Not Getting On Each Other's Nerves

A few weeks ago, one of my students told me that she had a fight with her husband and went off on an extended bike ride to cool off. I asked her what the argument was about and she described a situation to which I could very much relate. She said she wanted to talk about something she was interested in with her husband after he came home from work, but he was tired and not in the mood. She persisted and he got angry, then she got angry.

Like me, this particular student works freelance from home, though unlike me, she actually makes a full-time living from it. Her husband, like mine, works outside the home and puts in some pretty long hours. One of the things you find occurring when you're home all day and your partner is out working in a box somewhere is that he comes home overstimulated and tired, wanting nothing more than to zone out and be left alone while you want to talk about whatever has been floating around in your head all day. There's a big difference in your energy levels and how much stimulation your nervous system has had or needs.

When I first quit my full-time job (about 3 years ago now) and had no or few private students each day, this was a bigger issue because I was sitting at home most of the day and only talked to my sister or my friends very early in the day (due to time zone differences) and spent the rest of the day in relative isolation. When the CH got home, I was ready to pounce on him with a conversation and he was in desperate need of a decompression session. He spends all day talking to people so this is no small surprise, and spends the half hour before he gets to our door on a crowded train or station being bombarded with noise and buffeted around by other people who don't look where they're going and expect you to move to accommodate them.

In short order, we worked out a system whereby he came home and I left him in peace for about 15-30 minutes until he was ready to talk. Generally, I just wait until he starts talking to me of his own initiative. I imagine that this arrangement would not have been worked out so quickly if we hadn't been married for so long or didn't have experience identifying and working out solutions to such things. It also helps that we're both confident about our feelings for each other and don't take the need for a certain arrangement which excludes the other personally. Of course, the exclusion isn't a physical one. I don't have to leave the room or anything. I just have to leave him to recover from the stress of the day and the commute for a short time before engaging him in conversation.

I wonder at times if this may be a bigger problem for couples in Japan than those back home because having a larger house makes it easier to find a place to "escape" to areas where conversation can be avoided without necessarily making it clear why you're doing so. In fact, I wonder if people may develop patterns to adjust to their need for isolation without even being aware of why they're doing it in a larger home. In our apartment, the only rooms sufficiently isolated from one another that one can't hear a conversation or be spoken to are the bedroom and the bathroom.

Since I now have more students and freelance work compared to when I first quit, this is far less of an issue than before. I spend several hours talking to people so I don't really need to pounce when the CH gets home. However, one thing I take away from this experience (and my student's situation simply reminded me of this) is that there's usually an easy fix for the problems that arise from people living together if both parties communicate and surrender their neuroses and willfulness and just address the issue at hand.

Not Wanting a Long Life

Recently, I asked a few students an interesting question off of one of the Facebook Memes that's going around. This question was, "would you want to know the day you're going to die." To be fair, this is hardly a question that originated with the banal interactions we have with one another on Facebook. In fact, it's a philosophical question that I recall talking over with my friends during late nights back in college and high school.

Most people say they don't want to know because then they'd have to think about it for the rest of their lives. The main benefit of knowing only comes from knowing you have a relatively short time left because then you can modify your lifestyle to maximize enjoyment of that time. Since no one wants to know they have little time left, most of us would rather forgo that possible benefit for the larger comfort of uncertainty.

This issue has come up in the past with students because of the plethora of fortune tellers around Tokyo. A lot of my students have gone to them from time to time and one of the things they are sometimes told is how long they will live. One of my students said she was told she'd live to be 70-something, but she felt that was too long because life was too hard. Recently another student told me that she didn't want to live past 60 because she didn't want to live with diminished physical capacity.

In a country where people enjoy the longest life spans in the world, I find their responses curious. It's especially odd in some ways because so many people in Japan who I've spoken to about what happens after you die believe that we face oblivion. They clearly are not thinking that there is some comfort in an after life. I also find it interesting that men don't seem to have the same reaction to the question as women. Maybe women in Japan see a long and lonely road ahead as they outlive their husbands, or perhaps their lot in life is such that they don't feel particularly satisfied with the circumstances of their lives. Or, and I think this may hold a more relevant clue, women are so responsible for taking care of their husbands (even in equitable relationships) that they see a future full of the burdens of old age without any of the restful benefits of retirement. One thing I will note is that the students who don't want to live a very long life do not have children. I wonder if having kids changes the way in which people view a longer life because they know someone will be responsible for looking after them.

Unfortunately, the number of people I teach is too small to reach any conclusions, but it is an interesting question to ponder. I can say that it always makes me a little sad when someone tells me they don't want to live that long, though I honestly can't say I want to live to be a gnarled shadow of myself unless my husband makes it there with me.

Lesson Therapy

Let me start off this post by saying that I am not a monkey. That's right. I'm not a gaijin monkey who performs for the student during lessons to entertain them. It's not that the students and I don't have a laugh from time to time, but it's not because I'm slapping fins together and balancing balls on my nose. My demeanor with students is very casual and relaxed. I ask them questions or have them do textbook material and I allow them the time to answer and speak. Occasionally, they volunteer a question and I answer. That all sounds pretty natural for lessons in language practice, but you'd be surprised how many people treat it like monkey hour.

I feel it was necessary to get that out of the way before I say that one of my students told me at the end of a lesson today his English lesson was the happiest time of his week for him. If you think this is my way of boasting, then I will also add that this fellow currently has a very difficult life situation. His mother is ill and he has to take care of her and his sister is in the hospital dying from the big "C". It's not like I've got a lot of competition in the happiness department.

That being said, I do believe that, for several of my students, having lessons with me serves a meaningful purpose in their lives which has little to do with language skill improvement. Since returning to private teaching after a little over a decade of office work, I've come to realize that there are some people for whom their English lessons are a psychological lifeline. They offer a type of interaction and mental stimulation which they cannot find elsewhere in their lives. In particular, students who are opinionated and outspoken have a chance to speak out to someone who isn't going to judge them or ostracize them for their ideas.

Like many people around the world, a lot of my students spend their time working and operating in relatively small circles. They have friends, but they can't always have the types of conversations with friends that they need or want because they have to keep certain things to themselves in order to not be considered strange or risk being ostracized. One thing I've had to adjust to is the idea that having a conversation lesson which is just me sitting down with a person with an emotional need, having a cup of tea or coffee and "having a chat" isn't shirking my responsibility as a teacher. The fact of the matter is that I'm accepting that some of my students need more of a therapeutic encounter than a boost to their English skills. This is particularly so for some of the older, unmarried ones.

