Life in a Fishbowl

Lately I've been spending a lot of time with the BOE crew and I'm starting to see some of the critiques of BOE ALTs for myself. Not that I don't love the friends that I've made, and being able to spend more time with a solid group of people. It's just that, because the group is so small, it is both insular and insulated from the majority of the JET community. All of the dramas and melodramas play out on a much smaller, more tense stage.

Sometimes, it's nice to get away; I take advantage of my position as a kencho JET and hang out with other ALT friends. But sometimes, even that's not enough, because I still end up with ALTs. That's when I appreciate having made Japanese friends early on and continuously while I've lived in Shizuoka.

It's nice to forget all the issues, and just have a good time with friends. You lose yourself in another language. Which is what I did last Friday: after dinner with some ALTs, I went off to karaoke with two of my Shimizu J-boy friends, up until first train.

Which led to another fun experience when, while at the train station, two of my students saw me with them on their way to school. How they could be going to school while the moon was still up on a Saturday morning, I don't understand, but we had a good laugh about it when they asked me about it in class this week.