MMMmmmk.
So, obviously I’m behind on the blog. Working on it! Also working on getting a camera and whatnot. But enough of that. Just wanted to drop a jot about my activities today. Yaaaay. (By the way, my speeches went well at the Matsuyama Orientation. I will however say that I was filmed doing the mating dance of the Tancho-tzuru cranes in Hokkaido at a welcome party - available on Facebook for your viewing pleasure - and got in at 5 am the next night. Crazy weekend. Also scootered all the way into Imabari for the first time. Milestone. This self-referential exceedingly long parenthetical expression will cease and desist….now.)
For any other JETs currently beating themselves about the head and neck for filing taxes late, I feel your pain. But not nearly as much as I feel my own pain. The pain of your 8802’s and 6166’s, your 4868’s, your 2555-EZ’s, 1040’s, and possible Publication 970’s. And that’s just Federal taxes. State taxes are just as bad. Sigh. I’ll be phoning the IRS and the SC Department of Revenue again tonight, to make sure all my ducks are in order. The good thing is that, as near as I can tell, if I owe $0, and there’s a 5% penalty for each month you delayed (up to a 25% total), no matter how big that percentage gets it’s still zero…hahaha. I think. I’m laughing now. Whatever.
The other thing rattling around my brain is the strange approach to speech contests and whatnot here. I cannot stand the faux-achievement of the Japanese style school competition. Basically, a student writes something (in JAPANESE) for an English competition. Then they turn it in. Then the teacher reads it, cleans it up a bit (in JAPANESE), and reprints it. Then the teacher translates it into English. -wait, what?- Yes, the TEACHER does the translation. You tell me how that helps the kid’s English ability. Anyway, the teacher translates it, and the kid’s job is to read it. (Only read it if it’s for a recitation competition, but memorize it if it’s for a speech competition.) So…we’re judging the kid’s ability to pronounce a page full of words (s)he didn’t write. Uncool. I was asked by a teacher today to do the translation, and, understanding that it’s just the wacky system, I did it. However, my translation was too perfect. Flawless. Spot on. She knew that it would be far above the grammatical toolbox of a high school student. She asked me to dumb it down a bit. I asked why, thinking it was standard practice. The response? The rules say that the kid must translate it, and they’d see through this in a second. Does that make me an accomplice to a school kid crime? Hmmm. Still, everyone knows this is common practice. It’s just another example of the classically Japanese “official” and “officially unofficial” stances on things. Oh well, gotta go with the flow.