Aah, the future!

I turn 25 in a month. That sounds about right for a quarter-life crisis, doesn't it? But it's not so much a crisis, and if I have a bad day at work I can usually shake it off eventually---it's a growing awareness that maybe doing Japanese studies is what I want to do with my life. And I had been ignoring that for too long based on one really bad experience with a professor which made my year in Japan less-than-productive on an academic level. (I don't think any of my profs really knew what to do with me, except for Moriyama-sensei, who was so great).

Keeping in mind, now, this is probably a five-year-plan at best--
1) I am pretty sure that I want to go to Berkeley, because they have the best faculty/course offerings in premodern Japan, but--
2) They are very very rigorous and selective. They want you to have an undergraduate major in East Asian Studies, which I don't; I only have a minor, though as it happens I took enough classes for two separate minors. I nearly took enough classes to have a double major, but the hassle required to get my coursework in Japan approved as East Asian Studies courses was too great. Also I think maybe you had to write an honors thesis if you did a double major.
3) They also want you to have three recommendation letters, from faculty. Maybe I have impressed three professors enough that they would write me recommendation letters, but I dunno.
4) So the logical thing to do seems to be to get an MA so that I can get back in school and impress some people.
5) But Duke is expensive, and they don't offer much financial support, and unless I can get approval to fill my schedule with independent-study, their course offerings are pretty slim.
6) Or else I could do an MA with a concentration in Chinese. That might work.
7) It's worth considering that an MA would be enough so that I could be an East Asian Studies librarian, although they usually want you to have cataloging experience and selection experience, and I have neither.
8) Nevertheless, the job market is probably better for EAS librarians than for professors.
9) The other thing is that it would probably be fairly easy for me to get a job in Japan that's a step or two above the Nova/Geos/Aeon mass-produced english-teacher experience. And, then what? That is the question.

I decided some time ago that the best thing for me to do would be to keep studying and keep reading Japanese books so that I would be prepared if and when I figured out what I should do, after I had saved some money and acquired some real-world experience. But then I went full-time, and I'm still doing that, but--I'm lucky if I return a book to the library half-read. Usually I don't make it that far.

This wins the Surreal Experience Of The Year Award

A couple of weeks ago (on my way back from the airport from Wiscon, as it happens), my mom and I dropped by Whole Foods and were looking at the community notices by the door. Among which was a poster for Hedwig And The Angry Inch. "OMG," I said, "I have to see that." (I loved the movie, but I heard that the original play was better). What's more, the name on the poster--the name of the director/producer/lead actor--was familiar to me; turns out that I had gone to high school with his brother, and my mom does volunteer work with their mom. Small world. Small, strange world.

I'd have been perfectly content to see it by myself, but my mom called me up to invite me, and I was like "Are you sure? Do you know what it's about?" and there was no way to gracefully get out of it--not that I'll pass up free tickets, mind you. And so I spent tonight in a small studio in North Raleigh, watching a low, low, low-budget production of Hedwig with my mom, and half-sort-of-wincing at just how raunchy it got.

I really liked it, though. I think it is true that the play is better than the movie--it holds together better thematically, especially at the end--but this particular instantiation of the play had a sound mixing problem that made the vocals rather hard to hear over the guitars and drums. This seems to happen all the time, but it's unfortunate when the songs are (a) so good and (b) so necessary to the plot.

I did enjoy the local references. I squealed at one place near the beginning where Hedwig mentioned that Tommy Gnosis was playing across the street at the RBC center; the RBC center is actually hosting, this weekend, a ginormous and heavily hyped evangelistic thing.

There is just something surreal about saying hello to a guy I used to vaguely know in high school, and then shortly thereafter seeing his brother on stage in his underwear.