Notes on Routine

Pardon this self-help guru opening, but I want to share a secret with you. This is definitely the most valuable thing I’ve learned in life. Many of you may already know it, but it never hurts to say it again—and I could really use hearing it again. It’s this: that if you want to do anything in life, it’s all about establishing routine. This can be for good or bad, of course, but you can also replace bad routines with good ones. The only hard part is starting. Especially, I find, when it comes to restarting. 

I’ve been trying to get back into writing. (Hence, the stuttering restart of this blog.) I feel like I forgot how to ride a bicycle. 

When I first came to Japan some 10 years ago, I was a marathon writer. (I suppose it helped to reset my entire life by picking up and dropping myself off on the other side of the world with two pieces of luggage and pretty much no knowledge of the local language.) I used to go to a cafe after dinner and spend 2 hours every night working on my poetry. I even had the days down to a routine. First, I would read some poetry by some real masters of the craft, ideally works and voices that were in tune with what I was working on at the time. After about 30 minutes of that, I would try starting a new poem. This sometimes just led to some journal writing with a few images, or at other times would pick right up into laying out lines and stanzas. After finding a stopping point there, I would begin editing poems I had started and preparing them to be put into submission packs. 

This worked really well. While I wasn’t spending long days on single works (like during my MFA days) I was steadily producing decent work. Some of it not so great, but some of it really good. Without a doubt this was when I was getting the most readership I had had. 

Then, as happens, the system broke down. There were some factors that led to this. Success definitely lowered my own standards on myself, and possibly those of editors I was writing to. Also, I feel that I was beginning to try to write poems that were more like the ones that were being excepted into journals. However, it was when I broke from this that I found I was publishing less. Then again, at the same time I was trying to publish is harder markets at the same time, so of course I was publishing less. In the end, actually, rejections probably were what wore me down. I was still writing, but only occasionally. And it grows more and more difficult to move through the medium and to find that flow. 

Over years of only occasionally coming back to it, I’ve decided to give the routine another go. I know expecting the same level of work from myself now as at my peak would be a brutal attack on myself. Maybe this is why it’s so much harder to come back to something? That you can’t help but compare yourself now to who you were? No matter how fast it comes back, stumbling through what was once effortless (well, relatively effortless) can be enough to kill any effort. 

Anyway, the plan is to keep this blog posting thing up on a weekly basis and then start putting in a couple hours a week for more creative writing ventures. 

In conjunction with this, I’m thinking to post up some of the poems I’ve written more recently that haven’t found a home in any journals and maybe along with some comments on them. I know this is not really what poets do usually. But I watched Bill Knott put his work out there at a furious pace in his blog back when I was spending my nights at cafes. He would post several times a day, replacing drafts with markings and comments and posting full volumes of his work. It was something special. I am not the master Bill was, but I think what he did should not be seen as taboo. The internet has altered all communication, it’s up to us to make those changes for the best. 

Insisting on the Hard Way

Another delay, but I think next week will see some chance to get a rhythm going.

I just finished this huge project that ate up these last 2 weeks. Not sure how much I can say about it, but I think I can say that I spent many hours reading mostly terrible translations of Japanese phrases into English. There were some really good ones as well, but even those were 99% of the time clearly off the mark.

I really don't know why Japanese businesses are seeking out Japanese people to translate Japanese into English. As I've learned in studying Japanese (and heard from others who are more proficient in the language than I), translating into a second language is a recipe for disaster. There are a few people that can do it without many errors, but there will always be errors. Perhaps in languages with a common root it's not so bad, but when you're going from something as broad as the East to the West or the West to the East, you need native fluency on your side.

I've thought about this a lot lately (especially after reading this article). With all that Japan is doing to prepare for its cosmopolitan debute in 2020, hopefully they'll realize that when they want to communicate with the world, breathe out with Westerners, breathe in with Japanese.

Language Tests and What I've Learned (Besides How to Take a Language Test)

After many years of trash talking language-proficiency tests of all kinds, I finally decided to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (the one and only JLPT) last year, and I'm currently studying to take it again this summer. 

The reason I hated--and in many ways still hate--such tests, is that I feel they often aren't used as a measure of one's skills, but as a method of studying to reach a level mastery. The fatal flaw in this, of course, is that studying for a test only makes you more proficient at that test. 

