Right, it's that time again. let's start with straightforward things, then move into things that require more reasoning. number 1 straightforward thing - theme. i don't remember when exactly i thought of it, but my brain suggests april or earlier. my theme for this year is just one word: "healing". it's quite broad, and that's because it does refer to various aspects of my life. including the physical, obviously. i lost about 23kg from when i last measured my weight in singapore, to my most recent measurement a few days ago. that's something i'm incredibly proud of.

mentally, i feel like i'm in a much better place than i was back in singapore. my first major setback in the cruel "real world" in mid-2019 put me into a slump that lasted for more than a year. of course, that wasn't the only reason. living under the same roof with someone that i would rather not associate with was also quite a big stressor. not to mention the living conditions in singapore, which were bad enough already due to the overcrowding, and that were made worse by all the constantly-changing COVID regulations. interestingly, i have not lost my temper at all in japan. sure, i've been irritated, annoyed, even frustrated, but i've never flown off the handle at anyone or anything here. while i feel well enough mentally, i also admit that my regained mental strength is still untested - i have to be placed back into a job that requires more from me to truly see how i've recovered. i'll talk more regarding that tomorrow.

let's take stock of the present. things went well during my first year in japan! i get along well with the kids i'm teaching, i have good rapport with my colleagues, and the teachers in school see me as an asset. my predecessor said that the average stress level in this job was 3/10 to him. i feel similarly, though i might go as low as 2. most of the stress is self-inflicted. if i were to just go in and teach, without doing anything extra unless the teachers asked, i might even rate the stress level as 1. but that is also my biggest gripe with my current situation - that i'm not being utilized fully. not just because i'm not using my scientific knowledge, but even for teaching english, i am more often than not used as a glorified tape recorder. but hey - i knew that it was a possibility since many JETs report the same treatment, and my predecessor did tell me to expect it to some degree.

while i wouldn't say that i'm living my best life in japan, i would say that i'm living a good, happy life. there have been multiple avenues for growth; some necessary - speaking japanese every day, settling my own living activities (food, money, laundry, schedule, car maintenance), acclimatizing to living in a temperate climate; some optional - learning to cycle, attempting some new recipes, being present for my students beyond working hours. i'm happy that i chose to step up to most of the challenges that came my way. 

i'm not sure whether this should go here or in tomorrow's post, but i also wanted to talk about how my thoughts have changed this past year. initially, i only planned on staying for 2 years, maybe 3 at most. now, that's changed to wanting to see the current primary 6 kids graduate secondary school. maths time! they'll graduate primary 6 in march 2022. 3 years of secondary school means they'll graduate in march 2025, at which time i'd have been here for 4.5 years - or almost my full possible JET term! i'll also be 36 going on 37 by then. of course, there are intermediate solutions to explore, like finding a job elsewhere and coming back to attend their graduation ceremony...but that's for future me to figure out. the one thought i want to leave here for future reference is that however long i stay, i had better be able to justify the time and opportunity cost to myself.

on a larger scale, i wonder if i could make japan my permanent home. a year ago, i firmly said no to the thought of giving up singapore citizenship in favour of japan citizenship. now, i'm more open to the idea. not saying that i'm definitely going to do it, but it's something that i am willing to think about in the future. of course, i know that becoming a japanese citizen is not going to be easy for a number of reasons, but thinking about it now is still very premature. i am also less certain that i want to live in singapore again. previously, it was the only lifestyle i knew, so it was the only logical choice. but now, knowing that i can thrive in another country, it's cause for me to reevaluate certain core beliefs. as i've started telling people who ask me if i'm homesick, the thing i miss most about singapore right now is the food. i can reach everyone who matters online, but taste-a-vision still hasn't been invented yet.

adding on to that, there hasn't been much good news coming out of singapore. i am aware that it could be the echo chamber effect, because i tend to get my news from sources that aren't exactly pro-establishment. regardless of the news source, there's no denying that the government dropped the ball several times in the COVID effort. all the underlying problems that were swept under the rug got exposed when COVID pulled the rug out from under their feet. immigration policies and decision-making procedures were two major things that came into question. i'm more convinced now that had i taken the option to defer JET by one year, i'd be in a much worse place than the one i'm currently in.

chemical engineer cousin said that she celebrated several big events this year with steak dinners. by pure coincidence, i planned for a steak dinner tonight! i'm not really celebrating anything, though. maybe i'll take it to be for celebrating a good year. i did a reverse-seared steak with creamed vegetables (corn, spinach, broccoli) and accompanied by store-bought horseradish sauce. i accidentally bought a plant-derived cream, in which i detected a hint of coconut. not sure if i like it in this application. the steak was great though! easily the best steak i've made without a water circulator. the one modification i'd make is to dry it out for less time in the fridge - the crust turned out a little too stringy. no pictures of the final dish, unfortunately, because while it tastes good, my plating skills leave much to be desired. in fact, in a bid to do fewer dishes, i actually plated it in a lunchbox, and i'm eating out of that. it'll also be easier to store leftovers...not that i think there'll be any! i do have a picture of the steak itself though, before final slicing and assembly. do excuse the mess, i still have more cleaning to do around my kitchen area.

so, that's my year. easily one of the top 5 years i've had. i still don't believe that i'm in japan some days when i wake up. it's also only one out of a potential 4 to 5 (or more!) years that i'll spend here. i'm hopeful that subsequent years will be equally, if not more, rewarding.

