slowly chugging on

Life is moving slowly, and today that's just really getting to me. Thankfully I have some extra free time to do something about it. I say that and then I don't make any headway. But I like to think that I do. If you call job hunting for a couple hours and not applying headway, then I've made some.

I'm excited for margaritas with good friends on Thursday evening after work.
I'm excited to see the Yoshida Brothers on Friday night in Chicago...if Ty's car can get us down there and back. (please, belt on motor, do not snap...) I wonder if Ken'ichi is as ridiculously good looking in person? :)
I'm rather anxious to move on Saturday because of all the new space we'll have, but not so excited about having to spend tons more time getting to work (a job I'm only OK with; I don't particularly like or hate it right now)

I'm not excited that it's going to get much hotter outside for the summer and we don't have an air conditioner. It's been in the mid-50's during the day mostly and I love it.

I have this song stuck in my head right now:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL2od1AF_Cs
So catchy. Every time I listen to it I think about it for a few days. yay Genki Rockets.

I want to translate something else today because I feel like I'm making breakthroughs in understanding things I wasn't quite getting in certain stories or songs before. Some days the ideas just make sense to you, and you think of good ways to put them in your own language. I think this is one of those days. Novala Takemoto, here I come :)

Someday I'm going to send him my translations of his work when I get enough of them. His afterword in Kamikaze Girls made him seem really excited for his work to be available in English. I think he'll be happy that someone likes them that much. In any case, it'll give him something to do when he's in jail. It's too bad he was the one that had to get caught with cannabis. I agree, he's probably a rather weird person, but writing while on drugs is practically an institution. How else would Japan produce such crazy shit? How do kids' shows get written? (Seriously. No person in their right mind would come up with the majority of things children watch and read.)

I feel like I'm in a trap as far as my professional life is concerned. I'm working a dead-end job right now, and for what I REALLY want to do, I need more training in Japanese, and I feel that the best way to get it at this point in my abilities is to live (and work?) in Japan for a while to get practical experience and further my practical knowledge because there's only so much you can learn from books and controlled situations. But I have someone who doesn't want me to leave, and he will come with me, but I need to wait a few years before he will want to. So find some other work that will feed into translation in the meantime, right? That's hard here. Hard because there are few avenues for translation work here, and the few companies that ARE here are very small and it seems unlikely that they will need to hire someone for something other than translation. Of course, I guess I need to contact them and figure that out for sure. Even just a day of job shadowing might be enough to inspire me to try again. I also thought of other jobs, like proofreading and editing, for something that may not have anything to do with foreign languages at all but is important to the translation process. I have yet to figure out if people generally like you to have an English degree or something to hire you for that, though. Maybe a job at a newspaper or magazine. What other places need lots of editing done?

I don't think I've gone through that thought process with anyone else, to be honest. I don't know why I'm afraid to, or otherwise just don't want to. I guess I'm scared of not getting what I want. But through that I'll get a better idea of what I DO want, at least, if it ends up not being the right thing. It's too bad that it's so much work. Man, I sound like a whiner. If you really want something, you will make yourself do what it takes to get it.