Here Comes November

I’ve been going through a bit of a slump lately. I think a few things are catching up with me. My lack of sleep is running me down and the cold I’ve had keeps lingering. Combine that with the increasingly short daylight hours, the increasingly intense work hours and what I think might be the onset of culture shock and you have a boy struggling to stay smiling.

The good news is that step one to solving these difficulties is now complete. I’ve identified them. So, let’s move on to potential solutions.

Tomorrow, I’m planning on tracking down an alarm clock. A loud one. It has to be loud because I’m going to start wearing earplugs to bed. The loading dock, the ravens, the baby next door – their cries will all fall on my deaf, plugged ears.

That should help with the cold and that should be on its way out anyway. To prevent this from happening again, some serious hand washing has become a part of my school routine. Those kids are going to have to put their boogers directly in my mouth for me to get sick from them. And if they try that, it will be their health that’s in jeopardy.

The daylight hours thing is tricky. This bothers me at home too. November is always a problematic month for me and frequently sees me pining for some equatorial region when the sun’s hours are constant and where I won’t have to worry about these long nights. I think one thing that’s important for me is to make sure I get outside at least a little bit each day. A lunchtime walk or something will keep me a bit more sane. This might be difficult depending on which school seeks my services, but the more I see of the friendly ball of fusion up high in the sky, the happier I will be.

The work hours seem to be slowing down a little and I’m starting to learn how to deal with the long weeks. I’ve had a couple quite challenging ones and I took the second one much more in stride than the first, so hopefully, I can continue that trend.

And lastly, the culture shock. This one’s a bit trickier because I haven’t exactly been in circumstances like this before. Sure, my time in Ghana gave me my share of fits, but this is a whole new situation. (And I still blame the Larium for much of my African instability.) But, I do have a number of coping strategies to try out and some thinking to do. I’ll manage.

But for now, I think the lack of sleep is catching up with me. Keeping my eyes open is getting rather difficult. I best stop typing lest I faceplant into my PowerBook.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 15th, 2004 at 12:00 am. It is filed under Blog, Education, Japan, JET Programme, Travel and tagged with japan, Travel, travel log. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.