In the continuing theme of bad grammar and mislabeled dates, in my last entry it looks like I say that my half birthday was on February 16th. That is wrong. It was on the 15^th. I swear I know when my own birthday is, although Blogger will have you believe otherwise.

I feel like since I didn’t do anything recently that involved seeing tame wild animals this entry will be boring. I guess the most noteworthy thing was that I booked a ticket back to Canada. I will be visiting in late March, and I plan on eating a lot of bagels and smoked salmon, drinking club soda, and going to every used English book store.　　Maybe seeing some friends and family too, if bagel-eating time permits.

Since life these past weeks has had that weird feeling of just waiting for something to happen, I will write a bit about school life. Things are going well. The school year, which begins in April in Japan, is closely coming to an end. Tomorrow is the last day of classes for the third year junior high school students. Next week they will write various high school entrance examinations and then in the following week will be the graduation ceremony. There is so much pressure on these kids to do well, and I really feel for them. One of the English teachers was telling me that normally the girls don’t eat a lot, but with the stress of the past tests and the upcoming ones, they are now eating a ton. I didn’t really believe her, but you can definitely see on some of them a noticeable weight gain. As if they don’t have enough to worry about.

Today was the last class with the good elective English class. There are two elective English classes, and for some reason the one on Tuesday is filled with a ton of boys who don’t actually like English. I think they all colluded to take the class together, and it can be pretty painful. But the Thursday class is amazing. It’s mostly girls, but the boys that are in it are awesome. For the last class, Iyo, the teacher, made them bilingual certificates of completion, with a class picture on the right hand side and the student’s written future goal on the left. I had to write their names in hiragana on their certificates, and took the time to read their dreams. Many of the girls had written that their dream was to pass the exam, or to be a beautician or a designer or a careworker, with a smattering of ‘My dream is to make a dream come true’ and my favourite, ‘To go to the Bump of Chicken’s concert’. The boys’s mostly the same. One boy wants to be a diplomat, a couple want to be a public employee or a ‘salaried man’, but there were two that really made me laugh. One kid wrote, in neon yellow highlighter, that his dream is to ‘Go to the sun and finish my life’. I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out if he’s suicidal, or if he just really wants to be an astronaut. I know if the answer is the former, then it shouldn’t be this funny, but I can’t help it. It was just so unexpected, and I just love goth undertones.

The second dream to make me laugh is a bit simpler. This kid, Ryuu, who had been one of my favourites since the beginning, wrote that his dream is to ‘be a burglar’. I’m cracking up just writing that. I can’t think of how he would know the word burglar without having looked it up, since I don’t think the New Crown textbooks really cover that line of work. When I told Iyo about this, she just shrugged it off and said that Ryuu really likes naughty English. My friend Carolyn and I, during our week long Japanese course in September, then again at mid-year in November, would think of dirty pick up lines and translate them into terrible incomprehensible Japanese. So basically Ryuu and I have the same sense of humour and maturity level, except that I’m not a male fourteen year old junior high school student.