End of School

So I'm finally done with school.

I'd have preferred staying on until the end of next term, but I ran out of money.  Alas, the next JLPT exam is in June/July (somewhere around there) so I've got a while until I can try again.

In the meantime, I'm continuing to study and look for work.  Considering how expensive everything here in Japan is, the money problem comes first.  As such, I've been taking on jobs wherever I can find them.  The only bummer is that I can't find anything permanent.

Of the three jobs I've done this month, only one lasted for more than one day.  It was also the worst paying of the three.

Sigh

I've been applying for more permanent jobs, and I've been trying to keep busy in other ways.  We'll see how long it takes me to get cabin fever.

Considering where I am, I shouldn't be getting my hopes up, but I can't help but think of the stuff I'd like to buy and do if I got a job.  I'd go to a sushi place.  I'd buy a new PC.  I'd go somewhere other than this house or my old school for the first time in a year.  I'd take some photographs again.

Oh well.  I'll start thinking about doing something interesting if I find a job that pays well enough.

In the meantime, I'll keep studying.

Working

So while I've been primarily studying for the past year, I've also been goofing off to do some 'work.'

This has involved everything from writing to visiting a tourist area in the south.

While it has become clear that I will never be a linguistically agile person, what with it taking so long to learn Japanese, I've found that I'm decent enough at dropping in and out of a variety of situations to do a variety of jobs.

I'm coming to the end of my language learning, having spent the last of my saved money on this terms tuition.  With that, my options are basically as follows:

Sponge
Mooch
Work

I don't really have it in me to sponge any more than I already have been.

I don't really know what mooch means.

I guess that leaves work.

So the next question is, where to work?  I still don't have the necessary language qualifications to work full-time at a 'real,' company, so it's probably going to be a part-time job somewhere.  If you will indulge me patronising the reader a little, if you are under 50 or so years old, you might misunderstand the term part-time here.

It used to mean fewer than X hours a week (depending on country, somewhere around 25 hours a week).

Part-time now means a job that pays terribly, has zero benefits (health insurance, pension, etc) and can be any number of hours a week.  To put this in perspective, I was a part-timer while I was teaching, because I was paid for X number of hours despite working much longer.

At this point you're wondering what on earth I'm talking about and why I've written this confusing screed against the current state of employment law around the developed world.

Don't worry about it.

This post is entirely for me, reminding myself why I quit my previous job and am working to improve myself.  Everyone has to write something like from time to time.

I Think I'm About to be Assassinated

So I have an utterly, utterly filthy plastic cup that I've never washed (building up immunity) sitting on my desk.  It's so filthy that no matter what I put into it (usually tea, occasionally watery hot chocolate) it all tastes the same.

One of the English teachers I work with took pity on me and washed it out.  Evidently their cleaning liquids were not up to the task, so instead of giving up and telling me to stop being a bridge troll he took the nuclear option.  He cleaned it with bleach.

The nuclear analogy is perfect for a number of reasons.  Firstly, it worked.  The cup is now white.  Whether it's white because the filth has been whitened, or washed away, we will never know.

Secondly, it made a point about my personal cleanliness habits that I will not soon forget.

Thirdly, the area which has been bleached is no longer fit for consumables.  I can no longer drink from that cup.  IT REEKS OF BLEACH.  No matter how many times I wash it out, it won't stop smelling.  I was only away from that goddamned cup for an hour so it can't have been stewing for more than fifty nine minutes, and yet the poison is ingrained.  There is no way it's ever coming out of that damned cup, never ever, ever.

It's a shame because it took me the best part of four years to buy a cup to drink things at work (I only got it because I needed one for the hospital and it happened to be in my bag when I went to work the next week) and I will never remember to buy another one.

And what else is a cup useful for, other than cup stuff?  The cup has been destroyed.

It's also a shame because he's a really nice guy and I don't think he meant to utterly destroy my personal property - he only meant to slyly tell me that my colleagues think I'm a pig (I don't have the heart to tell him I don't give a rats ass) and that I should clean my stuff.