The truth is that these types of lessons, depending on the student can be much harder or much easier than doing a real lesson plan with a textbook there to provide structure, direction and momentum. When you're responsible week in and week out for carrying on a "chat" with the same person who has no obligation whatsoever to initiate anything, you have to work hard to make sure there's something to talk about. For the aforementioned student who said his English lessons were the happiest time of his week, I often have to do 20 minutes or more of preparation to make sure I have enough current event and topical information on hand to keep the "chat" alive. After 75 conversations with the same person, it's not so easy to avoid retreading the same talking points territory.

Right now, the student I am focusing on in this post is incredibly lonely because both his mother and sister are in the hospital, though he isn't the only one who I believe comes to me for social interaction more so than skill building. He spends his days at home or visiting his relatives or hanging around his house with nothing to do. He says his other friends are still working either part-time jobs or full-time, but he's not able to pursue such things because of his age and familial responsibilities. I have a sense right now that I'm pretty much all he's got to perk him up these days and that makes me sad for him.

I think a lot of people who take English lessons are fulfilling a range of emotional needs that can't be fulfilled in their lives otherwise, but the fact that they are doing so isn't nearly as obvious as a few of my students. I wonder if the structure English language learning in Japan has been built around this need just as much or more than the need to improve language skills which are so poorly taught here. In a country where people are always saying "do your best" (gambatte), going to a psychiatrist is uncommon, and putting on a false happy face is common, and where there is a fair bit of conformity and homogeneity, English teachers may be performing a variety of therapeutic services including exposure to cultural diversity, companionship, intellectual stimulation and cathartic expression.

Fifteen Minutes

I'm guessing that a least a few readers are thinking I'm talking about Andy Warhol's famous line about fame with this post. Thankfully, that has nothing to do with the topic at hand. I can't think of anything I'd like much less than being famous.

For quite some time, I've been trying to add a few things back into my life that had fallen by the way side and having no success at it. I've also been struggling for various reasons to keep some good habits (like exercise) in my life due to physical problems, and having difficulties with that as well. Part of the larger issue is that my time is incredibly fragmented. I teach students face-to-face about 12 hours a week these days and do 2-6 hours of freelance work on top of that most weeks. This is all for the good because I feel very lucky to have the work that I do. It is the difference between quite modest additions to our saving and rather generous ones. However, it's not like my schedule is compact.

Adding to that part-time work is the mix of being a housewife. People who think being a housewife is just another word for hanging around the apartment and doing a little housework or cooking aren't doing it right. In order to make our current life situation as successful as possible, a lot of time has to be spent cooking, shopping, and cleaning rather than doing what is convenient and expensive. Until you cook three meals a day (and prepare lunches, make homemade bread and baked goods), clean up after them (without a dishwasher), and shop for them, you have no idea how much effort and time it takes. I don't mind doing what I have to do, but it does introduce more fragmentation of time into my day.

At some point, I decided that a little was better than none. The only way I was going to be able to add certain habits back into my day on a regular basis was to do them for small amounts of time. Starting last week, I went on a "15 minute" plan. My hope is to do a quarter hour of Japanese study, exercise (twice a day for 15 minutes, hopefully), something creative, and, eventually, meditation. So far, I've got the Japanese study back in there and the exercise. I do spend the time on creative things if you count blogging, particularly on the snack blog. However, I'd like to do skill expanding things rather than just blogging so I'm hoping to develop that habit as well.

I know that fifteen minutes isn't much time to devote to something, but sometimes tiny steps will get you there (or at least stop you from falling back). I realized that the way in which my schedule works right now requires me to achieve some goals in pretty small bites rather than big ones because it's too daunting or difficult to manage otherwise. I have often encouraged my students to do something related to English study for just 15 minutes every day rather than cram a few hours in once a week because betting exposure often is more important than for a long time. I decided that, if that advice is good for them, it's also good for me.

"Fomp"

Yesterday morning, one of my student was pecking at her electronic dictionary to find a translation for a particular concept or word and she showed me the result in the dictionary. The result was "fomp". I never heard of such a word so I checked at dictionary.com and it turned up no result. The urban dictionary has three results, but I'm pretty sure that none of them (particularly not the extremely disgusting last one) apply to the relationship between her grandmother and her family.

For years now, I've been telling Japanese people that they cannot trust their Japanese to English dictionaries and that the results they get have to be double-checked with an English only dictionary. In particular, I've encouraged them to check example sentences when looking up a word to check the proper context in which various words are used. For years now, I've been looked back at as if I were making up fairy tales. The students simply don't believe that their dictionaries, which are the finest technology major electronics companies offer, are more fallible than their teacher who is just some schmo who ended up teaching English in Japan.

I'm pretty sure that the three cornerstones of bad English in Japan are:

• Inaccurate dictionaries and textbooks full of bad translations.
• Japanese teachers of English who aren't even close to fluent and teach their students all of their mistakes.
• The plethora of mangled Engrish and Japangrish which saturates the culture and makes people think that certain phrases are proper English use.
  

In regards to that last note, I used to see and read people repeating crap English used in big advertising campaigns. About 15 years ago, JR did a big advertising campaign where they wrote "traing" ("train" + "ing") to promote the idea of "let's travel by train" (because "ing" is used for gerunds). I started to get reports from students around that time with nouns that had "ing" added to the end of them, aping the expansive ad campaign. Another contamination by advertising I still experience to this day is "charm point". Students will ask what my "charm point" is as if this is a set concept everyone understands. What they really mean is "outstanding feature".

I guess that the mangled English is a two-edged sword. The presence of so much English (or "Engrish") provides a point of reference for students which increases their overall ability to understand and relate to English. On the other side though, breaking bad habits or the use of incorrect phrases, words and grammar is pretty much impossible. Once a Japanese high school teacher drills students to say things like, "I have ever been to (place)," it is completely beyond my magic teaching skills to break the student from using this incorrect phrasing.

Someone really should do something about the dictionaries though. There's really no excuse for that besides being too cheap or sloppy to get the information in there correctly.

Faith

Most people think of faith as something you have in a deity. However, faith applies to all areas of our lives. One can have faith in other people, in the future, nature or in technology. We can even have faith in our routines and the routines of others who interact with us in our daily lives. More often than not, we don't even think about our faith in such things as long as it isn't shattered by some event. The lack of faith in many of the aforementioned things, incidentally, results in cynicism.

For a person who has grown up under far less than optimal circumstances (i.e., me), sometimes it's very difficult to have faith in anything. Lately, I've been trying to build faith in some things in order to calm my all too frequent fears about the future. One of the things I want to have faith in is the idea that my financial life is going to be fine. When you grow up poor, it's easy to fear financial ruin, especially when your parents were constantly living at the brink of ruin and made no effort to hide their anxiety about money when you were too young to rationalize that anxiety and could only internalize it on a pure emotional level.

