a history of me

Despite (or because of) barely teaching much in the past five days, this week felt very long to me. Thankfully, the next two weeks will be much easier to digest with multiple holidays to break up the Monday-Friday grind and an increase of classes once all of the "sports days" wrap up. I have been invited to see one this year, which I would like to do, but I must first confirm that the buses run normally on Sundays. Remember, I work in the sticks and the buses are infrequent on weekdays, so the Sunday schedule might be extremely limited.

There was an unexpected element of fear that seemed to turn up this week, growing steadily as each day passed. I felt mildly uneasy on Sunday night, but I was watching a movie that whisked me through a great many emotional states. On Monday I kept myself busy with prep work for Tuesday, and the one class I taught on Tuesday went better than I would have expected. Still, I didn't feel good about what I had gotten done. Wednesday was business as usual (with a little bonus) but I was quite tense. Yesterday morning I was a nervous wreck, sweating far too much walking to school than the climate demanded. I had to teach my first two lessons of the semester at that school (which does not feature the most attentive students in my district) but I don't think that was the issue. All morning I tried my best to relax but I was extremely agitated, anxious and afraid in the face of some ever-swelling sense of terror that had (and I was just realizing this at the time) been with me since Sunday night.

It was mid-morning when I finally put my finger on the problem: Today is the deadline to apply for the JLPT, an annual exam that I couldn't prepare in time for last year and I had told myself I was obligated to take this year. The test isn't until December but the surprisingly-complicated application process starts in August and has a strict deadline in September. After that, applicants spend the next three months or so studying, studying, studying for the big day. Having heard that levels 3 and 4 aren't worth much in the eyes of employers, I had vowed to take level 2 this year. The jump from 3 to 2 is steep, requiring a knowledge of more kanji then I ever got to study in four years of college, but the knowledge that some of my classmates at Albany managed to pass level 2 during our senior year told me that it was a reasonable goal to set for myself.

I'm surprised I didn't put the pieces together sooner concerning my unexplained tension and a looming deadline. Deadlines are a problem for me - a really, really big problem for me. Whatever the project or purpose, whenever I find myself up against a deadline I go into a completely irrational state of panic. I have trouble sleeping, I overeat like I'm training for a competition, and I am positively on-edge at all times. College was a constant source of deadline torture, and my only perceived solution was to stay up all night and write the necessary paper or complete the very important application in one extended nightmare session. Occasionally I managed to pull this all-nighter in advance of the deadline, but usually I was working right up until the last possible minute.

No deadlines are almost worse because I get to simply put things off indefinitely. Examples include the long-overdue feitclub.com redesign, various personal essays that are half-written (or not yet started), applying for a spouse visa, that one incomplete I never managed to write in college, et cetera. If you ever find yourself wondering why I haven't written you an e-mail recently, it's because "common courtesy" has found itself on my "to-do list," a black hole of procrastination and laziness that shrouds all my deadline-less goals behind an event horizon of shame. Even entertainment and things I genuinely enjoy can find themselves in this dark place: I'm no closer to finishing Half Life* now than I was four months ago, meaning Half Life 2 is sitting installed on my hard drive just waiting for me.

*FYI: I bought this game eight years ago and I am on pace to complete it by 2009. I bought the sequel as part of The Orange Box this spring, which means I should finish that game by my fortieth birthday (not including the inevitable follow-ups that will almost certainly be released in the interim)

Getting back to the matter at hand, I was sitting in the staff room yesterday morning totally terrified yet suddenly aware of the source of all my woes. It was evident to me that I had to make a choice: bury my fear so I can get back to work or completely collapse in the face of another deadline. The choice was an easy one, but exactly how I could get over myself was a trickier call to make. I had, in theory, enough time after work to get to the local bookstore and buy all the materials I needed, assuming they had them in stock (otherwise I would have to go into Osaka). Running over the potential afternoon I was laying out for myself, I realized that my inner preparatory monologue was making me even more frightened. In a flash, I had discovered that this was more than a deadline issue. This was a failure issue.

Earlier this summer I tried to apply for a special "translation/interpretation" Japanese language course which I thought was the natural extension of the "advanced" correspondence course I completed in the spring. The entrance examination required some proctoring and it turned out to be significantly harder than I expected, so much so that I had to leave large portions of the answer sheet blank. Sitting there unable to answer 80% of the questions in front of two colleagues, I found myself extremely frustrated and morbidly embarrassed. I was so humiliated by the experience that I was actively fighting back tears on some level.

Yesterday's panic attack was not just over a deadline, it was over the test itself and that ties directly into the test I took a few months ago. The putrid taste of that failure is still lingering in the back of my throat. I still have very little confidence in my Japanese ability and I haven't noticed any ostensible improvement since last year when I felt I wasn't ready, so the prospect of applying for the JLPT forced me to think ahead to the actual test three months from now. The deadline was an annoyance; the test was the real nightmare that was scaring me shitless.

So...I gave up. Or maybe I woke up. Either way, I'm not taking the JLPT this year. I can pretend it's a studying issue and that my two-week vacation of awesome in November is going to interrupt my test prep time, but that's a non-issue. I'm scared of that test, period. Clearly there's some plateau of confidence or some invisible standard of Japanese comprehension I need to surpass/exceed/achieve before my fragile ego can handle the stress. In the meantime, I'm stuck with the procrastinator's motto: I'll do it next year.