you want, honest. I say it to myself a lot. But now I’m trying to figure out how to remedy this slight issue. I think I need to for my own sanity, before it gets worse.

Probably the reason I’m think about this now, or that I realized this now, is that Christmas break is coming to a close for most uni students, during which a lot of my friends did come back to Japan. We hung out, and it was really good. But now they’re leaving.

I thought I was satisfied here, with my little self-made prosperous life-after-college-which-is-really-my-year-saving-up-to-go-to-college. But the past strikes again. I miss my friends, I miss people I can relate to.

I don’t like saying that I miss people, so keep this under wraps, okay? It could damage my image if it got out.

The way I see it, there are several things I could do to improve my situation.

• I could spend more time communicating digitally with friends overseas, staying in touch through means like Facebook, Skype, and, oh, that retro thing called e-mail. Skype is the best option, but also the hardest to arrange. I spend too much time on Facebook, but if I switched my activities from perusing (read: stalking) to messaging, it might approach the classification of ‘time well-spent’. Maybe. Digital communication still leaves a lot to be desired; I think I can do better than this.
• I could invest more in the relationships I have, particularly those at Hi-B.A. I’ve been feeling lately like I’m not putting enough of myself into that. I particularly would like to have one or more AGs (Accountability Group – you checked your knee-jerk reactions at the door, remember) in order to get to know some guys better and be mutually strengthened through fellowship. This might be what I’m looking for, and I need to pursue it harder.
• The last thing I can think of is to develop my friendships with my classmates remaining in Japan. I’ve been trying to meet up with one of them for a while, and I’ve seen a few others in the past few months, but for the most part I’ve dropped out of contact with them because I didn’t talk with them much even during the school year. I would like that to change, and since I am an awkward sort of fellow, it might be difficult at first, but I think I will try to initiate something. I need more justification to mock returning students’ feeble attempts at ‘reunions’, at any rate.

That’s my plan of action to deal with this lack of connection that seems to have festered under the radar since last summer. My theme for 2010 is discipline, and I think that maintaining good communications with people who matter to me is a big part of that, both for me and for them.

Or I could just be spouting off of an emotional outpouring brought on by recent events. In any case, I apologize for not taking the time to proofread this entry before posting it.

Comment.

-Brad

Bait and Trap (Or Was It Snatch?)

Similar to what I said in my last post, I’ve been thinking about how to make this site more appealing to draw more visitors. I was thinking of what leads me to a blog. Not much, to be honest. I don’t read many blogs, which is probably a result of my poor opinion of them. In general I find blogs to be painful due to the poor grammar, boring due to the blogger writing about things I and the rest of the world have very little interest in, and distasteful because of the often cheap backgrounds and website structure. And now I see that my blog, as much as I try to avoid calling it that, basically falls under the above description. I most fervently hope I can at least avoid the first faux pas, however. I’ll take a properly written boring blog over a grammatically heinous moderately intriguing piece any day. Is that true? I suppose it depends on how far ‘moderately intriguing’ can stretch. My point is, get the grammar right, folks. I can bear terrible structure and irrelevant content. Just please be a little more careful with the easy stuff. There’s no excuse. You’re doing a bad job of representing yourself to the public, no matter how much you swear that no one cares. I judge you when you use poor grammar, that’s why I joined a Facebook group saying just that. See, I’m an activist for positive change. Ha. As if joining groups changes anything. Remember that.

So now all of you will be jumping on my every typo, right? That’s the idea. I figure if I ask you guys to let me know of any mistakes in my writing you’ll feel like I’m using you and won’t do it, but if I give you the opportunity to prove me a hypocritical bastard, well, that’s just too juicy to pass up, isn’t it? That’s what I should’ve done in high school to get decent peer editing – claim my grammar was perfect, my flow was excellent, and my conclusions impeccable. Ever get the feeling your fellow students didn’t really care about your essay or what grade you got? News flash: they didn’t. Except in terms of how the comparison with their grade made them feel.

That reminds me of Zoolander, which I watched last night, like I said before. There’s a funny bit involving the phrase “Earth to…” which I would say is probably the funniest part of the movie. Yeah, it’s not too funny. I was disappointed. It wasn’t worth my time. So few movies are, don’t you think? One of these days I’ll probably put out some really harsh movie reviews just to let out steam and increase this load of content not getting read.

I think the main thing is that I’m just sick of Ben Stiller. I think I was sick of him the first movie I saw him in. I just don’t find him funny.

But that’s enough on that. I accomplished my grammar goal. My primary objective is to discover what makes a blog appealing, even return-worthy, and how I can utilize that to gain followers and make money. Muahahaha.

Kidding. I would like to make money, and I will shamelessly flaunt ads to do so (barring those Evony travesties), but this isn’t about gaining followers. I would like to someday be able to call it a community of creators and appreciators, so I need to spend time thinking about how to get to that point.

I just read a blog article entitled “The Top 10 Snipers in History” or something along those lines. I saw it in some list on WordPress and clicked on it because I’m very interested in snipers. So what my articles need are captivating titles. They also need relevant and popular tags so that they’ll show up in searches. I would say that so far I’m succeeding in these two things. What’s left is to enlarge my content stash.

And how to keep readers here once they arrive? Well, interesting articles, for one. That’s so subjective. In the future I may write to please readers – when I actually have readers – but for now I’m sticking with what interests and pleases and satisfies me (as far as content and style). I had another thought earlier. The blog has to do something for the reader. If I’m putting out wonderful works of literature and especially poetry, that’s good enough on its own because readers will be inspired by the works and attempt to liberate their own creativity, or simply bask in the beauty. But I’m not. I hope to, but I’m not currently. So I need to help you out somehow to motivate you to return here the next time you’re in need. Good but not great prose needs practicality – the interest keeps you reading, the help brings you back.

Something like a guide to further information. That would be the simplest, probably. That list of snipers would’ve been greatly enhanced by links to websites with more information, which I’m sure exist because the author definitely wasn’t writing off the top of his head. I haven’t really written any information articles yet – but then again all my posts are information to a certain degree. So I should consider offering links for further enlightenment. It’ll at least draw the frantically procrastinating middle schoolers.

DIY (not DUI) blogs seem to be fairly popular. So I might want to consider putting that sort of slant on some of my articles. Surely I have plenty I could teach how to do. Mm…like fruit revolutions, for example. I’ve been meaning to make a video about that and post it on Youtube.

Speaking of videos, I also thought of making a video on how to get a job in Japan, a detailed version of Andy’s which I embedded in another post, put it on Youtube as a reply to said video, and include a link to this blog in that description. That would surely draw a few bored surfers. Andy has a pretty sizeable fan base which I can take advantage of (I mean that in the most parasitic way possible).

Until then, I guess I won’t be seeing you, because you haven’t yet arrived, but you will.

-Brad