Since the nature of my work situation is unpredictable, I have to actively work at keeping my faith in financial security alive. I try to boost this idea with an underlying faith in two other things. One is that karma will eventually repay me for the kindness and generosity that I extend to others. The other, much greater faith I'm trying to nurture is in the idea that there is "enough" work, money, opportunity, etc. for everyone and that, if one does not try and grab more than one's necessary share of such things, these things will naturally flow one's way. I try to see jobs as a river that sometimes flows hard and strong my way and sometimes weak and slow, but I want to have faith that there will never be less than I need. However, I also have to be careful not to confuse what I "need" with what I "want".

Recently, I referred someone to my former company who I knew without a shred of doubt would be good at the job. Before making this referral, I had the nagging idea that doing so might end up resulting in my getting less freelance work because I had benefited in the past from the fact that my successors had been troublesome employees. However, the person I was referring deserved the security and my former boss deserved to work with someone who I knew would be a delight to work with. Initially, it looked as if setting aside my fears and doing "the right thing" was also going to end up rewarding me as I was told I'd be asked to do a lot more work than usual. In fact, one of the Japanese staff members and my former boss came by my apartment and this appeal was made in person.

Over the last several days, changes to the plan have been made due to the ambitions of a particular Japanese staff member. Most, if not all, of the work that seemed to be on the horizon is evaporating rapidly and it is somewhat depressing. To cope with this (very likely) letdown, I've been trying to convince myself that I may have merely wanted this work rather than needed it and that things are coming together as they are to make sure more important needs than mine are being met. That is, possibly the new staff that were hired needed the jobs they're getting more than I needed the extra income. Still, my faith that good acts go rewarded and in the ebb and flow of that river of opportunity have been rattled a bit. However, I was incapable of making any other choice. My values would not allow me to protect my own interests at the expense of another and I still have faith that those who do so ultimately do not prosper.

Sometimes I wonder if my attitude about taking as much as I need rather than as much as I want and making the choices which are "right" rather than selfish is what separates me from people who society views as truly successful. That is, if I were the type of person who protected my own interests first and foremost, I might have been wealthier and/or risen to a higher position in my work. I'm sure that one element of ambition, besides a need for status and the approval of others, is a certain drive which compels you to get as much as you can, even when it is far more than you actually need.

The CH has often said that we should live our lives bearing in mind what the world would be like if everyone lived the way that we do. If everyone grabbed as much work as possible so they could be a little more financially comfortable and others had less opportunity than they needed because of that person's desire, then the world would be an imbalanced place. Of course, this applies to all thing from material possessions to food to energy to work. When we take what we need rather than what we want, we leave more for others to take what they need as well. If everyone lived that way, I'm sure the world would be a better place. I have pretty solid faith in that idea.

The Bitter Pill I Didn't Have to Swallow

This is hopefully the last page of the "magic English pill" woman saga in my life. I'm happy to say that I never taught her and will never have to teach her again and it again happened without my looking like the "bad guy".

This student was scheduled for a lesson on the 7th of November but canceled because she said she caught a cold. She was rescheduled for yesterday, but the agency called to tell me that she hadn't been in touch with them so they couldn't be sure when she'd ever take the lessons she'd requested, if ever. Their phone message said essentially that she hadn't paid for the lessons yet anyway, so they couldn't really expect much of her.

In the follow-up e-mail from the agency about this student, the referral agent essentially said that he didn't feel she was really all there. He didn't say those words exactly, but he did mention that half her mind was on something concrete and tangible and the other half didn't know what it wanted. He also said that he felt that "normal people" couldn't understand what she was thinking and encouraged me to flat out refuse if she were offered to me by anyone else who didn't know her history with both me and the agent.

So, I'm pleased to report that that particular issue is a weight off my mind. I had reconciled myself to dealing with her and viewing doing so as a challenge to my spirit and teaching skills. However, I'm just as pleased not to have to take on this particular challenge.

The Pill Woman Is Back

In my former blog, I posted about a student I taught about 2 years ago who was christened "magic English pill woman." I posted about my difficulties dealing with her and with her eventual departure. I was glad when she was gone, but unfortunately, she may be back for a brief session of 4 lessons this month.

I got a call from the referral agency today and was asked if I'd take her back for a temporary stint. This put me in an unfortunate position because they said things like, "You just dropped her because of the schedule, right? It's not that you personally disliked her, right?" The truth is that I didn't personally dislike her, but I found teaching her like herding cats. She was impossible to keep on track or to get to teach in any reasonable way. It was either me trying to bully her into doing something resembling a lesson, or allowing her to speak a hodge-podge of Japanese and English that wasted both of our time.

With the agency pretty much putting me in a corner, I had to decide if I'd take one for my reputation as a teacher and keep in good graces with the agency or if I'd do what I really wanted to do and just refuse. The situation is not too dissimilar from attending one of those awful drinking parties after work because one must be seen as part of the group to be viewed favorably by the company. You don't want to do it, but you bite the bullet and just handle it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with her. She's supposed to have some purpose in studying this time around, but she didn't have one last time. I told the agency to find our why she wants to take the lessons so I can structure something this time. I did mention to them that one of the issues I had with her before was that her attitude made it difficult to teach her. They said they believed they knew what I meant because they detected something about her when speaking with her on the phone in Japanese. They didn't say clearly what they meant, but they said, "she can't help it."

I'm going to approach her behavior as if she were a person with a serious learning disability who cannot focus or actually learn anything. I'm wary of succeeding too well with any type of lesson with her because I don't want to keep teaching her after her 4 lessons are up, but I also don't want to bang my head against the wall trying to push her to learn.

Perhaps I'll get really lucky and she'll change her mind about being my student again. After all, she complained about me last time so I'm not even sure why she's come back around my way this time. There is the very real possibility that other teachers had her before and categorically refused to teach her this time. I wouldn't find that the least bit difficult to believe.

*Cringe*

This evening I was helping a student with her work doing subtitles for a television program. She told me that they didn't give her a full script for the show and had two pieces of paper. One had blank spots indicated by stars and the other was a script of the narration, but not all of the dialogue between the narration. I assumed that the company had sent both documents and, as we went through it, I remarked that one bit of transcribing was badly done.

