The image above is a clear point-of-view from Friday night, when I drank at Yakyuudori with Tim and Yuki over the various meats-on-stick.

The weekend was trivial but in a good way. I spent Saturday doing little - cleaning house, laundry and some time with Zelda: Wind Waker. Sunday was a stroll through downtown Kokura where I got my usual 1,000 yen haircut. After crossing Amber at the ATMs I took her offer up on more Yakyuudori. So last night was another gathering.

Today was unsatisfying. Despite Morizono-sensei's return fax last week, her lesson was mainly open - "anything is okay" as she says. This lead to the class holding on to as much life as they could hold before falling asleep, and I tried to hang on too.

I decided that next week we're going to do something that I want to do, period. I should have done this long ago, but I figure that with just a few weeks remaining I don't want to have sour feelings towards my 3-nensei teacher.

I've been volleying thoughts back and forth about tomorrow's lesson, considering something to salvage the kids from the same, boring instruction. Laziness has creeped in though - I really don't want to think about work this evening. I'm too cranky.

I began work on my farewell speech. I'm trying to keep it short and sweet - I'll have to ask some of the teachers for the "proper" rather than caveman-James translation into Japanese. Abe-sensei said she was going to miss me today and the others I've started telling wished I would stick around for year two.

C'est la vie - a saying that has been going around between me and several friends both here and back home...