Hard Times and the New Year

Just a quick post to let you all know I am alive.

December was a very rough month for me physically and emotionally. Let's see, I...

1) fell down the stairs of my apartment
2) got food poisoning probaby from an okonomiyaki street vendor whereupon I had to go to the hospital to get an IV and blood taken
3) got a really bad cold on Christmas Eve that lasted so long that I...
4) missed my snowboarding trip to Nagano whereupon the emotional stress of first christmas away from home, lack of sleep, a mixture of cold/sinus medications, and overall self-pity probably...
5) gave me an arrhythmia at 2 in the morning where of course, I freaked out, stayed up all night in fear that I was about to die and...
6) went to a clinic of internal medicine for an EKG first thing in the morning and rested in bed all day but...
7) experienced such severe homesickness and lonliness that I called Kiyomi and...
8) asked to stay at her place until I...
9) celebrated a restful New Years at the home of my friend's cousins in Hamamatsu.

After such a horrid "vacation", surely you, faithful reader, can understand why I am never spending Christmas/New Years in Japan again. I am coming home next year.

Now that I am back at work, things have been looking brighter. My chorus club students invited me for a Nabe Party during lunchtime and I have enjoyed just being around people again... even if I can't necessarily talk with the teachers, at least I am not alone.

The hard times are when I leave school. Sunset is about 4:45pm which makes me FEEL like I should go home. But that would be insane. So I try to give myself something to do but there isn't much to do other than go to a bookstore, the stuffy public library, or go shopping with the intention of window-shopping which never turns out that way and I spend money that I wasn't planning on spending. I'm not hurting for money, not at all, but that doesn't mean I should spend it just because I have it.

Thankfully, this weekend is one of those "National Holiday" weekends so I will be spending it with the Hidakas and my friend, Sonja. This holiday is "Coming of Age Day" which in Japan is 20. Hopefully I will have the chance to post pictures of New Years, the Nabe Party, and this second Kamakura trip when I get back.

One request: Please pray for me to make it until I get home in the spring for my much-needed vacation.