Later, as we continued and I saw the two different scripts, I realized my student had done the transcribing herself. That is, I had called her work "bad". When I realized this, I wanted to cringe because I didn't mean to insult her efforts. The dialog was fast and hard to understand and I don't blame her for having issues with it. I do blame a company whose business it is to offer the scripts for not giving her a better one. My comment was essentially saying that, "if this is the type of work they get paid to do, then they did a poor job." My student isn't paid to transcribe. She's paid to do the subtitles so her work was above and beyond and I so very much didn't meant to put down her work.

My husband had a similar experience in the past. He had a student who said she'd lie to her husband if it meant she wouldn't get hassled by him. He joked that he was glad he wasn't married to her in that case. She laughed, but he hasn't taught her since then. He meant not offense, but, in retrospect, it's possible that she took the joke poorly. He doesn't cringe about it though as he's a bit more easygoing than me.

These are the types of mistakes you sometimes make accidentally as a teacher which you would like to take back, but you really can't make up for it or apologize after the fact. Doing so just makes it worse by emphasizing the gaff. I'm sure I'm not the only teacher to unintentionally mess up like this. I'm also sure this won't be the last time I do this nor that I notice every time I do it.

One Timer

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was trying to mollify myself about a student possibly defecting to another teacher and school. I don't know yet how successful I was at making a much needed psychological adjustment, but I got a message from that student today asking for another lesson. So, it appears that she only defected this one time.

I must say, this makes me happy. :-)

Would Like to Be a Human Being

Yesterday I was doing a few telephone English tests for my former company. During most of each 10-minute test, I'm asking all of the questions to gauge the student's grammatical accuracy, listening skill, pronunciation, vocabulary and overall competence as a speaker. I assign the student a score from 1-10 (10 being a native speaker) based on how they deal with the questions. Most students score in the 4-6 range, though there are occasional scores of 2, 3, 7, and 8.

Usually, the students are pretty terrified at the beginning and then settle down as the test goes on. I always start off with the most basic of questions phrased very simply and ramp up the difficulty if they appear to be capable of coping with harder questions. By the end of the test, the student is about as relaxed as he's going to get and I always end with, "do you have any questions for me?" I wait until the end because the student just had 8 minutes of my questions as examples.

About half the time, the students won't ask anything. Most of the rest of the time, they ask some bland question about my hobbies. Often the men will ask if I'm married. On occasion they will ask my age. Both of these last two questions are taboo in Japanese culture when asked of a woman. There are subtle ways to ask them without being so blunt. These are the ways I ask such questions. I ask "when were you born", not "how old are you." This allows people to omit the year and just give the date if they are sensitive about their age. I say, "tell me about your family", not "are you married". This allows single people who are uncomfortable about their marital status to not discuss it as they can talk about their parents and siblings.

I'm not sensitive about my age or marital status. I don't mind being asked about either and take no offense when asked this question despite knowing these are considered rude questions for women. However, I do mind being asked in a manner which shows that the student is intentionally breaking with cultural norms because I'm a foreigner and he doesn't mind treating me disrespectfully. Yesterday, my last student of the testing session asked, "how old are you," and immediately started laughing uproariously like a deranged hyena. When I told him I was 44, he guffawed heartily at me again.

A lot of the Uncle Tom foreigners will defend this behavior by saying that he is "nervous". I've dealt with nervous laughter before and that's not what this is. People who are nervous laugh at the start of the test (and as time passes, they may continue to do so) because they are uncomfortable during the entire process. They don't suddenly start loudly bursting into laughter at the end when they ask a question they know to be considered rude in their culture.

I've also lived in Japan long enough to know that one Japanese person would not do this to another who was essentially a stranger to him or her on the phone. They might joke with friends, particularly if they were younger, but the idiot student who did this yesterday was in his 30's so he has no good excuse. Also, keep in mind that this is a business English test done as a requirement of the student's company, not some volitional, casual bit of conversation. The point of the test is for placement in business classes. The point of the classes is to prepare people for doing international business communication. They should be demonstrating some level of poise and professionalism if they can possibly manage it, not carrying on like a school kid.

Most of the time, I try and brush off this sort of behavior. It happens so often that I'd go crazy if I didn't. Yesterday, it really got on my nerves for some reason. As I recently remarked to another blogger in an e-mail message, sometimes I get tired of being a gaijin and would just like to be a human being again.

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 3

(This first paragraph is mainly going to be for the females out there, but it may apply to some progressive and/or cross-dressing males as well.)

Remember your home economics classes where you were taught how to make a pie crust or sew a skirt? Well, maybe that was my class back in the day. I'm hoping that lessons are a little more practical these days. "Home economics" should include learning how to economically run your home, not only how to cook and sew. Both of these are useful things to know, mind you, and I believe everyone should know them, but I do believe understanding how to deal with daily living less expensively should be part of the lessons.

My days often include teaching myself lessons in home economics. For example, I can buy a bottle of pre-made cold tea to serve students in lessons (or myself when I want ice tea) for about 250-300 yen or I can make my own iced tea for 30-70 yen (depending on the type of tea). Making the cold tea myself requires adding water to a pan, boiling it, putting teabags in a jug, adding the water, allowing it to steep and cool, and removing the bags. In terms of my time and attention to the task, we're talking no more than 5 minutes of effort, though it is peppered across across a span of time in tiny fragments. In other words, if I buy that jug of tea, I'm essentially telling myself that it is worth paying a little more than 2400 yen an hour for someone else to make my tea for me (5 minutes is 1/12 of an hour so 12 x the difference between my tea and the cost of the bottle which would be about 200 yen).

Now, if you're one of those sorts who writes blog bits for $10 a post and can whip out one every ten minutes and calculate your time as being worth $60 an hour, then my advice isn't for you. Though, honestly, this whole "my time is worth $X per hour" when considering the value of pursuing a particular endeavor is a pretty big load anyway. It presumes that all effort is equal and that all time is potentially similarly productive or that there is sufficient demand for you work to keep you busy such that you can't spare 5 minutes to make your own tea without sacrificing a moment of precious earnings potential. Also, seriously, I'd rather work less and spend less than work more and earn more. The mental and physical toll of pushing myself to work for more cash is far less than making a pot of tea, but that's really just me.

If you start to do home economics in accord with your lifestyle, you can see where you're making choices to pay someone else to do the work for you and make an informed choice about whether the effort is worth it to you or not. I'm not advocating that people stop buying the things they want or enjoying their lives, but rather that they apply serious thought to their consumption and the real costs of it.