-random thought of the day: Happy and content. Great feelings to end the year on!-

Clearly, i underestimated how much time i'd need to do the exercises to determine my parachute colour! i suppose the length of the book (461 pages) should have clued me in. so that's going to evolve into a longer-term project, like i'll do bits and pieces when i have downtime, and have a complete picture by the time JET is over. i suppose doing it too early isn't good either, because who knows how japan will affect my wants and expectations over the next few years. at a preliminary skim-through, i picked up a couple of important tips - to clearly ask for the job at the end of the interview, and to gauge how favourably an interview's going by the flow of questions. also, to set an odd duration for the interview. the author recommended 19 minutes, but personally i think i'd try 22 or 23.

the past few days have been relaxing, as a break should be. just have some quality of life issues with the cold (both the sickness and the weather), but i appear to be on the mend because there was less phlegm today compared to yesterday. i also got some cleaning done, but i need to vacuum a little bit more and sort through the various documents and mail that have accumulated over the past year. most are destined for the bin, which will help to reduce the feeling of clutter around the place. i'm also thinking of throwing out some of the clothes that i brought from singapore, because there are items that i have literally never worn. perhaps at a later stage. i'll give them one last chance this coming summer.

after more digging for info, i don't think that i'll do the tax-relief purchases any more. first of all, the items are grossly overpriced. like say, for sea urchin. the special site that sells products eligible for tax relief lists a 100g box for about 10000 yen. that's about SGD1.20 per gram. rakuten, on the other hand, lists a pack of two 100g boxes for about 5000 yen, so we're looking at a fourfold difference in price per gram between the two sources. the auntie in me can't justify paying the inflated price in the first case. to make things worse, the tax relief comes as a deduction from taxable income, which means that i actually only save 10% of the amount i spend, less 2000 yen for some reason. so spending about 30000 yen (the maximum claimable amount for my income) actually means that i only pay [(30000-2000)X10%] = 2800 yen less in tax. it wouldn't be that bad if the products i got in return were worth the 27200 yen difference, but as reason 1 shows, they clearly are not.

to be fair, this scheme isn't meant to help people evade tax or anything like that. it's a way for people to support local industry/businesses, with the tax savings and items received being more of tokens of appreciation than actual products. it's good for me to pass on this because i spend less overall. initially, i wanted to aim for the highest tier of the aeon credit card campaign (spend minimum 100000 yen to get 10000 points), but i think that i'll settle for the middle tier (spend minimum 50000 yen to get 5000 points). considering i have the gopro purchase scheduled for january, it seems very possible to make the 10 february campaign deadline. i just hope the promotion will still be running, and that the camera will still be in stock in time for me to buy it!

by the way, i should clarify that this isn't the year-end post. i'm still trying to figure out how i want to order it, and what i should cover vs. what i can leave for another time. that should be up before the day is over, as it always is. have to juggle that with dinner prep, where i'll be trying to reverse-sear a steak. wasn't the saying "eat like a pauper on new year's eve, eat like a king on new year's day"? or was that dinner and breakfast? i might have gotten that mixed up. it's all just superstition, anyway.

-random thought of the day: Need to preheat the oven!-

My long break was too good an opportunity for uncle murphy to pass up. i'm down with a cold, which means i'm coughing up grey phlegm in the mornings. ok, it may not actually be grey, but it sure appears that way under my orange toilet light. i started feeling symptoms on sunday night, probably, which means today is day 3. hopefully it gets better within the week. but with the cold weather (pun intended) now, i don't know. i'm grateful that (1) it's not the debilitating man-flu, and (2) i can't recall the last time i was sick, apart from the vaccine side-effects. rural life must be agreeing with me. or maybe it's so rural that even the germs are like, "nah, forget it. there's nothing to see there".

close to exam season, the kids in one of my schools will be made to come up with a daily schedule. things like "morning - school. 5pm - reach home, 5:15 - shower, 5:30 - dinner..."; basically accounting for entire days' worth of their time. i remember my dad tried to get me and my siblings to do that in secondary school. it failed terribly, for me at least. while i do appreciate the value of a precise, well-planned itinerary, i'd much rather do it for special events, like a holiday, not everyday life. that's why my regular planning focuses more on events and deadlines, instead of a detailed breakdown of every hour and minute. with that in mind, here's my more detailed plan for the next 2 weeks.

