Ryan
Chasing greatness

I haven’t written in a while.  Mostly because there hasn’t really been a whole lot to say.

Actually that is only half true.

Greg left MES and us on Thursday, April  30th.  If anyone who reads this has ever known someone that has been so amazingly brilliant, not only at their job, but also in life, then you know how hard it is to say, “Good bye.”  I’ll be the first to admit that I never anticipated being a teacher.  I knew teaching English in Japan was my best ticket to live in Japan and see down the side streets and darker ally’s that tourists’ gazes cannot reach.  I became a teacher to live that dream, and I have  succeeded.

I never would have expected to find a role-model here.  He was Greg.

You could get into the entire destiny debate.  Argue if people are born for a task or not.  Greg is an artist an born teacher.  Anyone who meets him would unhesitatingly say so.  However, he returned to Vietnam to be with his family and new daughter.  I can only wish him the best.

I can only look back on the lessons I have learned and the great memories I have had.

All of that being said, it is, “Golden Week.”  This is the public holiday that all of Japan has.  Of course travel is marked up outrageously because of that very reason.  We have opted to stay in and pack.  We have learned the lesson of our predecessors, which is, “Don’t wait until the last minute to pack up.”

I have already prepared a box to send home with clothes, a sleeping bag, and a Nintendo 64 with 8 games an 4 controllers.  Yes, the nerd exists, and anyone who visits our life-changing place in the states can sample video games they remember, in Japanese.

Megan is taking on this task of cleaning and packing with absolute dedication.  As long as a new episode of Desperate Housewives isn’t buffering.  I, myself, have other goals.  First, to finish my stupid Zombie video game.  As it stands, I have a city generator.  My second goal is to finish, “The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass.”  If I don’t finish it, I’ll forget it.  Anyone who plays RPGs will know how much of a pain in the ass that is.

Anyway, I haven’t written because I didn’t know what to write about Greg leaving.  I also didn’t know what to write about our leaving.  I still don’t.  

All I can say is that he will be missed.  Forever.  Really.

I couldn’t remember what I wanted to blog about the past few days.  I knew I wanted too, but I couldn’t remember what about.  I do remember now, and wish I hadn’t written these three sentences in buildup.

So on Wednesday I was having of laughter because all of my attention was drawn away from the children learning, and instead drawn to how much they erase.  Sure they’re writing in a foreign language, sure they can’t spell, blah blah blah.

I timed them.  In a class of 9, the stopwatch never made it past 10 seconds before an eraser was grabbed and a hushed whisper of, “Machigaita,” was heard (“Oops”).  I was tickled by this and also tore the Japanese Teacher away from teaching as well to be mystified by the children’s erasing regularities.

See, that barely registers on the scale of interesting.

Lets lower the expectations further.

Today I was on a weird coffee high.  For those of you who don’t know, I generally avoid caffeine.  I do this because I suck at sleeping.  Unfortunately avoiding caffeine makes me more prone to it when I do take it in.

When you have to teach 7 classes that are 15 minutes a piece and involve dancing and singing, you need caffeine.  Trust me.

So anyway, I was a bit retarded on the juice and did ridiculous stuff all day.

I told the children to translate sentences like, “I must eat Mt. Fuji,” or, “I must lick a wall,” or, “I must drink a jacket.”  I did this because I couldn’t be normal.  The children were either completely freaked out in a good way, or freaked out in a bad way.  Whichever the case was, I don’t think they’ll forget the grammar.

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I had my private lesson today for the first time in almost a month.  I teach one of Megan’s student’s fathers.  He is a really cool guy.  Hard to believe he is Japanese actually.

He has his own company that specializes in custom motorcycle seats.  That is a pretty awesome job.  They do a lot of work to get their name out there by doing things like contributing to extreme around the world races and such as well.

Today we talked about love hotels.  He gave me some great information about how things can be there.  Things like there will always be a minibar with drinks and sometimes with sex toys.  During holidays when women tend to dress up in Kimonos they have “Kimono service.”  Essentially a special staff member will come up and help they young lady get tied up into her Kimono again because it is a 2 person job.

Crazy.

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Today I have finished my first releasable version of my Login Tracker application for Mac OSX users.

It still needs more work, but it is reasonably secure and is a good start on a tool that I think a lot of people can benefit from. If you don’t remember what this is about. This is a tool that will keep track of your user names and passwords for you.

If you are like me, you are drowning in them. Now you don’t have to.

So I don’t really have a whole lot to report in this entry.  I’ll just write some stuff thats going on.

First off, my dear friend Courtney is writing quite a lot about how she misses Japan.  That makes me feel like we were able to help her and Jason have a better trip.

Also, a lot of the differences between Japanese and Americans that I have written about somewhat bitterly have mostly faded away.  Sure, the facts of the matter haven’t changed, but you learn to just accept it or ignore it and go on with your life.  When that happens, the country opens up and becomes a pretty neat place.

This morning I wrote  a new template for our lessons and presented it to the boss and some others.  I didn’t make the new template to insinuate that things are bad, and I don’t think that is how it was received, but it could certainly be taken that way.  I don’t know how I would feel if I had been doing a job for 15 years and then someone shows up with 6 months of experience and proposes a completely different way of doing things.

Still, this is one of the first jobs I have had near complete autonomy in.  That is a great thing.  It allows you to put yourself in the situation where you can have an honest moment to take pride in the good work you have done, and fix the gross failures along the way.  There is nobody looking over my shoulder except me, and that pushes me harder.  That is what drives me to make new things.

In other things I have started reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne.  I’m about half way through and nothing has happened.  Good stuff.

I have almost finished my Login Tracker program that will securely store your user names and passwords.  I have come to find out that when you wish to authenticate a user in MacOS you are encouraged to use C instead of their own Objective-C due to the fact that Objective-C is full of security holes.  I’m really pleased that Apple admits it, but I’d like them to get on the ball and handle that.

I’ve also been seriously thinking about my next project.  A zombie game.  Completely done by procedural generation.  My biggest obstacles so far is that it is a huge undertaking, and I lack confidence that I can produce a game that will actually be fun and worth the effort.  I have a million ideas, but are the ideas of high enough quality to warrant the work?

I guess we’ll see.  I was told the biggest thing game companies look for when they hire is that they want to see that you have moved from a dreamer to a doer.  Thats he goal.