A Year In The Life (Part Deux)

100 posts in 2010. A first full year in Japan. I started it off alone in Kyoto, outside a temple in the snow, listening to the largest bell in Japan gong 108 times, and I finished it up with Heather in Warwick, England, in a big old house far older than my home country, surrounded by her family and her closest friends.

Last year at this time, snowboarding was some "I should get to that..." pipe dream that I was kind of terrified of trying for the first time. Now I'm pretty damn decent at it, if not--in fact--good, and of the four weekends I have in Japan this January, three of them will be spent on the hills.

When I started the year, I had already told my Board of Education that I'd be staying on for a second year of JET (nearly two months before the deadline for the decision). The year ahead was nothing but wild Japanese adventure potential. Now I head into 2011 very sure that, come August, I'll be leaving Japan. I'm suffering from Warwick withdrawal, and Japan is very much starting to feel like some bit of fantasy that is slowly breaking up and falling away--a dream that will soon vanish and maroon me on the shores of reality.

Yeah. I watched far too much Inception on the plane to, as well as on the plane back from England.

It's true, though. Come January on the JET program, it's time to make big important decisions about the next year of your life as the February recontracting deadline looms. Last year, I chose to extend my strange, Japanese, hedonistic (in terms of responsibility, at least) vacation as there was still so much to see and so many people to spend time with. This year I choose to get on with my life, I suppose, and I have to already start planning how I'm going to see all the people and do all the things I want to do before leaving this place.

What's cool about it, though, is that I get to take a part of this place with me as Heather and I are already concocting devious plans for our next year together. More on that later, though.

This is getting random.

So. 100 posts in 2010. I figure that ain't bad, even if I did SPAM Four Points posts and excerpts from NaNoWriMo. I'm certainly not going as balls-to-the-wall on Japanawriting as I was at this time last year, so here's hoping I can get back to it in a bigger way. If nothing else, I'll at least endeavour to keep on posting photos.

I can say that 2010 treated me nice, though, and that's a bit of an understatement to be sure. There was Craig and My Dad and sharing Proper Japan with them, as well as where I live. There was The Month of Adventures (also known as February), and with it snow and boarding and more snow and girlfriends and lacks of drift ice. Shit. There was the passing of Ross...

...and there was also golden life and sakura. There was the joy of being a part of HAJET, which may wind up being one of the best decisions I ever made over here. There was a whole lot of hair and camping and mountain climbing and JET town festival invasions. There was the return to Canada with its attendant weddings and boats and Amys and Vancouvers and Torontos and my Dad inadvertently and timelyly reminding me that I shouldn't forget. There was dripping, sweaty Aomori (christ! I never really wrote about Aomori!) and manly log pushing and moving out of expensive fucking apartments and Four Points and birthdays. There was NaNoWriMo and the promise of snow, then its dearth, then its glut.

And, finally, there was England, and a New Years Eve that was hundreds of miles from the last one I lived through, no matter what physical or metaphorical scale you used to gauge it.

2011 has got some big shoes to fill.