29 dec (today) - laundry, buy tax-relief stuff

30 dec - parachute, drop by supermarket, house cleaning

31 dec - regular rubbish disposal, year-end post

01 jan - new year's post, attempt french toast

02 jan - bike maintenance, grocery run (maybe)

03 jan - half day work (morning), update bank book, finances

04 jan - special rubbish disposal (paper things), raid release day

05 jan - 

06 jan - special rubbish disposal (bottles, cans, styrofoam trays)

07 jan - full day work, new year's party

08 jan - 

09 jan - 

10 jan - buy gopro and memory card (aeon double points day)

11 jan - term 3 starts

not the most taxing of schedules, which is good because this should be a time of relaxation. i'll probably be slower (both in mind and body) thanks to the cold, so having a few empty days for buffer is a nice safeguard.

for now, i'm off to browse the tax-relief items (i may blog about the entire scheme separately) and to take a nice warm shower. thinking of getting some sea urchin and tuna. then again, the 2kg increase in my weight over the past month is giving me pause. i need to reevaluate my food choices.

-random thought of the day: Less bread!-

School's out! we're entering that lazy year-end period where there isn't much to do and everyone's feeling festive/disinclined to work. well, i am, at any rate. i think my colleagues still have deadlines to rush and next january's events to prep for. as mentioned earlier, i'm only working 2 days in the period from 25 december to 11 january (2 out of 11 working days), so there's plenty of time to relax and refresh myself for the next year. just to remind myself, i'm working half days (mornings) on 28 december and 03 january, as well as a full day on 07 january. it would be bad to show up on a rest day, or worse, to not show up on a work day!

let's quickly recount what's been going on since the last post, which was...2 weeks ago? thereabouts. i had a performance review with my new supervisor (supervisor 2) and my vice-superintendent. my current (probably outgoing) supervisor (supervisor 1) was conspicuously absent. i think they're trying to get me used to not having her presence around. anyway, i thought i would only be assessed by the board of education, but it turns out each school also had to submit feedback for me. makes sense, now that i think about it. i was rated in several aspects from 1 (worst) to 4 (best). i didn't see the actual ratings, but my vice-superintendent told me that the majority were 3s and 4s. i was caught a little off-guard at the time, and didn't ask what exactly the 3s were so i could improve. later, supervisor 1 told me that the majority were 4s, and that there were like only a couple of 3s. i guess that means i'm doing something right!

quick vent about supervisor 2. she's nice enough, and probably still finding her feet in the office since she's a new hire this financial year. but unlike supervisor 1, who i feel totally comfortable with, there's a bit of distance with supervisor 2. it doesn't help that her idea of explaining things to me is to take the relevant document, throw it into google translate, then print the translated version out and ask me to read it. if that's all it took, i'd be a master at japanese! it also doesn't work perfectly for everything. example: i was supposed to write a report about the workshops i attended earlier this month. i was told that it was ok to write it in english, and that supervisor 2 would translate it into japanese for the higher-ups' understanding. wouldn't you know it - she did the google translate thing. unfortunately, google translate is quite bad at capturing nuances. one of the sentences i wrote in the report was "we had our temperatures taken". now, the implication that human readers would immediately pick up on is that the word "temperatures" here refers to body temperatures. google translate chose 気温 instead. while it does mean "temperature", it refers specifically to ambient temperature (literal translation - "temperature of the air"). supervisor 2 didn't catch that. worse, my superintendent did. so i got called into his office for a chat about the japanese report that "i wrote". i was as equally shocked as he was about the error, because it was the first time i was seeing the japanese version! side note: i was mildly offended that my superintendent thought i wouldn't know the difference between 気温 and 体温. i may not be strong at japanese, but i do know the meanings of simple kanji, especially since these 2 terms exist in chinese as well! so yes, that didn't help my impression of supervisor 2 at all. i don't think supervisor 1 trained her badly, considering how good a supervisor she's been to me and how on top of JET-related things she is, so there probably is a break in the processing somewhere. well...it's good for my learning, since it means i have to be more independent and get a better grasp of japanese to prevent any similar events from happening in the future. i just pray that my eventual successor will be somewhat decent in japanese (for their own sake) if supervisor 2 remains as the JET supervisor after i'm gone.

