Snowing on Monday, now were up to the upper teens, Celsius that is. I guess that works out to about 75 or so in the degrees F (for flippin idiotic, really boiling at 212? what the hell). Anyway, the weathers up and so is my ire along with the new list of classes for the new school year. The Japanese school calendar starts around April 1st or so and continues on until August when the students get a 3 week summer vacation and then again until Dember/January when they get a New Years break of about 3 weeks. Then they're right back in their freezing classrooms with the kerosene stoves until mid-March when they finish up their school year with some finals and then it's back to the grind again April 1st. Sounds like hell doesn't it? Well, it may very well be.

We have just begun the new set of classes for the new academic year and consequently I am really hating life. I used to consider myself a flexible guy, a kind of "go with the flow" chill person. What I have discovered is that I'm not. I'm really a tense nit-picky workaphobic. I like to have my plans all laid out for the week so that I can get my recreation time all scheduled in there. Right now, things aren't working out that way. In fact, i have little idea of what my weeks will be like in the future, because I don't even know which of my classes will be cancelled. I teach about 15-20 regularly scheduled classes each week and then on top of that I often teach one on one lessons that are somewhat randomly scheduled each week. Right now i have taught about half of the classes I was scheduled because no students actually showed up to them. It's not my responsibility to drum up new students, just to teach them, which is nice, but it's just annoying to have to show up for work when no students ever materialize.

To put the icing on what has been a stressful week, I had to sit through an entrance ceremony for the girls highschool where I teach weekly. Aside from the fact that I got a bento lunch out of the deal, it was a total unpleasant waste of time. I was paid to sit and stand and show my presence, show what a good cog I can be in this dysfunctional machine that is Japanese education. That sucked. Luckily, after the boring waste of a pleasant morning I received the climbing shoes that I'd ordered a week ago. I ordered two pairs of shoes so as to be able to choose the best fitting pair and then to return the other. This would have been fine but for the fact that the assholes at Customs opened my box and charged me 5000 yen in duties. How awesome is that? The pair of shoes that I am going to keep cost $140, the shipping to get the two pairs over to me was $35 the shipping for the remaining pair back home for the refund will be about $15 and the duty fee, which I'm going to see if I can get reduced, is $45. Let's see, that adds up to, $235 which is like a plane ticket to Korea. What the hell, it's just money right? I think that I may wish to shoot someone soon. Fortunately, it's really difficult to get guns here. Now swords are another matter.