Bleeding Fiction

I had a strange moment at orientation today wherein my graduate advisor effectively turned to me and said "Why'd we let you into this program?" It did wonders for my self-esteem, since I've been asking myself that question all summer. I considered asking to transfer out to the school's Comparative Religion or Russia, East Europe and Central Asia program, but I realized that my situation wouldn't change much, linguistically, in the former and I wouldn't be admitted into the later. So, I'm stuck here, which may be for the best.

I met a few people today, some of them in my program. The folks in my program are mostly coming fresh off the JET program, which means both that they have a common bond which can (at times) leave me out in the cold and that their Japanese is much better than mine. I think, just from research interests, I'm going to be the crazy fringe guy in the program, which is a bit expected and also suits me just fine. It's what comes of approaching Japan purely from a pop-culture perspective and looking at things, more than ever these days, as informative for strange fiction.

Speaking of fiction, or of strangeness, my stuff will arrive to me sometime around the fourth or fifth of October. My car will come about a week thereafter. Tomorrow I head off to the local mall to buy a sleeping bag; it would be plain silly of me to stay in a hotel for the next two weeks, and too expensive besides.

Aside from that, I deal with the necessities of life and wait for the day when I won't be ready to lay down and sleep at ten in the evening. I have the worst trouble with the time change between the Right Coast and this one. Perhaps counterintuitively larger shifts are easier to manage; they throw me up into the air along with my regular schedule and, when I come down, I land right into the new schedule. These smaller shifts are more difficult; they just mean that I wake up and get tired earlier.

More on time zones tomorrow. For now, I debate the relative benefits and drawbacks of committing acts of fiction while tired.