Spring Break!

And I am happier for it, let me tell you. As I put it in my Facebook status: 勉強に飽きた, or, "I'm fed up with studying." 飽きる (akiru: to be tired of/fed up with) is a newish addition to my vocabulary - I've renewed my efforts to not lose all my language skills, which in practice means I'm trying to learn more kanji and I'm sort of working on memorising more verbs. I have a book that has the 600 most common Japanese verbs and I took it to work the other day to study a little bit in between appointments. Akiru is one of the words I managed to memorise and learn to write.

Anyway, my spring break is very low key so far. I need to work on my thesis, but I haven't done that yet, and tomorrow I'm planning to get my hair cut and pick through sale racks at the mall (I was in Forever 21 for about 5 minutes on Saturday and the entire back half of the store is sale stuff - I am all over that) . I'm thinking I'm going to grow my hair out a bit again, so I want to get the ends evened up before it starts looking ragged. And I might get bangs of some sort, for something different while I get some length back. I'll ask the stylist what she thinks.

Spring break non-plans aside, I'm getting really edgy waiting to hear back from JET. Apparently, according to my mother, my sister recently said something to the effect of: "If Alexis doesn't get hired, I don't know who will." So, hey, at least someone has faith in me and my abilities to get a damn job. I'm trying to be sort of neutral about it, you know? I really want to get accepted as a short list candidate (it would be quite possibly the best news of my life, from where I'm standing right now), but I'm trying to be prepared for the possibility of rejection. I've been considering my contingency plans, and I do have a few, but I would vastly prefer not to have to go there. And the fact that it's almost April is wreaking havoc on my nerves. They're going to be in shreds by the time I get that letter, you don't even know.

I know my blog is really boring right now, sorry. I don't have a lot of different things going on, but what I do have is big and taking up a lot of space in my mind. I have my thesis to finish, JET should be contacting me sometime in the next two to three weeks, graduation is 16 May... this is a weird time in my life. It feels really up in the air, sort of like I'm just waiting for things to happen. I'm working and active, obviously, because that thesis is not going to write itself, but everything is heavy with anticipation. It's not bad or unpleasant, but it's definitely strange.

General Life Update

Have I updated my blog with anything of substance lately? Why no, no I haven't. So, I guess you can think of this as the general State of the Alexis post, to cover the various things that have happened/have failed to happened/will be happening soon in my life.

Anyway, on 17 February I had my JET interview at the Japanese consul in Seattle. It went pretty well, I think, though a couple of things kind of threw me and my one Japanese language moment wasn't exactly flawless. I had an answer to every question, though, and I think those answers were decent. I was consistent, at least, and I smiled a lot and tried to make it clear that I'm really very flexible - while there are obviously some things I would prefer to others, anything is awesome. I find out sometime in early to mid-April whether or not I've got a job and then, if I am a short list candidate, I'll wait until sometime between the beginning of May and the end of June (as far as I can tell) to find out my placement. It all varies by consul, so there are no specific dates for when candidates get new information. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I'm also thesis-ing, which is interesting, but also somewhat maddening. My thesis is about Eve in "Paradise Lost." I'm arguing that she has greater power and agency than Adam and that Adam is actually the follower at the critical point in the text (the Fall of Man). I'm also partially refuting the claim that Milton was a hardcore misogynist. There is some definite misogyny in that poem, that's undeniable, but the traditional reading of Milton as a misogynist writer is partly based in some historical misconceptions and not completely accurate. And I'm going about the whole thing from a New Historicist perspective. So I'm doing a lot of reading about women in early modern England.

Other than that... Powwow is this weekend, so I'll be really busy helping run that. But it's my last Willamette powwow and it's my favourite school-related event of the year, so the exhaustion is totally worth it.

And, since I have to go to work in about 10 minutes, I think I'll just update the book list and leave it at that. This wasn't the greatest blog post ever, but it's proof of my continued existence. Or something like that.

Books of 2010, as of 9 March:

1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
5. Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
9. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
10. "Paradise Lost" - John Milton
11. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut