More of the same, really

First of all, I've found a 60-hour online TEFL (synonymous with TESOL/CELTA/the 20 other acronyms that all amount to the same thing) course that I think I'm going to register for after I get my second check. The first check will be next Thursday, so I'm going to wait a little longer before doing anything that costs much money. It's $310, accredited, and is a 40-hour basic Teaching English as a Foreign Language certification course plus a 20-hour extra grammar course that will up my overall qualification. Considering my total lack of practical teaching experience (and my inability to change that before I'll be applying for work), this is the best I can do to make myself more competitive. I'm planning on calling the school that offers these online classes when I get closer to registering to ask some final clarification questions, of course, but I think it'll work out well.

Can you tell I'm getting a little anxious about this? It seemed so far away for so long that I wasn't really thinking about it, until I realised that, if I do want to go back to Japan, I'm going to have to start figuring things out in September. Almost a year before I'd be leaving. And right now I'm in a sort of liminal space, waiting until I can do something.

And, you know, it's kind of funny - I'm putting all this work into being an English teacher when it's only a short-term ambition. I have no intention of teaching forever. Really, I (like a lot of other people) am planning on using teaching as a means to something else. Basically, this is my skillset: I'm very fluent in English, I'm going to be fluent in Japanese, I can read, I can speak well, and I can write. I still want to do the graduate program at TIU, but that's just more school, nothing permanent. Actually, what I'd really like to do ultimately is write books about Japan in English. Not travel books or books on subjects that have been done to death (because, really, do we need another book on geisha?), but rather English language books on things that don't get much attention. There are so many topics that foreigners, for whatever reason, just don't touch and I want to take them on.

I want to take pictures of the things travel writers and tourists don't really look at. I want to write about teenagers and the elderly and the assholes at immigration. I want to go to towns 95% of the foreigners who go to Japan have never even heard of and document them, or take the long way to Kansai from Tokyo, rather than the shinkansen, and write about the people I meet. And maybe no one would buy the books, but I would have so much fun writing them that I wouldn't even care.

It's kind of crazy how motivated you get when you realise that, actually, you do have somewhere you want to end up. And it's just vague enough that it will drive my mother nuts worrying that I'm going to finish school and not know what to do with myself.