Sons of Loki

It’s a very exciting time to be alive: revolution is in the air! Egypt’s fallen, Libya’s on the way, and who knows who will be next?

Of course, most revolutions tend to end in dictatorships. It’s one of the sad fallacies of humanity that the people who should rule never want to, while the people who lust after power are precisely the ones who should not be allowed to be in power. But some good might come of it. I love the idea of revolution, if not the practicalities of it.

And on the theme of revolution, my life is … revolting! I’m afraid to report that after a long struggle with Failure, my BA in Japanese has passed away peacefully after receiving poor marks in the recent exams. In all seriousness, I think this is the third and final time I’ll be thinking of packing it in. Even though I only have a year left, my Japanese just isn’t going to get any better. I gave it a year, and it’s not coming together, and it’s become a frustrating chore. This just isn’t what I want to do. Best to cut my losses and try for a decent English degree rather than a poor joint honours one. I don’t think doing English will be any easier – it might well be harder – but I’ll be able to concentrate on one subject, rather than the ungainly hodge-podge of joint honours, and it’s a difficulty I enjoy – a challenge, not the immovable mountain that is trying to learn Japanese.

Wheels are in motion, and I’m reasonably certain that this time there’s nothing to stop me – I’ve got the marks, and I should get funding for an extra year. This gives me the rest of the semester off. A kind of sabbatical, if you will. Sort my head out. Get a job. Do some writing. Here’s hoping it goes well.

Thursday was the listening exam; I was very pleased to discover that it was (intentionally?) easier than the exercises we’d done in class. Some of the questions – particularly the multiple choice ones – were nigh on incomprehensible with weird diagrams and unexpected answers, but I feel I did well enough to pass. Revision helped, as did having Japanese TV on. It’s really all about training your ear to split up the sound into syllables and words.

I ended up with a slightly-bonkers set-up with my netbook on my left, plugged into my radio streaming Japanese TV; Anki open on the left half of my desktop monitor for flashcards; and JDIC open on the right half of my monitor for looking up words; and a remarkable program called Synergy which lets you use one mouse and keyboard on two PCs as if my laptop was just another monitor. Another monitor and an iPhone somewhere in there and I would truly be a self-facilitating media node.

Woke up worryingly early this morning. And Im hungry now, which is strange because we ordered pizza last night (Rob: meat feast, me: tandoori) while watching X-Factor contestants getting into fights on YouTube. Before that I had the rest of my increasingly popular (amongst myself) chilli, which is easy to make and so much better than the stuff I used to get in cans.

There’s more of a sense of … sociability now in the house, which is really nice. It’s partly down to the recent acquisition of Super Smash Bros. Melee, which has led to frenzied battles for domination as a regular occurrence. Rob always plays as Marth, which has led to me upping my game and getting good with Sheik just so I don’t die straight away. (I can’t beat Rob, but I can annoy him.) Also, as we’re all studying for exams at the moment, I think there’s more of a need to just kick back and socialise sometimes. It’s nice. In the words of Judas Priest (as in “The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest”, not the band) it’s not a house, it’s a home.

Last night I found these streams for Japanese TV and started watching TBSテレビ. Eventually the 3am teleshopping ceased and the breakfast show came on, and it was a strange sensation of jetlag to be watching people wide awake in the morning while I was getting ready for bed. But oddly enough, I slept really well.

So for the next two days I’m just going to have Japanese TV on as much as possible in preparation for the listening exam on Thursday. It bothers me that I only really study at my best when I have exams coming up, but I suppose that can’t be helped. It’s how I passed the exam last year, after all, and it did lead to genuine long-term gains in reading proficiency.

Today was the Japanese writing exam. Regular readers will know I’m actually not very good at Japanese, so I wasn’t very confident about this one to begin with. But from the looks of the past papers, it was obvious that it was basically going to be a letter to a teacher making a request, which is easy to learn by heart (with the help of the wonderful Anki). So, basically, I taught myself this basic form:

It is [hot/cold] because it is [summer/winter]! I hope you are well. n years have passed since I graduated from [university] and now I am living in [place]. Things were [difficult/bad] to start with, but then they became [easy/good]. I am working as a [occupation].

The truth is, I need to ask a favour. Because of [reason], could you do [request] for me? It’d be really good if you could.
Give my regards to your [wife/husband].

Then you throw in some 「もっと早くご連絡しようと思っておりましたが、遅くなり、申し訳ありません。」 (“I thought I’d contact you quickly, but it became late. My deepest apologies.”) or 「桜の美しい季節になりましたが」 (“It has become the season of cherry blossom’s beauty.”) and the killer 「仕事応募の為、身元保証をご提出して頂き、有難う御座います。」 (“For bestowing on me the honourable submission of a personal reference for the benefit of my job application, my deep thanks.” written with ridiciously showy-off kanji that will probably make the marker either shake their head or admire my pluck).

So I revised that while listening to some amazing jazz (I find it the perfect revision music because it’s sort of soothing and exciting all at the same time, and there’s no words to distract you) and went into the exam this morning, wrote a half-decent letter, and finished neatly before the end.