A lot of people find the sort of "nickel and dime" thinking I'm talking about petty and feel that it won't save you an appreciable amount of money. Whether this is true or not really depends on how much you feel you have to save to make it worth your while. When I was living in the U.S., there was a woman who worked at the same halfway house as I who my 22 year-old self used to scoff at because she'd do things like cut up old calendars to use for notepaper. I felt that she was saving the place a few cents and it was meaningless. Similarly, I used to get annoyed with my parents for insisting I turn off the lights all the time when I left the room. I thought they were being cheap and petty. Now, I'm cutting up my old calendars and turning off all the lights.

Since environmental concerns and energy consumption have been something I'm paying attention to more and more, I've found out that these small actions result in meaningful savings. Over the last year, I've discovered that taking showers by intermittently turning the water on and off has reduced my gas bill by about $15-20 a month in the warmer months. Having an air conditioner with low power settings and having two air conditioners (one in the bedroom and living room) and cooling only one room at a time has reduced summer air conditioning expenses by about $50-70 in the hottest and muggiest months.

Over the course of a year, I've discovered that just turning off the lights and television when I'm not using them and showering more efficiently has saved us more than $300 a year in living expenses and we sacrifice nothing in terms of quality of life. All it "costs" is developing new behavioral patterns. That's essentially the cost of a new iPod Touch or iPhone. And it is a real savings. I know what I used to pay and what I pay now. I've saved the bills and done the comparisons. It's not theoretical.

I never crunched the numbers specifically on what other habits we've employed to reduce expenses have allowed us to do because it can get pretty complicated. However, I do scrutinize the cost of home-cooked meals compared to eating out on a regular basis and consider the cost per portion based on the type of ingredients. I mainly do this to dissuade myself from going for convenience over effort as often as possible. For instance, I know making my own chicken pulao costs less than 150 yen per serving whereas going to an Indian restaurant will set me back at least 1000 yen (very likely more) per person. The serving sizes will be bigger, but they will also offer more food than I require and result in waste or overeating. Making chicken pulao also frees me up for the next two evenings as we'll eat leftovers for two additional days.

I know cooking is out of the question for some people as is carefully shopping for cheap food or buying in bulk (which also saves money). I'm not saying what people should or should not do, but rather saying that, if you want to save, you have to start considering the price of convenience. It's very likely more expensive than you realize.

(This is the last one, I promise. ;-) )

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 2

One of our fellow bloggers who also tends to talk quite a bit about Japan recently married a Japanese woman and came to Japan to live after completing university. He was concerned about debts from his education and getting them paid off as quickly as possible. I told him that my husband and I had managed to save nearly as much as his entire educational debt in the two years since I quit my former job so I was sure he could get those debts dealt with pretty quickly if he was careful with how he spent his money. (All the money we save, incidentally, has all gone into savings for when we're old and grey and can no longer work.)

You might assume that we make a lot of money. The truth is that we do not and our rent is pretty high (110,000 yen). The money we saved during those two years represented about 35% of our income. We don't make a small amount of money, mind you, but my CH isn't in a high-paying job and I only worked 5-10 hours a week from home during the two years in which we saved that amount of money. The way we save a fair bit is by not spending what we get. This isn't as hard as it may sound, but it does take awhile to reach a mindset where living well below your means doesn't feel like a burden or sacrifice. For us, it evolved naturally so we've never found ourselves pining for things. I consider us very fortunate in that regard.

I've come to understand that there are 3 cornerstones to reducing your spending:

1. Cook for yourself from real (whole) food ingredients (never pre-mixed, pre-bagged, or pre-made).

2. Don't buy new clothes or shoes unless you need them (never buy because they are attractive to you or you think you'll look good in them).

3. Never shop to entertain yourself or to mitigate unrest in your life.

If you follow these, your spending will be dramatically reduced. Most people waste their money on incidental items they rarely need or use, convenience, and the momentary "high" of obtaining something novel. If you scrutinize the pleasure your spending habits bring you, you'll likely see very few of the items bring long-term pleasure or fulfill recurring needs. Most of the pleasure you get is from looking at the items, considering buying them, making the purchase, and carrying the bag home. Once the item is in your possession, there is definitely a letdown for many purchases.

Most people can't get past the idea of "deserving" the reward of buying something they want so they justify wasteful spending as a way of making working worthwhile. They feel empowered by the freedom of obtaining what they want when they want it and choose the immediate small sense of freedom over the long term freedom that comes from financial stability and security. I won't say that, if you hate your job and have to placate yourself by buying junk, it's probably time to consider a different job which doesn't make you as miserable but may pay less because I know that's unrealistic for many people. However, it is worth considering.

I'm not judging anyone for their spending habits, mind you. We all make stupid decisions for short-term benefits because life is hard sometimes and some little tidbit can make us happy for awhile. However, if saving money is important to you, you have to change your entire mindset about shopping and the acquisition of possessions.

Cornerstones of Saving — Part 1

One of the reasons many people believe foreign folks come to Japan is to make big bucks. The general impression among Japanese folks is that we make a lot more money than they do. That's a half truth. If you're an underpaid Japanese office lady with a crappy job or a university student toiling at a convenience store or McDonald's for minimum wage, then that assertion is correct. If you do nearly any other full-time job which requires a university degree (and all us teaching types have to have degrees because we can't get a work visa without one), then it's probably not correct.

Most Japanese people calculate your wages based on what they pay to be taught by you, not on what you are paid. They assume you get a much bigger slice of the pie than you do. My referral agency charges students 4,900 yen an hour, but I get paid 2,800 yen an hour. I'm not complaining about the pay, mind you, but you can see how a student might think that I'm getting a great deal more than I am.

It isn't really how much you make but how you live which dictates how well you live here. One of my students is a nurse who makes less money than the average starting level foreign teacher salary of 250,000 yen. However, she also lives in a dorm provided by the hospital which only costs 22,000 yen a month and gets free meals at the hospital cafeteria. To put that in perspective, a super cheap accommodation in Tokyo for a teacher would be 50,000 yen a month for a shared place (gaijin house or shared apartment). If you want your own small place, you're likely paying 70,000 yen a month or more. In terms of food expenses saved, most people can't eat for much less than 30,000 yen a month unless they live on ramen. That means that the "perks" of my student's job as a nurse add to her salary to the tune of at least 70,000 yen each month.

My underpaid student who is a nurse told me that she spends 50,000 yen a month on clothes and she spends that much every month. She gives her old clothes away to friends and coworkers, but she has a constant revolving door on her wardrobe closet. She also goes to concerts and bars with friends at least once a week. Despite having a low income, she's certainly not hurting for discretionary funds.

