In an effort to restructure my daily life..

I came up with a daily 'schedule' of sorts to keep myself busy in the immediate days after Al leaves Tokyo. In the past two months, my evenings and weekends were occupied, taking Al around, eating out, or just hanging around at home and watching a movie. With him leaving, however, it empties out my evenings and weekends, especially when I don't have any middle school basketball games to coach. Thus..

Mondays: 3-5 Afterschool help/Tutor; 5-7 Gym/Pool
Tuesdays: 3-5 Basketball; 5-6 Yoga
Wednesdays: 3-4 Tutor; 4-6 Girl's Soccer; 6-7 Pool
Thursdays: 3-5 Basketball; 5-6 Yoga
Fridays: 3-5 Basketball; 5-6 Gym
Saturdays: Morning Yoga

In addition, I plan on studying an hour of Spanish, an hour of economics, and an hour of IR every night--this should put me at around 10pm to go to bed. I think I'll start adding brown rice into my diet, more fruit, no junk. I also need to get back into practicing for my auditions again.

This should keep me busy for a while.

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Photos!

Finally they are available for viewing! Check out my flickr site for a full range of photos from the charity event!
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I'm a Counselor-Idealist

While printing a series of recent periodicals on international relations theory, inter-Asian relations, and the legacies of the Cold War, I took a personality test--the Myers-Briggs personality test--for fun. It claimed that I was a Counselor-Idealist, someone who thinks in terms of ethical values and morals, and look to maintain and improve the welfare of others. We Counselor-Idealists, unfortunately, constitute only 2% of the total population.

Besides being a true introvert--"who can only be emotionally intimate and fulfilled with a chosen few from among their long-term friends, family, or obvious 'soul mates'"--and difficult to get to know, Counselor-Idealists have intricate, complex, and thus mysterious personalities that often surprises others. This is, however, not to say that we are inconsistent; on the contrary, we value our integrity, and it is just that we find it hard to reveal the entirety of us all at once. We are apparently also very good writers (right).

Furthermore, we are 'mind-readers', in the sense that we are often keenly aware of other's thoughts and sentiments before such are verbally expressed:

Counselors have strong empathic abilities and can become aware of another's emotions or intentions--good or evil--even before that person is conscious of them. This 'mind-reading' can take the form of feeling the hidden distress or illnesses of others to an extent which is difficult for other types to comprehend. Even Counselors can seldom tell how they came to penetrate others' feelings so keenly. [...] [Counselor-Idealists] readily grasp the hidden psychological stimuli behind the more observable dynamics of behavior and affect.

As a result, we are not easily fooled by others and are always questioning the motivations of those around them.

Pretty true? Perhaps.

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One day..

This summer I am visiting Peru to do a 4-day hike up Machu Picchu. Al and I booked a tour with the same company Colleen and Gemma had booked through last summer; they said they had a great time and enjoyed themselves very much, so we figured their experience was a good sign. I adjusted my half-around-the-world flights so that I fly out of Tokyo on 7 August, arrive in Lima on the same day, from where I would take a flight to Cusco on 8 August. I would leave Lima for Washington D.C. via Miami on 17 August, and leave for Heathrow International on 17 September. Tokyo - Lima - D.C. - London. That's a fair amount of traveling, right?

But, in my most honest moments, I feel that it really isn't enough. If it were not for my parents' full objection and my lack of total financial independence from them for my graduate school expenses, I would have taken up the backpacking trip through Chile, Bolivia, and Peru in an instant. And I was almost on my way to New Zealand this March, but this didn't happen either because of the amount of cash it required. And I am SO envious of my friend Sarah who is travelling to India this month. If only, if only!

Conclusion? (Lack of) Money sucks balls.

I digress. My point is that traveling in order to live within different cultural environs is a secret, and thoroughly restrained, desire--perhaps an obsession?--of mine that has only been sporadically appeased. If I hadn't been accepted to any of the graduate programmes, my back-up plan was to apply for a job teaching at an international school in Guatemala--what a life I would've lived there! I have not a clue as to how I convinced my worrisome mother into letting me travel alone to Italy at the age of 18, but I did, and it was wonderful. So wonderful that, I took up the Italian language in university and used Italy as a focus topic in most of my studies. My decision to go to Canada for my undergraduate degree, in hindsight, seems like one based on the fact that I would live 4 years in another country.