We went into town, ended up at Waterstones. I bought Catcher in the Rye ’cause it’s like my favourite book ever and I don’t care if that makes me a hideous hipster stereotype or whatever, and a terrible paranormal romance called … oh god, I can’t even remember the name – Double-Dating With The Dead. My reasoning was, yeah, I should turn my unfinished NaNoWriMo into a kind of deconstruction of the paranormal romance genre that’s so big at the moment, and I want to catch the tropes and cliches of the genre firsthand. It also features wonderful dialogue such as “I can’t stay in a place that’s haunted since there are no such things as ghosts” (imagine that in John Freemon’s voice, if you know who that is).

Walked back listening to Classic FM on my phone because I deleted all my MP3s while upgrading to Android 2.2. It was Chopin’s beautiful Romance Larghetto, which really went well with the drizzling rain. Listening to a lot more radio, these days, which is nice. Sometimes you can get a bit fed up of having so many MP3s always available.

I’m not doing Japanese! I’m doing Japanese! I’m confused! Well, I guess I’m sticking with Japanese. I got a language partner and I’m working on listening practice and I’m trying hard not to think about it, but just to do it. Dissertation reading has begun, and I have about two weeks to complete my research. That’s probably cutting it too thin, but I shall endeavour.

It’s a cold November Sunday afternoon, and I’m listening to the amazing Kaji Meiko sing enka. I wrote a haiku:

秋納め、
演歌聴いたり、お茶を飲む

The end of autumn
I’m listening to enka
And drinking my tea

I’m actually drinking coffee, but that’s three morae in Japanese and ‘tea’ is only two, one if you drop the honorific. It’s interesting to compare the English haiku to the Japanese – the Japanese version is based on 5/7/5 morae and not syllables, so a word like enka, two syllables, is three morae. Also, Japanese haikus traditionally require a seasonal element – so you get stuff like the autumn leaves, the summer sea, obviously, but then there’s massive lists of kigo (seasonal words), each with a deeper meaning – harvesting burdock in autumn, pickling wasabi in summer.

I tried looking up some haiku for inspiration, and found ひとり暮らしの５・７・５ (Haiku of a Single Man):

電球を　またも忘れて　暗黒湯』
Once again I forgot
To change the light bulb. I bathe
Sitting in darkness

呪怨見て
表紙のサップが
俺見てる
So I watched “The Grudge”.
After, from a wrestling mag
Bob Sapp stares at me

I guess I should get back to work.

We land on a cloud and I hop off his back, realising in mid-air that I’m jumping onto something entirely insubstantial, and yet I land on a soft, solid surface. I run through it, and it’s like running through fallen autumn leaves, a sense of wonderful, childish joy. He sits catching his breath, watching me run. I feel a little silly, but it’s absolutely incredible. I run and scream my head off, jumping without fear into the soft white fluff, spinning around with abandon in sheer awe at the unscaleable dome of blue sky that hangs in every direction. I run back to him, grab his hand, and we stand on top of the world, on a white meadow, in a perfectly silent world.

NaNoWriMo is back! I’ve come to look forward to November – first my birthday, then NaNoWriMo (3rd time this year), and finally my first Movember (feel free to donate to my ‘tache here).

Back at home for the weekend. Regular readers of my blog will know I very seriously considered giving up Japanese last spring, but somehow I pulled through the exams and started back at Leeds for the third year of this degree. But it feels like a Pyrrhic victory; sure, I passed, but I didn’t pass very well, and it may have been better to just bite the bullet back then and come to terms with the fact that I’m not really that into Japanese.

It occurred to me, the week before last, when I had to write this English essay. It was pretty complex and I didn’t really have any idea of what I was doing, but I happily hunkered down in the library for ten hours with a stack of books and crafted a deeply imperfect, but ultimately finished essay. I realised I really enjoy that kind of work – essay writing and such – because it’s creative work. I find creating something – a story, an essay, something in a computer game, a piece of art, a blog post – to be a wonderfully rewarding experience.

The thing is, I get none of that buzz from learning Japanese because it’s mainly passive learning. I know you create conversations and write compositions, but it’s really not the same thing at all, for me.

Anyway, my real point is, I really don’t think I necessarily need to be doing Japanese any more. The big problem is that I can’t drop it. I investigated, and was a little taken aback on Thursday to be told that I’m two weeks too late to drop the necessary credits to have room to take up English modules for next semester.

So I’m stuck. But! There is a plan C: abort this year entirely, get a job until August 2011, then start again at Level 2 next academic year doing Single Honours English. This would mean I graduate in 2013, not 2012. The job would earn me a nice bit of extra cash (and I certainly need all I can get) and I believe that since I’d still be registered as a student, I wouldn’t have to pay council tax.

This is kind of scary and exciting all at the same time. But then, it might be just what I need to do. There’s that great Talking Heads song, “Found a Job”¹, with the line “if work isn’t what you love / Then something isn’t right” and I’ve always thought I’ll never be one of those people trapped in a boring job they hate just because they’re too scared of things changing. But, to shamelessly quote another song, for me I’m more afraid of things staying the same². So I guess I should perhaps go for this. It certainly beats being bored and miserable in Japanese class all day.

¹: Byrne, David. “Found a Job” in More Songs About Buildings and Food. Talking Heads, CD, Sire Records (1978).
²: Cave, Nick, et al, “Jesus of the Moon” in Dig Lazarus Dig. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, CD, Mute Records (2009).