A Little Over Halfway

I'm always writing fairly depressing entries in here, which is pretty disappointing to me. I'm not always so gloomy and down -- it's only when the minutes seem to drag by like hours and I am either bored with absolutely nothing to do or being forced into doing something against my twenty-three years of will that I get upset, and both of these feelings seem to be par for the course lately. (You can thank part of that on my digestive tract, which has hindered many of my efforts to Just Get the Hell Out and Do Something, Melissa over this past week or so.)

So, I wanted to write something a little more upbeat, both for my sake and for everybody who's been following this little blog thing of mine. This might not be the deepest or most profound entry, and some of these discoveries I've made may not seem like the big, Earth-shifting ones a journey to a foreign land like this one is supposed to inspire, but eh. Anything is better than nothing, and, frankly, I get sick of really self-important people pretty quickly.

...

...wait, we have fucking cockroaches in our room now?! Okay, this is not cool. (But, for what it's worth, I actually walked over and killed the damn thing instead of screaming and crying as per usual, so that has to count for something. Something. Maybe even a little something? They better not be in my clothes, though, or I am going to have the largest hissy fit this side of... Singapore?)

(WHY cockroaches, WHY?)

Okay. Enough with the roaches. Lessons I've learned from China after 3-and-some-odd-weeks:

• I really want to get serious about cycling again. Not soon, because America, unlike China, does not have decently built bicycles for 20 dollars, so hence I can not get a dispensable one in the US like I managed to here. However, maybe when I return to Japan for my planned year-or-two stretch I might be able to start training. This has nothing to do, really, with fitness or anything like that; bicycling is just pure fun to me, and I really want to take a long trip via bike sometime in the distant future.
• I prefer Blogspot to LiveJournal. Hahaha. How much of this has to do with the fact that my mom can comment on my entries here has yet to be figured out, but I'm sure it's a pretty significant part. The lack of Blogspot drama is also quite major, though, I have to admit.
• ...WHY COCKROACHES, WHY, WHY, DEAR LORD, WHAT DID I DO TO YOU?
• According to this torrent of "Top 250 Hits of the 90s" I mentioned in my last entry here, Savage Garden is responsible for quite a few of the 90's top hits. Also, some songs are much, much younger than I thought they were, which somehow makes me feel real old. I'm not sure how that works, but there it is.
• Mosquito bites can and will bleed if you scratch them too much. Also, I am pretty allergic to Asian mosquito bites, as one bit my thumb yesterday and the thing has swollen to even thicker than its usual plump proportions.
• I want to teach Japanese. I want to just speak Japanese, really. I want to do everything in my entire life in Japanese, because I love Japanese, because I realized early on that for every thought I want to express in Chinese (and can't), I can come up with at least three ways to say it in Japanese, and this is extremely frustrating. I need to be there. Soon. (Or home. I will speak to Japanese people at home. I mean it, this time.)
• I need to stop being shy when I feel like the weakest person in a crowd, because I thought I was over that BS, but apparently not. I think I need to feel like I have authority or I shrink like a withered flower. When I don't feel I have any authority -- like, when I'm the token white girl from America who doesn't speak Chinese in a second world country -- I feel awkward and grow silent. This needs to stop.
• ...the cockroach I killed is gone, now. DON'T TELL ME IT WAS STILL ALIVE. I am so upset by this that I need to end this post, because I no longer feel happy and positive. Look at how easy I am to change, hahaha. (There better not be any more. I knew we shouldn't have left the door open so long today!)

I'm homesick. This post isn't helping. This is ridiculous. I want to be better than this. How can I expect myself to do anything if I can't even see this through?

Blah. In good news, though, I found out that the student center on campus is practically a miniature shopping mall, and I was able to buy some very strange sliced bread there. Maybe if I go shopping a lot, I'll feel better, huh?