Getting ready for karaoke

So I have spent every minute while in my car today singing Misfits songs and the top of my lungs. All I can say is that this has been one of the best days in a while and I owe it all to my horrible singing. There is nothing quite like going horse singing about murder and monsters. As I was doing this I was thinking about the fact that Karaoke is a super popular way of spending time in Japan and while I listened to myself I started to think that I really need to get better at singing if I am going to represent my country well. More over my friend Yosukei told me that I should attempt to learn Japanese songs to assist me in getting use to pronunciation in a fun way. So I think I will. That is one more thing to add to my new years resolutions

The Person. Part two.

So I have lived a fairly interesting life. I think my parents are to thank for that because they were so liberal with my two siblings and myself when raising us. People say that you can do anything if you put your mind to it but that was a way of life in my upbringing. My parents encouraged and supported pretty much anything that we became interested in. They let us do what we wanted, even if it was a little frowned upon, with out interfering unless we managed to get ourselves in to deep. Mom and dad called it benevolent neglect. What ever it was, I allowed to grow up how I wanted with out being smothered by overbearing parents.

Being raised with this out look allowed me to pursue what ever was interesting. This has blessed me with an odd resume that started when I was around thirteen. I have worked in several plant nurseries, I have been a kennel worker and eventually became a veterinary technician, I installed school networks in New Orleans until Hurricane Katrina destroyed my apartment and all the work we had done, I wired and installed security and home automation equipment, I have worked at an advertising agency where i started out doing data entry and eventually was required to become a web design intern, I taught high school computer classes for four years, I was an art gallery assistant and today I am an exhibits fabricator at McWane Science Center where I get to build, assemble, maintain, improve, and deconstruct kick ass science exhibits. I have been at this most recent job for about eight months. It is a great job; I wake up not dreading to go into work like most of my friends do. It has good benefits and I get to work with intelligent and interesting people.

Unfortunately for me, I have such a wide veritey of jobs because I become bored over time and I think life is to short to be bored. So, I stay at a job for a few years, some times up to six, and then I move on to learn the next trade that seems cool or useful. That is one of the reasons that I have already set my sights on the goal of getting into the JET program over the next year or two.

I realize that the background that I have given is some what sporadic and I'm sorry for that. from now I will only reveal little bits about myself in sections of the blog instead of paragraph after paragraph. I just wanted to establish a base line. till next time!

The Person. Part one.

As of now I have finished the first major step to getting in to the Jet program. Last Saturday on the 13th of December I graduated from the University of Alabama at Birmingham or UAB. I have spent the last seven years working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree focusing in Sculpture. Some people ask me why it took so long. My general response is because I wanted to enjoy college. There are several other reasons though. First is because a BFA degree is an advanced degree that usually takes an extra year to complete. Second is that I have a wide variety of interests and when a class popped up that looked interesting I took it. I don't regret the time it took to complete my degree. Actually I think that I am one of the few people that squeezed everything that I could out of college and in doing so I have made many valuable friends, contacts, and I have learned lessons that can only come with experience.

So what did I make as an art student? Because I did not know much about art when I began taking classes I started off with the basics and took many of the intro classes. At first I became interested in printmaking but after a few classes I was bored of it. Then I became interested in ceramic sculpture. This seemed to be a natural progression, I have always been drawn towards 3-D thinking and was never very good at abstracting into a 2-D format. I took enough ceramic classes to make it my concentration in school but became bored with it so I moved on to regular sculpture. After taking one semester of it I felt slightly more drawn to it than I was ceramic but not overly so. It was not until I decided that I needed a chair for my apartment and did not have the money to buy one that I found where my place was in school.

I set to work one night and made an incredibly cool but very uncomfortable chair, the response was unbelievable. One of the beauties of art is that no one expects it to be functional and the idea of it being interactive was a hit in my department. I set to work making one piece of furniture after another changing the design to become more functional with every piece. Below are a few of my works and as time allows I will make more in preparation for a show in April that I need to get ready for.

The Project

I have always had a fascination with the country of Japan and the Japanese culture in general. I study their architecture, use their electronics, listen to their music, watch their cartoons, eat their food and much more. Not a day goes by that this culture dose not affect me in some way. Despite all of these things I have never been to Japan. The only stuff I know about the culture is what I can pull from my surroundings. This leaves me feeling like I only understand a very small amount about the Japanese and I would like that to change. There have been several quotes to the effect of: you can only understand someones culture by experiencing it. I don't know if it is possible to fully understand another culture without growing up in it but I would like to find out how much you really can gain by living in another country. I have only one problem... How can I get there and afford to stay long enough to gain the understanding that I am looking for? Enter the JET program! This program takes people from all over the world and invites them to go to Japan to teach their native language. They pay you a salary and have a support system to get you acclimatized to your surroundings. You don't even have to know Japanese to be eligible for the program.

So I have decided to apply to the JET program, But I need some time to get a few things done before I do. First, I would like to stay at my job a little longer in order to learn more from it and to foster a strong recommendation when I need it. Second, I need to save money so I am sure that my student loans will be taken care of while I am gone. Third, I would like to learn the language so I can communicate with the locals, making it easier to learn what I can from them. I think it will take about one and a half years to accomplish these things. In that time I will take classes in Japanese and learn what I can to prepare my self. This blog is designed to follow my progress reaching these goals. So as I learn I will post what I can and would enjoy any feed back from readers to assist in my learning and preparation. In the end of this blog my hope is that I can present it along with my application process to show what I have done to prepare myself and that I truly am interested in the Japanese culture.

Introduction

This blog is designed to follow my life for the next few years in regards to a project about Japan and myself. It will help to keep track of what I have learned over the time that the blog is active as well as, hopefully, create a kind of forum where readers can assist in my learning by telling me there experiences, facts about what I am writing about, asking me questions, as well as giving me advice on what I should research. The next few entries will consist of an overview of who I am, what my life is currently like, my personality, and what the project that I am about to undertake consists of. I hope you all take something away from this, enjoy yourselves, and give lots of input.