Thesis Time

I mailed off my JET acceptance today. Along with my criminal records check and an IRS form related to my upcoming foreign residency. On Thursday, I have my physical and then, as soon as I get that form filled out, I'll send it off to JET and be all set for getting placement! I could know in as little as three weeks what my placement is, which is just enough time for me to be reduced to a ball of nerves. Again.

Anyway, in the meantime I'm trying to finish my thesis and it's... going. I'm on page 12, of a required 20-25, and that isn't including an introduction because I haven't written one yet. I'll make at least 20 pages easily, so that's not a concern, it's just that I still have to write them. I also have to seriously edit the first 10 pages that I wrote because there are a lot of problems. My thesis adviser pointed out that I kind of don't really have a central focus. I mean, I am arguing something, but there's no strong "so what" yet. Instead, I've been sort of toying with three or four possible reasons for even writing this paper. Aside from, you know, my intense desire to graduate on the 16th. So, when I get the whole thing written, I'm going to have to go back through it and edit, reorder some parts, break a few paragraphs up and shift the content around, because I shouldn't structure them the way I did, and refine it all to fit a more central idea. That I don't quite have yet. It'll happen.

I'm just burned out and bored, honestly. I'm so close to being finished, and so close to going back to Japan, and so close to doing something I've dreamed of for a long time that it's hard to maintain enthusiasm for my thesis. Or anything else I have left to do to attain my degree.

I'm down to my thesis, a final 7-10 page paper for Apocalyptic Lit (that I haven't started - it's on the agenda after I make more thesis progress), and a group presentation for art history. And all of that will be turned in and completed by 4 May. Then I'll chill for a week and a half, graduate, and head back up to Washington until 24 July when I peace out to Japan. That's it. I'm thisclose.

Also, I will definitely be moving blogs. I made an account over at Wordpress and am planning to migrate over there this summer, probably in July a little before I leave the country. Blogspot has served me well for the past two years, but I'm due for a change of scene and I like some things Wordpress has to offer.

And that's about it. I don't have a lot happening, just a few things that are kind of big. My only other news is maybe that I decided to get James Heisig's book Remembering the Kanji to try his method. I'll let you know how that goes for me.

Busy Busy Busy

Here, have a JET to-do list:

• Get a chest x-ray
• Get a physical
• Get fingerprints taken
• Request an FBI criminal records check (cost $18)
  
• Send reply form, proof of criminal records request, and medical stuff to Seattle (by 4/23)
  
• Fill out a tax thing (cost $36)

And that's just the preliminary stuff that has to be done ASAP! It's partially because it's a government job and partially because Japan is really worried about TB and whatnot and requires extensive medical screenings in order to get a visa. I got up way too early this morning to walk over to Salem Hospital and get my chest x-ray, I'm getting the fingerprints done this afternoon at a place that is really far out of the way (thanks for that, City of Salem, I appreciate it), and I have the physical next Thursday because it was the soonest I could get in to be seen. I've already emailed the JET person in Seattle to tell her that my medical stuff will be a couple of days late, because I was just a little too late to get an appointment for this week, or even the very beginning of next week.

But my packet got here today! My mother had to overnight it to me because JET stuff goes to our permanent addresses. This means I can actually read the instructions myself, rather than have them relayed to me over the phone. I will do this as soon as I go to the mail center and pick the damn thing up.

I'm also thesising and trying to finish up my last two-ish weeks of undergrad, so I can graduate. I am so ready. Also really psyched about Japan and getting a little twitchy about getting my acceptance stuff in so I can find out what my placement is and start preparing for departure.

Oh, and I depart on 24 July, which is sooner than I'd expected. I'll let y'all know when I find out where I'm going to be living. Keep your fingers crossed and send good thoughts for me to get somewhere in Saitama or Gunma (my top two requests).

JET ゲットだぜ！

So, I changed up my blog layout. Except that's not important right now because I'M GOING BACK TO JAPAN. Yes, you read that right, I made the shortlist for JET, which means I have a post-graduation job as soon as I accept the contract. Which I will do as soon as I get the paperwork. There are about 890432 things I have to do before I go (like graduate and get an FBI criminal record check), but I made it through the interviews and life is awesome. I won't find out where my placement is until sometime after I accept the contract, but I will be letting everyone know as soon as I do.

It was kind of ridiculous when I got the email this afternoon. I flailed and got this massive adrenaline rush and may or may not have shouted "yes!" really loudly in my empty apartment. I was actually shaking a little bit when I called my family to tell them.

Anyway, the thing I was going to blog about before I got the best news of the year is that I decided to make a header with my almost non-existent graphics skills (it's a stock fashion photo, I did very little to it aside from add text), but am probably going to make a new blog sometime after graduation. Since I'll be moving on to Japan and things that aren't being an undergraduate student, a fresh start will be good. I'll be sure to properly notify everyone.

Other than that, I'm just working on my thesis and trying to get everything done in time. Graduation is 16 May - we're getting really close now.

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

Books!

Thanks to Ashalyn, it has come to my attention that I am woefully behind on keeping my books of 2010 list updated. I'm also shamelessly steeling her idea to review books, so that you might read them (or at least look them up).

So, first of all, Books of 2010, as of 18 February:

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

And, yes, I am aware of the fact that the list is over half Sherlock Holmes. I've been working through the canon off and on since New Year's Eve and I'm not going to bother going through them in any sort of review. You've all heard of Sherlock Holmes and, if you've never read any, you ought to. The individual short stories aren't long, there are just a lot of them. The other books are for Apocalyptic Lit and I'm going to talk about two of them.

1. Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
This is a great example of '70s southern existentialism. It takes place at an unspecified point in time in the south and is about a psychologist (a self-identified bad Catholic) named Thomas More. Tom has been mentally ill himself, and he's invented a device to diagnose maladies of the soul and one day, if he ever perfects it, to treat them. The whole story happens over the course of a few days and it's not linear - a good portion of the novel is Tom recalling what happened after the fact, as he lays under a tree at what he believes to be the end of the world. There's a lot of the Book of Revelation throughout and I won't spoil the ending, but it's a pretty good read.

2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon is weird. In fact, Pynchon is very weird, and this novel is evidence of that. It's about a woman named Oedipa Maas, who is named co-executor of a recently-deceased ex's estate and, while she's trying to deal with that, maybe stumbles upon a centuries old conflict between two mail delivery companies and the secret society that seems to surround the one that no longer exists. But really, when you get past the plot (Oedipa gets obsessed with this simple drawing of a muted horn that she starts seeing everywhere and spends days chasing after what seems to be a huge plot, but might in fact just be her imagination, or a practical joke, or something else entirely), it's about entropy. It's very '60s, very postmodern, and I loved it. It also makes me want to start drawing the Trystero horn in random places, to join the maybe-conspiracy.

But I've heard this book referred to as one of the most grating, incomprehensible novels ever written and feel like it's one of those things you'll either love or hate. So you might not have my reaction to it.

And now I'm reading Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, which is great. I love the film adaptation (starring Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, and Robert Downey Jr), so I felt like it was time to read the novel. It's about writers and writing and failing to write, and is both darkly funny and true to life. Maybe not for people who don't write, but for those of us who do. I'm currently about a third of the way through, but since I've seen the film a few times I know the general shape of the plot. As tends to be the case, the book is even better than the film, and it's a good film, so I'm very happy.