Anyway, it is said that we should learn something every day.  Today I learned that if you BLEACH a receptacle for FOODSTUFFS (drinkstuffs?) you are substantially reducing the ability of that thing to carry the item(s)/thing(s) it was designed to carry.

P.S.  If you're going to try to murder someone who isn't anosmic, bleach is a terrible choice.

What a Hectic Week

So this week has been all kinds of crazy.

First off, work is a real pain at the moment.  We have to write end of year reports for all our kids.  This is a nightmare, because each child needs a custom written report; not like England, where each kid falls into one of three pre-defined categories, each with a standard form.  I've known classmates who received identical school reports, with someone else's name and date of birth.  Each comment is bespoke, and each one requires five to ten minutes.  Multiply that by eighty or so and you see how annoying this particular task is.  It would be okay if we had fewer daily and weekly tasks to complete - but I guess there is never enough time.

My finger is officially healing in the wrong direction.  It's pointing outwards, where the same finger on the other hand is pointing inwards.  I've managed to keep the actual pain of it from my manager and co-workers, so I shan't be discouraged from playing sport by them.

On the sporting side-note, I might finally have cracked the american football conundrum.  There is a training session next Wednesday, and I've been invited along with a couple of colleagues.  It's not rugby, but beggars can't be choosers.  Plus I'll finally be able to fold some chumps and work out the inner aggression I've been barricading inside.  Who knows, maybe I'll be able to lay out some of the aforementioned colleagues too!

I made a girl in my year six cry by pronouncing her name incorrectly.  I checked, it wasn't swearing, and it wasn't rude - I just said it wrong.  If she hasn't figured out that people make mistakes by the age of twelve, I fear for her growing up.  When she steps outside of the school gates for the first time, her little head will explode.

We played a little basketball on Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and again on Wednesday this week.  Basketball is fun, but there are a couple of societal rejects who play, who score fewer than I do.  This would not normally be a problem, but they whoop and yell and shout and scream as if they were gods.  Not to mention that they hit me and push me, (past the point of it being a foul) and jump on my toes; and when I run at them with the ball they call fouls that would make a footballer blush.  They're pathetic, and must have been bullied by someone who looks like me at some stage in their lives.  I have heard that one of them plays american football though, so I will go out of my way to destroy him.  If I break both of his legs, then he can't play basketball next week and I will be much happier.

We played football with a group on Wednesday.  It was good fitness, but I'm worse than hopeless at football.  I still can't see the appeal of it, if I'm honest.  I'd play any day of the week though, I was up and down the pitch like a terrier (a mentally handicapped one, but a terrier nonetheless) and as a result have surely gained .1% lunch capacity over my previous fitness.

So basically between the gym, basketball/football and work, I've had no time to even write an entry on my blog.  (I finished at 7pm today, went to the gym but wasn't really feeling up to it and came back early.)

I'm going to finally pick up an alarm that works this weekend, if I survive tomorrow, that is.

The Weather Then.

It's humid.  Really humid.  This makes it feel substantially warmer than it is, (as of right now, 20 degrees or so) although it will get much hotter than this.

The beaches are nice, but the water is too cold for swimming at the moment.  Presumably the water will get warmer too.

Everyone is really nice, and the kids in school are pretty energetic.

I seem to have hit the jackpot in terms of location, because the supermarket (which I've only visited once, in order to get some breakfast; everyone has been so kind that I've not needed to cook yet) and gym are within five minutes of me.  Pretty much everything I need is already here, (thank you previous owner!) and so my shopping list is rather sparse.

I'm going to play some american football later in the week.  My limited experience of this sport suggests it will be easy to  begin with, (as it was when I played it before) but I suspect as with all things, the more involved you get, the more intricate the theory becomes, besides; it's always fun to learn new things, especially sports - it should be a laugh!

I'm debating whether to bother with pads or not for the training, we'll see how it goes.

I'm still suffering with timezone differences.  I woke up at 2AM today, and despite my best efforts only dozed until 5, I'm going to be zombified tonight.

