I Want a Hula Hoop

Wednesday was a meeting with all of the Mie ALTs in the afternoon wherein we were walked through papers we had already been sent, and that made perfect sense if you actually bothered to read them.  Which I had.  Multiple times.  (I was bored.)  One of them was about the big two-day conference we have with both ALTs and JTEs coming up in January.  So basically we had a meeting about a meeting.  And then we did a workshop exercise that was fairly useless because it revolved around grammar, which I don`t teach.  Whatever.

Thursday I started work on my Christmas lesson plans for my 1st Year classes (because I can).  I can`t remember if I already mentioned this or not, but one of my JTEs told me that previously they`ve done fill-in-the-blank things with Christmas songs, and then learn to sing them.  She said that when she last did it, they used Band Aid`s "Do They Know It`s Christmas" and the Mariah Carey song that shall remain nameless for everyone`s sakes (for those of you who just ended up with it in your head anyway, I`m sorry).  I have to talk to the teachers and find out how exactly they did this, since we discovered in August that the equipment in the Language Lab (LL) doesn`t really work...  I mean, we have a CD player, but that will only work if I can get one of the teachers to burn a CD with files that I give them.  Given that they took to basic network functions in the computer lab like a fish to merchant banking when we were in there for my self-introduction lesson, I`m thinking that isn`t likely.  So, I`ll either have to hope that my phone/school laptop is loud enough, or we`ll have to see if we can get the computer lab again, and I`ll have to run them through there, because I think there are large speakers hooked up to that system?  At the very least there`s a tv...  Anyway.  I want to do Faith Hill`s "Where Are You, Christmas?" because it`s still kind of a popular song on the radio at Christmastime, and the language and melody are simple enough that the kids should be able to pick it up without too many problems (though I might switch and do NSYNC`s "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" because reasons).  For the other song....  Yeah, I`m making them learn "The Chipmunk Song." 

I`m an evil, evil person, and I really love this song, and because this is Japan I`m pretty sure the kids will love it almost as much as I do.  For the last few minutes of class, I`m going to have them write "Letters to Santa," for writing practice and because I think it`ll be fun to see what kinds of lists they can come up with.

Something weird that I`ve noticed about myself lately is that apparently, while I still don`t like people on the whole, I require a certain amount of human interaction daily.  I`ve realized recently (ie this week) how I check my phone rather obsessively for Line/Facebook messages, or comments on my Facebook posts.  That`s a huge change from the girl who used to leave her phone on silent and forget to check it for 12 or more hours at a time (making me the worst possible person to ever have as an emergency contact of any kind).  So my theory is that I have a certain amount of communication I have to reach each day or something, and I`m not reaching that quota here the way I would back home, because there are very few people around me that I can actually have a conversation with.  ...Does this count as some kind of self-discovery?  Have I become the cliche of one of those twenty-somethings traveling around the world to "find themselves"?  I hope not.  Next thing you know I`ll be wearing thick-framed glasses and drinking lattes or something.  Or, god forbid, doing yoga.  And enjoying it.  But I still dislike people as a general rule.  Still a relatively asocial badger over here.

Friday night I started with a scratchy throat, and it was somewhat unbearable on Saturday.  Luckily I did all of my shopping on Thursday night, so I didn`t have to go out at all over the weekend.  I just spent the weekend praying it was only a cold, and that it wouldn`t turn into something that required a trip to a doctor.  I`m a little terrified of having to visit a doctor while I`m here.  On Sunday my throat was better and it had migrated up into my nose, blocking it completely and turning me into a Neanderthalic mouth-breather.  Yay.  Most of you are aware that I get sick rarely these days, so when I do, I basically turn into that guy with the man-cold in the Nyquil commercial.  I`m just a big baby, buried under blankets and whining (to myself, since I live alone) about how much everything sucks.  On Monday, Morita-sensei was taking the afternoon off, and was like, "You should go home and rest.  Really, no one cares.  Take time off!"  But I didn`t want to dip into the rest of my paid vacation yet, because I might need it in the spring and it doesn`t reset until the beginning of August, and and if I took it as sick time I`m pretty sure that I would actually have to go to the doctor`s to get a note.  It`s just a cold, and I`m just a giant baby.  I`ll live.