Moving!

As of today, I've moved blogs! I can now be found at A Farther Room, so if you want to keep up with my JET preparation and upcoming Japan adventures, it's time to update your links and bookmarks (or however you keep track of the blogs you follow) accordingly. This summer it might be a little spotty, since I want to keep the blog Japan-centric, but I've done a first post and I will be recording my progression towards JET-dom.

New Developments

First: I graduated yesterday! It was actually pretty fantastic, as far as commencements go, and I'm happy to have my diploma in hand. Well, it's on my parents' dining room table now, along with my cap, but I definitely have it. So now, after four years, I have my Bachelor of Arts in English and am done with undergrad! I don't have any pictures, because I personally didn't take any, but my mum did and I'll get some from her to show off later.

Leaving Salem was a little bittersweet and I cried in the car because I'm leaving a lot of people I love. But it's all okay because I'm off to Japan in two months (plus a week), which brings me to development the second: my JET placement!

I did not get what I requested at all, which seems to be more or less the norm for JET, and I was a little thrown off at first because it's so far from my sphere of familiarity, but I will be living in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture. That would be on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four islands. Matsuyama (I've learned since looking it up about an hour ago) is the capital of Ehime and the biggest city on the island, a ferry ride away from Hiroshima (and a longer ferry ride from Kobe, apparently). I'm pretty psyched I got a major city, rather than a tiny town way out in the inaka, but I'm a little disappointed that I'm so far from Saitama where I know people. I'll visit, though, and people should definitely come visit me. You know you want to check out Shikoku.

So it'll be cool. Based on pictures, it's prettier than Saitama (not that Saitama's all that picturesque, but still) and very green, and there's actually a decent amount of stuff in the city. Like a castle!

JET is seeming a lot more in my reach now that I know where I'm going. And I'll be switching to my new blog soon, so keep an eye out for that.

More Thoughts on Academia

I sent out graduation announcements today finally. Spent about $6 on postage sending a stack domestically, two to Canada (for my mum's side of the family), and one to Japan (my former host family). I included a note in the one to my host family because they don't speak English and I also wanted to let them know that I'm going to be back in Japan soon. I'm definitely visiting them ASAP because they're wonderful. My homestay experience was awesome.

Anyway, I've been totally finished since Tuesday, when my final paper for Apocalyptic Lit was due, so now I have more free time than I know what to do with. It's kind of weird. So I've been thinking about my college experience and, because I'm a list-y person, I'm going to mention the classes that have been the most influential (or just the best). Not going to do a bunch of explanation, but over the course of the last four years I took 30 classes on the Willamette campus and three at TIU. A couple of them sucked (I'm looking at you, intro to literary theory, AKA hell on earth), but some were fantastic.

So, without further ado, my top 5 Willamette courses. In no particular order.

1. Japanese. [All of them, but particularly during JSP and with Fujiwara-sensei]
2. Literature and Sexuality.
3. Shakespeare: The Comedies.
4. Avant Garde as Critical Tradition. [This was a film studies course, if you can't tell]
5. History, Sexuality & Power.

And then there were the classes at the other end of the spectrum. Like the aforementioned lit theory. It was English 202 and the nightmare of my English career. It serves a valuable function because it's the class that, as the name suggests, introduces all potential English majors to the theorists who will stalk you for the rest of your time in the discipline. It was in lit theory that I first read Derrida, Saussure, Lacan, de Man, Butler... it was the kind of course that covered a lot very quickly, so we'd be better prepared to read this stuff later. I've actually got my lit theory book with me and I know most of these names now. Clearly, I learned something here.

I do have to say, though, literary criticism/philosophy is frustratingly male-dominated. There are 47 essays in this book and only 12 of them are by women. All but two of those are feminist theory. So this book, which is widely considered an excellent intro to lit theory, only recognises two women who write about something other than gender. One of them is bell hooks with an essay called "Postmodern Blackness" and the other is Martha Nussbaum with something about literature and philosophy. I'm not knocking feminist and gender theory at all (I'm really into it, myself), but the fact that only two women managed to make it into this book with something else is pathetic.

There's also no queer theory. The Foucault they picked is about structuralism, they have Butler's feminist theory, and they left out Eve Sedgwick and Adrienne Rich (not to mention other, less well-known, theorists) entirely. I need to stop looking at this book, it's starting to annoy me.

So, on that note, I think I'm going to call it a blog entry. I want to go sell a book back and if I don't get moving I'll never get around to it.

Morbid and creepifying

First of all: Books of 2010, as of 1 May:

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
12. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
13. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
14. White Noise - Don DeLillo
15. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
16. Japanese Lessons - Gail Benjamin

Yeah, it's been awhile since the last time I updated that list. I also re-read parts of Lost Japan by Alex Kerr, but since I only flipped through it while eating dinner one night I'm not counting it. It's a good book, by the way, if you're interested in Japan. He owns property on Shikoku and in Kyoto and the book is kind of a critique of modern Japan. He's really legit.

