Catching up in 2020

I’m slowly working my way out of this latest funk. A large part of getting myself out of my various pits is to force myself to do things that I know are good. Unfortunately, none of that can include movement at the moment, so I’m writing.
The semester finished. I apparently co authored an academic paper which was approved (I think?) for publication. It doesn’t seem like I did nearly enough to justify anything on anything, but here we are. I also think that another thing that I wrote is going to be published or something along those lines? I feel as though I’m either smarter than I ever imagined, grad school is the easiest thing ever, or my university isn’t very good. Regardless, I’ve got a two year visa, and that’s super handy. Especially as I couldn’t land a job.
I’m working two part time jobs. Most mornings, I work as a jobber for a kindergarten agency. A Japanese teacher and I go all over the prefecture teaching English to kindergartners. Words cannot express how much I adore most of those kids. I really think that if I were independently wealthy, I’d just teach people for fun most days. Especially little kids. Oh my goodness how I adore them. Seeing their faces can bring me back from the brink of anything. I adore them.
In the afternoon, I work at a school for special needs children. Once again, I adore them. These kids are first to twelfth graders. There are few things in this world more wonderful than a well behaved child, and few things more hideous than a badly behaved one. Once again, I stand by what I said before: I believe that raising children consists mostly in modelling the behavior you want to get out of them. And man, can you tell a lot about kids’ parents from how they act.
I feel as though I should say something about Corona, but, it really doesn’t impact my life in any major way. I mean, it meant that I barely went to school my first semester, but, other than that it’s mostly meant that I have to wear a stupid mask, and the hours at my cafe are all weird. Thankfully, nobody I know has it.
Money is still a huge source of stress. I have $300 in my bank account at the moment, and my family in the US is being a bit difficult about getting me any additional funds at the moment. Hopefully it’ll all work out alright. Somehow or other.
I’m also teaching children from my last kindergarten most nights. They’re amazing and I adore them. I was teaching the Ikeda girls, but their mom recently canceled. I’m not sure as to why. To be honest, the nature of video lessons meant that it was mostly a waste of time anyway. But I miss my girls.
I’ve started lessons with an excellent Japanese tutor. She’s super cheap, and that’s great. My Shamisen is coming along nicely, and that’s nice.
Needless to say, life is dull.
I’ve really enjoyed going to Church, and I’ve officially become a catechumen. Of course, I’m getting terrified by that prospect. It’s final. It’s really, REALLY, final. It’s a massive and life altering decision and commitment.
The notion of sacraments is interesting to me, because I was taught all of my life to reject the notion of sacraments. In fact, in a lot of ways, I’ve been trained to reject the meaning of any physical thing because it was subject to some higher spiritual thing. This anti-materialism really seeped into me and I think it’s infected a lot of people more deeply than they realize. I think that one reason for the malaise in society these days is the fact that we have anti material materialists. That’s a notion that’s REALLY been in my mind these days, but I don’t have the vocabulary to express it, a friend to discuss it with, or the ability to parse through it on my own. Back to the point. The notion that a thing has a meaning in-and-of-itself, while ALSO having a super-ordinate meaning is really interesting to me. I think that without Lewis and Peterson, I’d never be at this point, but I feel that without them, I’d be far off in a worse place.
I think that I need to make a lot of changes in my life. For one thing, I need to decrease my dependence on devices. It’s become almost impossible to read anymore, and I’m finding that I cannot complete basic tasks without background stimulation. That’s bad.
My back gave out again a few weeks ago. That’s one reason for the inability to do much.
Gotta make changes for the better.