supervisor 1 invited me to her house for a christmas-ish get-together on friday night. maybe she thought it would be better for me to spend christmas eve with some company. considering all the JETs under her care before me were american, i can see why she might think so. but even though i don't see christmas as a big holiday where i need to be surrounded by people, i was still grateful for the invitation. i also finally got to meet her husband, who works in the city. he's really friendly (and looks really good too!). i'm happy that her family seems to like me well enough, probably helped by the fact that her usually-shy son sticks to me like anything. her dad told me to go over to their house anytime. although he was half-drunk when he said that, i don't doubt his sincerity. just that i'll probably use that card very very sparingly, or if i have an emergency that requires it.

in the upcoming 2 weeks, there are quite a few things i need to do. in no particular order, they include:

- washing the car

- buying tax-relief things

- buying the gopro

- doing my finances

- chores (cleaning, laundry, throwing rubbish out)

- reading about my parachute colour

- writing year-end and new year posts

with all the buying i'm planning to do, i suppose it's good that rakuten increased my credit limit to 500 000 yen. i just went to check, my bank account is set up with aeon for automatic bill payments, and there's a spend X amount to receive bonus points campaign going on now. i'll come up with a more detailed schedule tomorrow or the day after for my long break, but for now, it's off to the city (again) to use my 5% off discount coupons that the supermarket gave out for christmas.

-random thought of the day: It's getting even colder!-

As expected, things happened and blogging took a backseat for a while. but i figure that i should update, so that future posts don't become overly long. let's do the 10 sentences per point thing for conciseness.

the business trip was a good experience. got to meet up with other JETs and JTEs. i am so grateful that i don't face most of the problems mentioned, like not getting along with other staff, and various forms of abuse. it was also a nice reminder of what city life is like. i think that i could tolerate living in kochi city, maybe with a little less traffic and more shops open. somewhat embarrassing confession: i was kind of...jealous? when a japanese teacher that we didn't know praised an american (caucasian-looking) JET for speaking japanese while taking for granted that i could speak it. but yes, i get it - the asian-looking person is more likely to be able to speak japanese than the obviously foreign one. i also met up with the other singaporean JETs and a previous english teacher at one of my schools, who took us for great tsukemen. and i finally bought my first mcdonalds since coming to japan. 390 yen for 15-piece nuggets!

i haven't been progressing through final fantasy as fast as i'd like. ideally, i'd be finished with the story now and be working of getting raid-ready gear. but like i mentioned before, it's not a race, and that's something i have to deal with internally. externally, i was also hampered by my internet speed getting killed. you see, i didn't know that my ISP has a practice of limiting upload speeds when a user uploads more than 150gb over 3 consecutive days. between long hours of streaming the story, plus uploading the stream recordings to youtube, i accidentally crossed that limit on...monday? thankfully, the limitation period is only 3 days, and things are back to normal now. have to spread out my uploads, i guess. the story itself is great, and while i have guesses on what happens next, i don't know anything for sure beyond where i'm currently at. excited to see how it develops!

finally, aeon accepted my credit card application. the biggest positive sign was that someone actually called me to confirm some of my personal details this time, as opposed to just sending a rejection postcard via mail. the biggest difference was that i applied with  the added backing of a japanese driver's license, i think. and i may have filled out a question wrongly in my previous applications. i'm facing one more issue now, which is the linking of my bank account to automatically pay my bill. something about the name on my card account not exactly matching the name on my bank account. so i couldn't do it online, and had to send in a form. japan is really a paradox of modern and old-fashioned. it's nice for things like architecture, less so for administrative procedures. hopefully that goes through soon, though the customer service lady i spoke to said it may take up to a month.

now that end-of-term tests are over and the holidays are approaching, school will probably wind down for a bit. i have 2 more weeks of school, followed by 2 weeks of term break, then term 3 starts. decided to clear a chunk of my leave, because i can't carry over more than 20 days, and i have 36 now. i think i took about 5 days' leave in the 2 weeks that i don't have to be in school. add on the standard year-end break that civil servants get, and the result is that i'm only working for 2 days in that period. mental note: year-end would be a great time to travel back to singapore in a typical COVID-less year. as things stand now, the cost and time requirements for quarantine, plus the possibility of being denied re-entry to japan, make it totally not worthwhile. hopefully japan soon eases the travel restrictions it imposed in reaction to omicron. i'm personally not super affected by it, but i know couples who are being physically separated because of it.

i really should go and get some exercise. gaming for hours at a go is fun, but not healthy. also, i may have eaten something wrong, because my stomach has been hurting for the past few days. apparently it's not just me; some other teachers are experiencing it too. i wonder if it's a reaction to cold weather? semi-related thought - i know winter's here when i become reluctant to step out of the shower. that, and when my gas bill rises. good news is that i'm more prepared this year - fleece sleepwear, thick socks, huge heavy blanket. i haven't seen the need to activate the kotatsu yet, so perhaps i'm becoming more acclimatized?

-random thought of the day: Find time for year-end and new year posts!-