Or at least so I believed over these last few years. Friends had told me, though, that having a goal really kicks your studying into gear. And they were right. Before I signed up for the JLPT last summer, I was mostly reviewing material I had been trying to bring into my everyday conversations and occasionally adding new material but with no real system to it. It was like I thought some word or phrase was interesting or useful and I'd try to memorize it. But after signing up, I began studying the test material and adding new words, grammatical structures, and reaching up with my reading at an intense rate. 

I definitely improved my vocabulary and reading ability. However, I know that in this time and as I continue to study my speaking ability is getting worse and worse. 

This is something I often see in my students of English as they begin to study for English proficiency tests. My youngest students become more and more comfortable conversing in English, but when the testing begins, they stop talking and start memorizing. 

It's like if I give you a toolbox and a hammer and a screwdriver, then teach you how to use those two tools, you'll get comfortable using them. When you see a nail you'll think "My hammer can handle that." But then one day I come and give you a hundred tools and say, "Okay, I'm going to teach you how these work this week," after that week you see a nail and you begin thinking, "Um. I think the hammer could work this. But I also have this claw, this mallet, oh and that finishing hammer." So after a few moments of panic, you decide to just leave the nail hanging out there. 

Still, eliminating such tests is certainly not a solution. But I think language learners, especially young learners whose parents haven't mastered a second language, must be careful not to lose balance between gaining knowledge of a language and gaining use of a language. Too often the tests win out. It's far easier to praise a grade then it is to praise one's ability to accomplish tasks in a learned language when those opportunities are so limited when the language is not the local language. 

Anyway, as I said, I've decided to take this test again. I'm hoping that having it on my resume will help me make a move into some new fields of work, but I also hope that studying for this test will also improve my writing and reading comprehension. But I'm definitely going to spend less time buried in books this time around and be sure to get out and speak to people more. What use is learning a language if you all you can do is take it in? Keep that output up, folks. 

And, hey, that goes for all this messaging and social media stuff too. Knowing how to talk and knowing how to read a book are very different things than talking to people and reading books. If we don't use it, we'll certainly lose it. 

Well, that's enough rambling from me. Sorry for the lack of editing on here. Hope you enjoyed the read! Email me! 

Ok, a Slight Delay...

A little behind on my weekly promise, but I have a good excuse. On February 19th my wife gave birth to our son, Alexander.

It was a wild couple of weeks, but in the end we're all home safe and sound.

Alex really digs his sleep, so we're also blessed in that way, too. Forgive me for sparing you all the baby pictures, but my wife and I have decided to keep Alex off social media until he's old enough to know what the Internet is and whether he'd like his image all over it or not. It is hard not to splash him up for the world to see (as far as babies go, he is indeed among the cute), and I have of course emailed photos to friends and family that are just too far away to see him. But I can't help thinking back to my own childhood, and really my life now. That no one reading this can simply search and find my baby photos is a very nice thing to know. Privacy is a treasure, and giving it away (as I often do with my life as an adult (case in point)) comes with its own rewards, but I feel that giving away his privacy (well, the privacy of the person he will become) is something I don't have the right to do.

So, if you want to see pictures of my son in varying states of sleepiness, you'll have to catch me in person.

For now though, I'll be happy to describe him to you! (Feel free to skip to the next section if the description of a baby doesn't strike you as an exciting read.)

Well, he came into the world at 10 pounds and 22 inches long with a full head of hair, big ol jowls, and a thespian's range for facial expressions while defecating. His eyes are lightening from the nearly-black brown they were at birth as he gets some sun. He loves staring out the window. A lot of his day he spends looking at the sky. He rarely gets fussy outside of diaper and feed-me time, but when he does he usually just wants to be carried around and rocked a bit. The only hard part is he fights off sleep when he's being held so unless he's exhausted it's nearly impossible to get him to sleep this way. When he gets a belly full of milk though, he'll be out for four hours easily.

I wonder if all that is maybe worse than a photo or two? Well, here's to the old gods of print.
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As for the poetry I've been thinking about sharing here, I'm still thinking about it. I've since placed one of them with a blog (liveneudepoems.com) and I'm still thinking to share a few here. Maybe even with some commentary if I feel I might get some readers. So, watch this space.

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In other news, there were a couple of incidents that occurred over these last two weeks that really got to me that I'd hate to taint this post with, so I'll leave them for another entry. Next week!