decision making.

Me with a goldfish (they`re baaaaaack!) trucking around Nagasaki.

Hey everyone,
So unfortunately my adventures/experiments in dating have come to a bit of a close. So, today you wont be regaled with amazing/awkward stories. But, maybe next post? Seeing as how popular the topic of dating in Japan (<- click here if you missed it, you wont regret it) was, maybe for the sake of viewership I will need to go out and have a few more misadventures in dating. If I`m completely honest it is at least mildly entertaining.

I know I said I would post about cat origami next, but...I haven`t got my camera with me right now, and those cats are a betch to fold! Next post, I promise! And if it`s not, then well you can think of the punishment. Boycott my blog maybe?

Usually I try to post about some of the weird crazy things that happen to me while here in Japan,or else the really hectic things (car in a ditch!?!?). But today I thought I would post something, a bit more personal, which I guess is putting myself a bit out of my comfort zone because I dont usually like to publicly share a lot of my personal thoughts. Anyway, hopefully it will still be enjoyable, if nothing else it will occupy about 3 minutes of time if you are like me and have nothing to do today.

Time has been breezing by and if you have been checking my blog posts regularly you may recall that way back in November through to January some of my posts thought about the topic of continuing my year on JET. Well, it is now February, the month of reckoning, and from what I can gather most of my friends in the prefecture have made up their mind, signed and turned in their contracts. If you recall from a few posts back I had a few questions for myself to consider prior to signing, here is a refresher:
Where do I want to be next year? What would it mean for me to sign up for another year? Do I want to put the rest of my future plans of grad school, etc. on hold to spend a second year teaching in Japan? I`m really not sure. But I am sure that by the end of this month, in under 20 days I will have made my decision for sure for sure. Truth be told, I think I already know what I want to do (and I think I`ve known for awhile), but it is pretty difficult to think that once I sign those papers I cant really change my mind one way or another.

These were some of the questions I had to mull over before being able to be confident in signing my contract one way or the other. I didn`t want to jump into a a half thought through yes or no, and so about a week and a half ago, on a particularly long (2 hour) train ride by myself I decided that there was no better time to go over my thoughts. And with that, after about an hour of thinking and internal arguing, I began a little note to myself that was a bit of a condensed version of what I had thought through which ran as follows:

22 years old. It's weird for me to think that when I was younger I used to imagine that at 24 I would be married and at 27 beginning a family. I think when you are a child of 10 you can't really grasp that in your early 20's you will be just as young at heart and have the entire world waiting at your feet. I'm 22 nearly 23 and know now that I am not at all ready to give up my hopes, ambitions, or independence whether that be in the form of marriage or maybe even a boyfriend. Likewise I don't find myself particularly eager to rush back to school. I figure that if you can only be young once why should we waste our prime sitting in a class researching and writing papers. I am never going to be as actively fit nor free of responsibilities as I will be during my 20's. Right now I am accountable to no one but myself (and maybe my boss if I want to keep my job) and no one is particularly accountable to me. It's a liberating feeling to think that if I should want to pick up and move to New Zealand for a year or two no one is holding me back except for myself (and of course the necessity of funds). As a young adult the options and opportunities in life are endless. Our youth is the time to experiment, take risks, get a little lost, and make mistakes. Somewhere along the road we will get ourselves back on the right path and those mistakes we made and risks we took will be the lessons we take away that will let us know which path is the one that will lead us to the destination we hope to reach. This being said I have decided to stay in Japan a second year, and after that, well who knows. For now the rest of my life can wait.

And with that the next 18 months of my life have been decided.


More posts shall be coming soon, I`ve been up to a lot of mischief, or something like that. But I figured it is about time I let my friends/family know what I`ve finally decided.

Things to look forward to in coming posts: Origami cats (I promise they are coming!!!!), Nagasaki Lantern Festival, and maybe more on dating (Tonight I think I am going on a psuedo-date with my Japanese chap from `My life as a 20 something single: Dating in Japan`. But does it really count as a date if you`ve got a chaperone of sorts?)