A long awaited update.

I forgot what the template to this blog looked like.

It's been over two months since I last wrote a blog. It's funny- just a few years ago, the blogs just kept coming, but now it just doesn't seem to work that way anymore. I haven't been much of a blogger in years and I am not sure exactly what happened to that.

I thought that returning to student life would mean a return to blogs because my blogging habit pretty much ended when my undergrad life ended, but here I am halfway through my first semester as a grad school student and the blogs have not returned.

But there's no reason for me to fret about it. What's done is done, but it won't stop me from now and then trying to revive the blog creature in my brain.

In a way, I feel like it's never completely died. I've been writing blogs in my head all of the time in the past 2+ years, it's just been that by the time I'm sitting in front of a computer, the train of thought is already miles (or kilometers) away.

I've written a few papers for school so far. It felt strange to be back in the world of writing papers, so it was a little difficult at first. Quickly, I rediscovered aspects of it that I like and ones I really don't like (ex. figuring out how to do citations).

The school has offered me work study, but I've only applied to one job that I haven't heard back from. I'm beginning to feel a lot like I did as an undergrad- like I just want to be a student and I really DON'T want to work at the same time. I'm still fully intending to work, but I still wish I could focus entirely on academics.

Although I seem to be doing well in school, I can't help but feel kind of behind compared to many of the other students. I get the impression that most of the other students at the school have more precise goals and ideas of where they want to end up. For me, I've been studying Japan and Japanese for so long and I want to use my time at MIIS to learn about many other places and cultures.

This week was kind of unusual in that I found myself thinking about potential things I could do in the not-too-distant future. I have random spurts of inspiration every now and then. It's from those times that I can figure out what I plan to do next. I didn't really have any experiences of that in my post-Japan life until this week. As much as I've been enjoying my time at MIIS, it seems like I miss out on a lot having no idea what kind of direction I want to take.

Last night, I was supposed to work on a news article report for my Japanese class, but then ended up doing it much later because I was suddenly struck with the desire to plan the rest of my MIIS semesters and look up some internships. I figured that I've been waiting for months to get that kind of frame of mind to show up and it's worthwhile to neglect a little schoolwork in its favor. Because of that, I was up to about 1 am working on the news article report. Still, I think I made the right decision.

After this week, I have an idea of a region I might want to specialize in conflicts in and an institution that I would love to to an internship with (although I am not sure if I would be able to get in). I've also decided that I want to add a new aspect to my education at MIIS. So, I have a few things to talk to my adviser about.

Between chats and a phone call, I completely lost my train of thought. There was something else I was going to say.

I suppose that means this is it for now. Hopefully, I'll blog again soon.