I need to get myself a camera.  I find myself looking up at the scenery at every given opportunity.

Zen and the Art of Pressure Washing

So I recently had to clean a relatively large surface (astro turf) with a focused high pressure water cannon.  The beam was focused enough that agonising slivers of green were revealed during every sweep, while the ruddy mottled brown, no matter how hard you try, laughs back.

Being notoriously lazy, a plan was sought to minimise effort.  This plan involved a detailed grey matter image of the surface, contours, and eventual route; considering environmental factors and footprints.  Once the map had been set, following myriad rules such as:  Generally moving from the top of the slope to the bottom, working in three parallel blocks (each sub-divided by two further blocks), moving no more than fifty centimetres forward at a time (on each block), and moving as much detritus (for the cleaner picks up many billions of microscopic particles, congealing them into a macroscopic ooze) to the sides as possible.

These rules generally applied, but were legitimately broken if problems, considering such factors as wind direction, footprints and astro fibre density were found.

While millimetres were cleaned with every sweep, time was taken to contemplate the route - but even this only takes a finite amount of time, considering the task seemed to offer infinite opportunity for inexhaustible fun (the seasons bring further coverings of rain, sand, mud and snow.  Each sweep would appear to take five years to complete, lending the surface to continual cleaning, non-stop, all year round) I had to occupy spare grey cell computational cycles.  Therein lies the zen methodology.  Plan your pebble garden (or cleaning duty) around a simple and convenient pre-meditated (sic) plan, and follow it, being as detached as possible.  The mind goes blank, and one awakes to find the work either complete, or someone firing paintballs at him.  Either way, some amount of time has passed, and the world is a little cleaner/aesthetically pleasing.

So the Job Interview Then.

So first things first.

Visit here and here, they're a couple of posts I've added in order to catch up with the days I've missed.  One is a few photos of horrible food out the front of a chinese restaurant, (the chinese eat more disgusting, cringe worthy stuff than the Japanese, believe it or not) and the other post is my typhoon experience.

So I went for the interview at GEOS yesterday, having not slept for two days.  One night was spent listening to the incessant rain, (which, through the wonders of youtube and my other post, you can also listen to) and the other night was spent worrying about this interview.  Needless to say I was pretty much zombified by the time it came to the interview itself.

To indicate just how tired I was, let me just say, it took me an hour to find the underground station, that's about ten minutes away from here.  I planned the route out the day before so I wouldn't miss a trick, and had everything planned, but it still took a lot longer than I thought it would.


Luckily I budgeted the forty minute trip at around three hours, so I arrived with about half an hour to spare.


Then the problem of the shirt arose, it had become horrifically crinkled, and no one sells irons in Japan.  If there's a gap in any market, it's in iron sales.


So I got around this problem by hiding under a respectable sweater I'd bought with me, (a jacket wouldn't fit) and pretended to be an etonian toff trying to blend in with the riff raff.  I think it worked pretty well, because the guys who interviewed me were Australian and american, two countries noted for their populaces' ability to be amused/impressed by jangling keys and shiny things.  My facade worked flawlessely.


So I had to give a five minute lesson, and fill out a form with my details and whatnot on them.  I had an 'interview,' but it was really just a formality with such banal questions as, 'why do you think you would make a good teacher for GEOS,' etc etc.


The problems arise at this point.


They've got me on the books now, and will give me a job when one surfaces.  However, that's not going to be for some time, and bizarrely, inside their corporation, it takes them 4-6 weeks to get a working visa; in any other company it takes half that time.  The upshot is that if I work for these guys I'll have to come back home for a while.  I'm probably going to end up doing this, but that throws up a whole bunch of other annoyances, like trying to get a bit of money together while I'm back home, just to help when I come back over here.  I guess that's something to think about later.


So the upshot is that I'll hear back from them in a week or so, and after that I'll probably be heading home for some length of time.


If anyone knows of any temp jobs starting in a month, that have a flexible term, let me know...