A few weeks before I was supposed to go to the conference in DC, I got an email out of the blue from one of my friends from elementary school, Lee. She said she had been Googling for something else, came upon my old teaching website, and was inspired to get in touch. She gave [...]
Archive for February, 2008
Old Friends
Posted in Life, Travel, tagged DC, elementary school, friends on February 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Tournament Pictures
Posted in Karate, Life, Pictures, tagged tournaments on February 20, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Slightly belated, due to the other news, but I did finally get my pictures from the karate tournament downloaded.
First, the good one of me with my ever so fancy trophy. Please feel free to ooh and aah. You know you wish you had one in your living room. Do click to enlarge so you can [...]
Engaged
Posted in Life on February 18, 2008 | 4 Comments »
Yesterday, at about 11:45 in the morning, Mark felt he was sufficiently awake to ask me if I would marry him.
I said yes.
We then spent the rest of the day alternating between calling family members and friends to let them know and looking at houses in Durham. It felt like a pretty busy day.
To answer [...]
How to Spot an Ex-JET
Posted in Culture contrast, tagged Japan, JET, Kitty-chan, netsuke on February 15, 2008 | 2 Comments »
One of the graduate students in our program is coming in right now to help us with the undergrad study abroad files, which are kept in my office. As she picked up her stuff to go, she got out her cell phone, and it jingled in a very familiar way.
“Ooh! Which keitai straps do you [...]
One of a Kind
Posted in Karate, tagged tournaments on February 11, 2008 | 1 Comment »
… or it could turn out that I would be the only person competing in the Women’s Traditional Kata (18-34) division, and I therefore automatically win. Yes. How anticlimactic.
As it turned out, actually competing in the tournament was the shortest part of my day. I arrived at the community center where we were hosting the [...]
Required to Lose
Posted in Karate, tagged perfectionism, tournaments on February 8, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Tomorrow, I will be spending all day at a karate tournament. It is, in fact, a tournament being hosted by my school. As such, I’m more or less required to both compete and help out. I have mixed feelings about this.
I haven’t been to a tournament in maybe 15 years. My old school wasn’t very [...]
On Being a Foreign Woman in Japan
Posted in Books, Culture contrast, Travel, tagged Japan, Kickboxing Geishas, women on February 4, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Synchronicity can be so weird. Less than a day after discussing how different the experiences of foreign men in Japan are from those of foreign women, I came across this passage in Kickboxing Geishas:
The truth is that in many ways, it was my own loneliness that drove me to write this book. Before I [...]
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