After you live here for awhile, you understand that Japanese society is different from Western society in that jobs tend to take the average life circumstances of a person into account when deciding how much to pay. Most women who work as nurses are single and child-less because married women with children can't put in the sorts of hours required or be on call. Most office ladies are either married and working for spare cash or are still living with their parents so they aren't paying rent or shouldering the burden of supporting a family. Men who marry get raises compared to single men and men whose wives give birth to new people also often get raises.

Since life circumstances dictate how Japanese folks tend to be paid, but not how foreigners in usual foreigner jobs (teaching, translating, entertaining) get paid, it's hard to compare salaries. We are paid what the market will bear based on supply and demand. They are paid what their culture feels is appropriate based on their life circumstances in many cases (though certainly not all). Companies assume that you won't apply for a job which doesn't suit your needs and everyone "knows" that certain jobs are at a low pay level for students or housewives looking to support discretionary spending and no one expects adults who need to support a family to do them.

This is all my roundabout and tangent-heavy way of saying that how you live is more important than what you make in many cases when it comes to money. In Japan, the wages tend to reflect how they expect someone doing that job to be living. That's not to say there aren't people who simply do not have enough money to live comfortably, even in Japan where unemployment stats are low and it is currently a market (on the Japanese side, not the foreigner side at present) which favors job seekers over job providers.

Losing Business Through Bad Assumptions

When I'm offered a new student, I always ask the referral agency the same questions.

1. What is the student's level?
2. What particular type of lesson does the student want?
3. What are the student's goals?

The answers I always get are something along the lines of:

1. 'I think her level is ~, but I'm not sure. You'll find out soon enough.'
   
2. 'I don't know, you'll have to ask her/him in the lesson.'
   
3. 'I don't know, you'll have to ask her/him in the lesson.'

This is somewhat frustrating for me because not knowing these things makes it impossible to prepare to do what the student wants. In two recent cases, I did whatever "generic preparation" I could and didn't have any problems, but certainly didn't do as good a job as I'm capable of.

The bottom line is that the referral agency simply does not bother to ask these questions of the students who are considering signing up with them. While these questions are quite reasonable and the students would definitely not mind them, the agency doesn't bother. The reason they don't bother is that they buy into the commonly held notion that all Japanese people study English casually and are looking to have a casual "chat" with a foreign person who is being paid to be as nice as possible to them. This underlying mentality is one of the reasons teachers are viewed as unskilled and interchangeable and having an easy job where they just socialize for an hour for pay.

The truth is that there may indeed be many people who are looking for a chat. Another truth though is that not everyone is looking for that, particularly not in hard economic times where people are far less likely to invest their money in frivolous endeavors and much more likely to further themselves professionally. At present, I have 12 regular students and only 2 of them fall into the category of chatting to alleviate their boredom or for entertainment. All of the others have very specific goals in mind and actively want to advance their skills in specific areas.

In a previous post, I mentioned that I was asked to give a trial lesson to a 13-year-old girl and given very little information. The lesson ended up being one in which she needed instruction for a short-term goal (passing a test to enter a special school for those who have lived abroad for a long time and are now living in Japan). In particular, she needed to know a lot of vocabulary for the test and had a book she was studying from that needed to be used. Had the agency asked, I would have known this and could have considered my options before the lesson. As it was, I had to fly by the seat of my pants and it went okay, but I think it was very tiring for the girl and she complained that one of my requests (asking her to make sentences about her life using the words she was studying to help her remember the words since using new words aids greatly in recalling them) was too hard. With more time to plan, I could have varied the activities more and she may have enjoyed it more.

Today, I learned that she won't be taking my lessons. Color me totally unsurprised. The given excuse was my apartment is too far away, but I don't believe that. I'm not angry about losing the job as it was probably good for 10 lessons tops anyway given the fact that the test would be taken in November and she'd learn English at the school if she passed and not need it if she failed. I'm annoyed, however, that the referral agency doesn't ask a few basic questions to aid in my doing a professional job simply because they can't wrap their heads around the idea that anyone who teaches can be a professional.

Extrapolation

The weekend before last, the agency that refers students to me called and asked if I'd accept a 13-year old girl as a student. The girl had lived in the U.S. for awhile and (they're guessing) has relatively advanced English ability. The agency hadn't had any direct communication with the girl herself. They negotiated through her mother so they couldn't tell me much about her. They speculated that she was probably studying so that she could maintain the level of fluency she acquired while living in the U.S.

After about a week, the agency said that they'd confirmed a trial lesson with the girl and gave me her mother's name, e-mail address and phone number. They didn't, however, tell me the girl's first name so I asked them what it was. It's at this point that things get a bit strange. They told me that the mother wouldn't tell them the girl's name because she was too "cautious".

The trial lesson is scheduled for this afternoon and I'm not sure what to expect when the girl is supposed to show up at my front door. I have a suspicion that the mother will show up with her and may even ask to sit in with the lesson. If I were teaching in a classroom where the mother could unobtrusively observe from the back of a large room, I wouldn't care about this, but that isn't the case. I teach in a 9' x 9' room which is closed off from other rooms to air condition it more efficiently. There is no "unobtrusive" way for anyone to observe.

Of course, I could be wrong about the mother horning in. I have quite the tendency to panic and extrapolate the worst in any given situation. I'm one of those people who thinks I'm going to prick a finger, get an infection, be given drugs that damage my other limbs and end up a quadruple amputee. It's a tendency I've been endeavoring to reign in for years now with some success. In odd or very uncertain situations, however, I tend to gravitate back to this type of self-defeating tendency.

I know these situations are supposed to be growth experiences and I try to see them in that light, but sometimes it's difficult. In 98% of situations where I play out the worst outcome in my imagination, things turn out to be just fine. In one particular case in my past though, it was as bad as the worst I imagined and I think that still haunts me. That was a situation which I talked about in my former blog where I feared refusing to work on my day off might get me fired, and it very nearly did.

Ultimately, this tendency is part of a defense mechanism which I'm sure I developed as a child growing up in a family with a lot of emotional instability from a depressed and neurotic mother and an alcoholic father. If you can predict the worst possible outcome at the beginning of a situation, you can defend or protect yourself. Though such behavior served me well as a kid in a family with problems, it no longer serves me in most cases and tends to cloud my judgment. It's like an old battered shield that I still raise in times of uncertainty even though I no longer live in the heat of a battle.

Business Rules or the Golden Rule?

One of my student called 30 minutes before her scheduled lesson time and canceled her lesson yesterday. According to the rules of the referral agency that collects fees from students, I'm allowed to charge any student for any lesson canceled on the same day, though they ask that the teacher make allowances if there is a natural disaster like a typhoon or earthquake that prevents a student from making it to the lesson.