In other news, I finished my thesis! Annie and I marathoned Firefly while she worked on her art project and I worked on my thesis and now I've finished it. Unfortunately, it made me sad again that Firefly got canceled. I mean, I do like Serenity and I'm glad they made a film to give some closure, but I still really wish there had been more of the show. So many things never got explained and I love the characters.

But, yeah, thesis is off the list! I'm giving it a final read-through to catch any little errors or weird things, but at 24 pages I can comfortably say that it is, indeed, done. I still have my final paper for apocalyptic lit to write, but that's only 7 to 10 pages and it's not due till Tuesday. And then I will be clear to graduate and, in a little under three months, I'm off to Japan!

Maybe I should start a JET countdown, with a ticker or something that I can keep on my blog. As of today it is... 85 days till departure. That's really soon. Craziness.

My College Experience: A List

My friend Ashalyn did something like this and I decided to do it, too, because it's an awesome idea. So, here is my list of things I did in college (that are noteworthy, anyway), in no particular order.

1. Held Full-Time Jobs. Three of them, in fact: Macys in summer 07, King County Jail Health in summer 08, and King County Public Health in summer 09. I will probably be back at public health for part of this summer, too.

2. Studied Abroad in Japan. I spent four months of 2008 in Kawagoe, Saitama going to TIU for my study abroad. Clearly, I loved it because I'm going back to Japan in July.

3. Lived with roommates. I lived with the same roommate for two years, then went abroad, and I've lived with Annie ever since.

4. Wrote a thesis. Okay, so I'm still working on this. But a week from today I will definitely have successfully written my senior thesis.

5. Had a boyfriend.

6. Made friends.

7. Voted from a foreign country. I was in Japan during the 08 presidential election, voted by mail, and hung out in the second-floor lounge at TIU with their wireless internet to get the election results.

8. Had my wisdom teeth removed. It sucked.

9. Got detained at customs. This also sucked. Fortunately, it was only for about 15 minutes, but I didn't enjoy it.

10. Got into reading feminist and critical race theory. This is an on-going process. I still have a lot of books to read.

11. Went to a couple of anime conventions.

12. Went to a funeral. For my friend Yasu, last fall. It was a tough time, in a lot of ways, but I'm glad I went to the funeral.

13. Got H1N1. Another of those things that I probably could have done without.

14. Sang with the women's choir here at WU every semester.

15. Completed NaNoWriMo. So, I successfully wrote 50,000 words of original fiction in November. The novel needs some hardcore work before I would even consider showing it to anyone, though.

16. Went out drinking. I suppose you could count karaoke in Japan along with more domestic happenings.

17. Got into the JET Program. My next adventure!

I'm sure I could think of more, if I really wanted to, but this seems like a pretty good list. So I'll leave it at that. This was a good four years, I'm happy with what I did with them.

I'm Blogging A Lot Lately

I think this can be attributed to my thesis and other "important" things. The more I have to do, the more likely I am to distract myself with the internet. I haven't updated my blog very consistently this year, anyway, so I'm sort of making up for it.

Anyway, today I got some kind of bad news from home. Apparently, my family's dog, Max, has developed a degenerative retinal condition, so he's losing his sight. It's not something that can be treated and it's just one of those things that happens sometimes to older dogs. The vet said that it's not preventable and it isn't due to anything we did, so it's not anyone's fault. He also said that it could stop at any time, which means Max might be left with weak vision, or it could continue until he's completely blind. So that was hard to hear. It could be worse, like cancer or something, but it's still sad.

So I'm finding things to do that don't involve brooding over things that can't be helped. Like reading for fun and studying kanji. Exciting stuff, I know.

Actually, on the kanji front, I said I was going to try Heisig's method, yeah? Well, after hearing a few times about my friend Katherine's success with it, I really did get his book Remembering the Kanji 1 off Amazon and I'm pleasantly surprised. I admit, I was a little sceptical at first because it's a kanji book with no Japanese at all aside from the kanji themselves (no readings or use explanations or anything), but it's a really good method. His idea is that you should first learn how to write all the characters, with their meanings (so all English), and then learn the readings afterward to apply them to what you already know. It sounds kind of weird, because it's totally different from every Japanese class ever, but I'm doing really well at it so far. Each kanji has a little story (sometimes silly) attached to use as a mnemonic device, based on what the character looks like. The kanji for "old," for example, looks like a tombstone (it's a box with a cross on top, basically), so that's how you can remember it.

I don't know if it works this well for everyone, but I at least am already retaining more than I did by the traditional method of learning the stroke order, meaning, and readings all together. When I finish the book I'll get the follow-up to work on the readings. So, if you, like me, struggle with internalising kanji, check out Heisig.