Still Here

The Best Friend is not a morning person. Sometimes I will call on a Saturday afternoon around three and she will have just pulled herself out of bed. Because of this the timelines of the working world often frustrate her. She believes it to be reprehensible, even morally wrong, to call someone before 9:00 in the morning. Yes, she gets into the office between 8 and 8:30, but she's getting her coffee, reading her email, and settling in for the day. If you really want to be considerate, you won't call her before 10:00. She can be ready for the world by 10:00 if she has to be.

So having heard the above tirade more than once, I was a little alarmed on Friday to see that she had called at 8:04 in the morning. I thought maybe her car broke down and she needed a ride to work or maybe it was a family thing, but I knew it couldn't be because she had just called to chat. Not at 8:04 in the morning. So I called her back.


Me: Did you call this morning?

BF: Yes! Are you still in town?

Me: Uh, yeah.

BF: (sighs in relief) Oh good. I just hadn't heard from you since last week and I woke up this morning panicked, thinking you had already left for Japan.


The one time she remembered to tell me she was going out of town for a week on business and I remembered that she had told me she was going out of town for a week, and she comes home panicked because I hadn't called her to invite her to dinner or emailed to ask if she wanted to meet for lunch.

To calm her down, I assured her I would give her plenty of notice before I left the country for ten months. And then we made plans for today. I'm heading out to the bike trail this afternoon.

Waiting

The Board of Education in Japan has my paperwork and now I'm just waiting on them. I haven't been particularly patient. In the meantime, they've announced I'm leaving at work and have started interviewing my replacement. I'm answering a lot of questions again and again, but the one that comes up again and again is:

"So, you speak Japanese?"

"No, but I'm taking some lessons online."

"What?!? How can you go to a country where you don't speak the language?"

I haven't come up with an answer yet that seems to satisfy. I keep trying to tell people that since I'm quite obviously NOT Japanese that most people won't be expecting fluency from me anyway.


I will be in Georgetown again next week to meet the mayor of Tahara City. He will be there to further promote the sister city relationship between Tahara and G-town, (which is how I got this gig in the first place.) Since I'll still be in the country, I've been told it would be a "great gesture" if I were to drive down to meet him - part of the duties of being a representative of the College and State of Kentucky.

I especially love representing Kentucky since I only went to school there for four years and know practically nothing about it, other than people like to say which county there are from rather than the city (as there are only about three cities of any size in the whole state.) And then there are ironies of being known both for Bourbon whisky and the most dry counties in the US.