In the past, I was lauded by both a student and the agency for having the decency to allow a student whose sister died not to pay for a late cancellation. I guess they expect teachers to be utterly mercenary, but I think it'd be pretty awful to rub a few grains of salt in an emotional wound by charging for a canceled lesson due to a family tragedy.

I am presented with a little bit of a quandary in terms of deciding to charge my student or not. As the phone was ringing, I was hearing thunder loudly roll outside, but it never rained here. She said that she canceled because it was raining where she was and the trains weren't running. That means that she couldn't get to my apartment unless she sought an alternate form of transport like a taxi (if she was telling the truth, and I'm inclined to believe she was).

While her "excuse" for canceling is quite reasonable, I've gotten burned in the past for acting in accord with my ethics (that is, treating people as I'd like to be treated) rather than in line with what business guidelines allow. I'm guessing I'll come down on the side of not charging her because, if I were in her shoes, that's a courtesy I'd appreciate being extended to me. I just have to shush the nagging voice which says I'll be taken advantage of later if I take the high road.

Kind of Down

For the last two and a half months, I've done nothing but complain to my CH, my sister, and my pal the wombat stuffer about how hard I've been working. I kept saying how great a relief it was going to be to finally have some free time. Well, now, I've got that free time and I'm feeling a bit depressed.

It's been so long since I've had the time to do things I want to do that I've forgotten what those things might be. I'm forced to consider what I want to do and find myself coming up rather empty and feeling as if I'm lacking in direction. In fact, I've been having one of those pesky first world citizen problems where I find myself questioning where my life is going and what I'm doing with it. As near as I can recall, the last time I had a sizable chunk of free time, I read Wil Wheaton's "Just a Geek" in two days (a good read written by someone who realizes how he is now self-aware and can admit he wasn't when he was quite famous and successful). I'm pretty sure that my goal isn't to read more, however.

After a bit of hard thinking, I remembered that my goal when I quit my full-time job was to "get healthy" both mentally and physically. I'd say the mental part is coming along pretty well. Most of the trauma of working with an erratic company president whose whim-based management style infused life with tension and a distinct feeling of insecurity has worn off by now. The physical part is coming along much more slowly, though I can now do 30 minutes on a treadmill if I can lean on the handles and my disaster area of a back doesn't have to make too great of an effort to keep me vertical.

At any rate, I'll admit something and you can judge me as you will. I don't have any career goals. I used to have some, mind you, but I don't anymore. I once wanted to be a counselor or therapist, possibly even a psychologist. I planned to work for awhile and then go to graduate school. I even applied to and was accepted into two schools (one was Ohio State University and I can't remember the other). After I worked with really crazy people for a few years and saw that the answer is almost always pharmacological rather than through any sort of talk or guidance, that notion withered away. I didn't want to go to medical school nor did I want to simply be the person whose task it was to evaluate whether or not someone should be taking psychotropic medication or not.

The truth is that most people will opt for a handful of pills rather than do the hard work of changing their behavior and that's assuming that they even possess the capacity to change. Many people who are in the mental health care system are pretty far gone. Those who aren't in the system rarely seek help because it's expensive and their insurance won't pay if they're not so far gone that they are endangering themselves or others, or they simply think psychology is a crock and can't do anything for them that they can't choose to do for themselves. My experiences in the real world of dealing with mental health left me disillusioned and a little bit afraid. Being a woman and working with disturbed people is a dangerous business.

After coming to Japan, I found that I was really interested in desktop publishing and learned all about the minutiae of working in print media. That would have continued to have been a goal, but, as I'm sure many have noticed, print media is a wilting industry. Even before print media sales started dropping like a stone, the demand for people who knew their way around Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop was dropping off as everyone with a nephew who could use Microsoft Publisher felt a monkey could do layout so they didn't want to pay much for higher quality work.

Also, while I enjoyed such work, there were always serious creative limits involved. Every time I did a project, people who had nothing to do with the actual work of doing a layout had to have their fingers in the pie of how the creative aspects were carried out. From font choices to graphic styles, someone who did nothing more than lean back in a chair and make frivolous choices based on aesthetic whims would override a cohesive design plan such that the end result was a compromised mess of too many (and clashing) fonts and absurd mixtures of illustration styles. In the end, books always ended up a crazy quilt of poorly mixed elements because various people who were higher on the totem pole then me insisted certain things be their way. Any talk of balance, design grids and use of aesthetic white space flew out the window in favor of cramming as much as possible onto the fewest pages and catering to the pet font and picture choices of the higher ups. Some of the books I was involved in making turned out so poorly that I'd be embarrassed to offer them as samples of my work.

Once again, the reality of the work quashed the dream. Any fulfillment I might get from these types of work was seriously undermined by the environment in which the work was done. After quitting my office job, I realized that most of the positive points connected to any career goal is going to be redirected by reality. The only true way to find fulfillment is to do it outside of the framework of pay. Once it becomes a job, someone else has a say in what you do. This applies even if you are your own boss since the customer's whims and sales figures will then dictate what you should and shouldn't do. Once money is involved, you're someone else's bitch.

That is not to say that I think this is a terrible situation or that I'm bummed out that my dreams have gone unfulfilled. In both cases, I think that the goals were met and then I moved on. Mainly, I think I've just come to realize that the goal is less important than what I walk away with from the experience. Knowing this, however, has made it hard to be overly ambitious or fix a hard target on a future path. For now, I'm pretty satisfied doing what I do teaching and writing. It's not lucrative and it may not have a lot of glamor attached to it, but I do learn and grow and use my skill and wits. It's challenging and rewarding.

I think the reason I'm a bit down now though is that the process and pace of just being a better person and expanding my knowledge and experience through interacting with others and doing modest creative work feels "small." It's also rather hard to measure progress when the goal is "be better than you were in every way." The empty time that I have now makes me ache a bit for a bigger boat to hook my anchor onto than simply "being better." However, part of what I want to be mentally is the sort of person who is just OK with being the way that I am now rather than the type of person who has to have some grandiose life plan or big goal that I can announce to the world.

The Customer Is Always Right

When I first started teaching, I thought all my students were nice, friendly people who were interested in having conversations with foreign folks and, sometimes, interested in improving their English skills. That's right, gaining better English skills is pretty much second to a paid social experience with a foreigner in many cases. Those of us who grew up in cultures that are cultural melting pots find it a little hard to fathom at times, but there is a lot of appeal for the Japanese in such opportunities. For many of them, it is their only chance to experience people from a different ethnic or cultural background on a regular basis.