Somedays I wish that I were able to drop everything and all my responsibilities to go around the world and become a photojournalist. As if this idea hadn't been thought of before! My current desires lie in a trip from Moscow to Beijing via Mongolia on the Trans-Siberian Railway. But really, when could I do such a trip? I couldn't do it anytime this year. It would have to come after I finish obtaining my MSc degree from LSE, perhaps on my way back to Tokyo from London--it is cheaper to do that than to fly. How awesome would that be!

I just want out of this place. And what the hell, if I'm coming back to Tokyo ever again, I'll do it via Russia and Mongolia.
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A splashful afternoon

Apparently we raised $1,000. At the start of the event, we had raised about $500 so the final number came to me by surprise.

The donations collected from the charity event, called Mustang Splash!--named after our school mascot--was for Dr. Tadashi Hattori, who devotes his time and money in providing eye surgeries and care for those without the funds to do so in Vietnam. Apparently he was also awarded an appreciation letter from the Japanese Embassy in Vietnam not too long ago. The 5th grade classes in the elementary school headed a project called the "Global Responsibility Prize," in which they chose someone in the world who lived by the school vision: Developing compassionate, inquisitive learners prepared for global responsibility. Dr. Hattori was the chosen candidate.

The event went well. A few hiccups at the beginning, because there was quite a large mass of elementary school kids running around, and it was the first time that these high school kids who were working with me would experience moving masses of people through a system, but all in all I think it was a great experience for them and most of them enjoyed doing it. We had to get some Varsity swimmers to swim for teams as they were lacking swimmers, and some of them really didn't like that, but I guess that's the nature of high school kids; Al put it well enough: "That's what they do. They don't enjoy themselves in any school setting." I will upload some photos from the event as soon as I can on my flickr site.

**Postscript**
I suppose I could've made the event a simpler set-up. I could've advertised, "Open Donations for Open Swim Time. Pool's open until 5pm." Or even, "Diving Contest!! Bet for the biggest Cannonball!!" But, alas, no. The event was a full-fledged relay party complete with heats and race times and registration tables and even marshal areas. I had 6 high school students working with me, putting together promotion efforts and creating signage and on the day of, managing a huge mass of people--kids, to be perfectly accurate. At the end of it all, when I finally arrived home and sat down to reflect, the first question on my mind was, "Was that really necessary?"

When I worked for REC at U of BC, this question was never asked because I was hired by an organization to do the work. But here and now, the logistics of Mustang Splash!! was something I just came up with, and no one--well, save the head coach who did not (and does not) know how to trust others to do their work--really stopped me or the kids from pursuing our 'big plan'. What really triggered me into questioning the event's necessity was the attitude of some adults present at the event that this was their doing because it was their idea and they just adored themselves in the spotlight of things. At that moment a certain skepticism came over me, and I questioned the 100+ hours of preparation work that went into putting the thing together, and whether this emotional distress from knowing that certain people considered the event to be their--and wholly their--achievement was worth it. I have yet to arrive at a satifactory answer.

Additionally, I felt like doing something upsetting or destructive like spilling coffee over a white, freshly-ironed shirt (that is quite truly upsetting on Tuesday mornings) when I read an email that thanked all the faculty and staff involved in the preparation and/or participated in the event. I was sick to the stomach to see that, in this mass school email, there was no mention of the kids who helped put it all together--no, that would apparently take place during practice today and I was to "[h]elp [her] think of good word choices tomorrow to put a positive spin on everything they did today." And how many faculty and staff were out there who helped put this together? There can't be that many because I never saw a single adult face in any of my planning meetings. Support, yes; energy, yes--and we were totally grateful for that. But planning and execution? Absolutely not. Those were the kids and they deserve a mention, and definitely something more than in a mass-email.

Some people make me sick.
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