Personally, I think it's pretty cool that they value this enough to pay for it, but you can be lulled into a false sense of feeling that students are your friends or at least want to be your friends if only you'd let them contact you outside of the confines of the classroom. A lot of teachers make a mistake when they first arrive in forgetting that their students are paying customers and, if anything goes amiss, this is going to be the first and foremost consideration on the part of the student. One of the biggest reasons not to socialize outside of class with students is that you can upset them unintentionally and they have the power to mess with your job if they choose to do so. That is not to say that many of them do or that many of them have problems with teachers. I only say that there is a risk.

This fact is something that I've never had to deal with directly as I have rarely socialized with students outside of class. I have, however, dealt with a similar situation more indirectly through my correspondence-based work both in the office and from home as a freelance worker. One of my more recent experiences brought the fact to mind once again that the student is a customer and not a friend nor even a friendly passing acquaintance.

Over the past two months, I've been doing copious numbers of calls in a 6-part telephone lesson course. During the course, a few students inevitably forget to call and then they have to do a make-up lesson one week after the last scheduled call. Last weekend, seventeen of them were scheduled to call from 4:30-6:45 pm in their last chance to finish. Two of them called at a blatantly incorrect time - 1:20 and 1:25. There was no doubt that they knew they were calling at the wrong time and might have been hoping to get the call over with so they could go out and enjoy their Saturday afternoon without having to bother to call me later. One of those two students was scheduled to call at 6:30 and never called back despite my reminding him of the correct time when he called earlier.

The next work day, I got an e-mail from one of the office workers at the company arranging things and they said the student called the office and said that he tried to call and I never answered the phone. The student doesn't know that I'm sitting in my own apartment taking calls. He believes I'm in an office and his lie might hold some credibility if I'm perhaps dashing out of the office to leave early and get home or if I could be distracted by other office work. It makes no sense whatsoever to claim I sat in my own home and let the phone ring and ring pointlessly, particularly when I don't get paid in full for calls that aren't completed. These facts are things he was not aware of when he lied.

Despite the fact that the office knows full well the circumstances of my work, they still approach me as if there is some mystery behind what has happened. They know the student has lied, but they treat the situation as if there might be some other explanation which lays responsibility at my feet. This is because the student is a customer and I'm an employee.

On this occasion, the fact that the student was lying was crystal clear. In the past, when I was working in the office, such lies were not so easily detected. We sat in cubicles and our phones had a switch that allowed us to turn them off. When off, the phone did not ring on our end and rang continuously for the caller on the other end. When the foreign staff worked in the office and sat at our desks and were therefore paid regardless of how many times we received calls, any time a student claimed they called and the phone was not answered was seen as a teacher turning off the phone at an inappropriate time and just slacking off. My home phone, of course, has no "off" switch.

At one point when I was working full-time in the office, a student who lied about when he called resulted in a wholesale change of our work schedule. We took calls between 5:00 and 7:00 pm and the last call was to be completed by 7:00 pm. We could turn the phone off and go home at 7:00 if the students did not call, but had to stay and complete a (5-minute) call if a student called right at the end at 6:59. All it took was for one person to claim that he called at 6:58 and there was no answer for the president to get apoplectic and state that we would henceforth have to leave the phones on until 7:05 and that our workday would now run from 11:05 to 7:05 (instead of 11:00-7:00) to reduce the chance that we wouldn't turn off the phones prematurely and shut out a student.

The thing that always angered me about these lies is that I was courteous, friendly, and kind to these students throughout multiple phone sessions and they had to have known that the lies they told would make me appear to be less than diligent. They either can reasonably conclude that they will get the teacher in trouble or so utterly self-involved that they don't give a thought to the consequences of accusing an employee of shirking her duty. The selfishness of such lies in the face of the kind treatment they were getting was very disheartening. There are no negative repercussions for the student aside from embarrassment at forgetting and rescheduling the call and quite potentially bad ones for the teacher who appears negligent.

So, it was a good reminder to me that students are customers, no matter how good your rapport is with them or how friendly they are when they speak to you. If it serves their interests, they will do whatever they are inclined to do at your expense. I'm pleased to say that this never happened to me in face-to-face teaching though I did witness it happen to a few other people. Let's just say that I won't be shocked if something ever does happen with one of my in the flesh students and that I will never make the mistake of viewing them as anything but customers.

A Secret

I've got a secret that I'll let you all in on. When I first started blogging, I had a tiny little fantasy in the back of my mind that some publishing entity would stumble across my exceptionally well-written and interesting blog and offer to pay me for my writing. Before that statement points to the notion that I have a big head or think a lot of myself, please let me say that my tongue is in my cheek when I say "exceptionally" and "interesting". I will add, however, that it is not really in cheek when I say "well-written."

During all of my adult life, I've been told that I write quite well. In college, being able to write made success far easier for me than for others as I could write essays and papers without the mental equivalent of chipping a nail. What is more, writing has never been a struggle for me. The words roll out with ease. In fact, I think many people wish I could simply get them to shut up as I go on and on at times.

In large part, I attribute the ease with which I write to two things. First, I read copious numbers of books when I was a child and young adult. This slowly sets up an almost unconscious awareness of patterns in stories and a completely conscious recognition of the joy of having an expansive vocabulary. While a lot of people deride the use of "university words" or "$20 words", I think that having a deeper and broader vocabulary to draw from allows you to express ideas more precisely and colorfully with the right word choice. If your audience can't go to dictionary.com and look it up, maybe they're not the right readers for you.

The second thing which almost certainly contributed to my writing was having a huge number of pen pals from age 12 to 17. I wrote all the time from a very young age to a captive and receptive audience. All of that practice may not have made me perfect, but I'm sure it helped build a smooth synaptic highway for my mind to speed along when it came to expressing myself on paper (or on screen).

At any rate, I'm sure that being "discovered" via your blog isn't a little dream that is uncommon among those who believe they have something special to offer. In fact, a lot of ambitious sorts take matters into their own hands and create blogs that pay for themselves through advertisements rather than wait for someone to come along and recognize their brilliance and give them money. I wish I were so ambitious, but that requires more marketing effort and and focus on a niche for the likes of me.

Fortunately, fate was kind to me and my former blog did attract the attention of a print publication based in and about Tokyo. They asked me to write for them regularly and, yes, they pay me for my pieces. Since I don't want my real name connected clearly to this blog, I won't offer the name of the publication, but I will say that it's in English and has been around for a very long time. I'll also say that it's not one of the freebie magazines that you can pick up and you can buy a subscription to this publication through Amazon. It's the sort of thing you'll almost always find in places like Kinokuniya book store.

It's not that big a deal really. It's not like I'm writing for the New York Times or something, but it's nice that sometimes some little dreams do come true.