Don't Know Why

Seriously! I don't know why it's taken me so long to update! (Actually, I do now- but more on that later.) IUC classes officially ended on Friday, so this upcoming week is reserved for fixing up our 発表原稿 and polishing our speech-giving skills one last time. Tomorrow (ie. today) we also have an exam to see how much we've progressed during the year. If gossip is to believed, the test is the same as the one we took when the program started. That's a big relief, but also worrisome. What if I don't do better? What if the only thing I learned in the course of the year is how to recognize the kanji for corner （隅）which I remember getting wrong the first time around?

In other news, my presentation is shaping up quite nicely. In the end, I chose to focus on Japan's healthcare system and a health intervention program started in 2000 called "Healthy Japan 21(st century)." The powerpoint is still painfully boring, but maybe I'm just wrongly assuming that people won't find metabolic syndrome as fascinating as I do. Bleh.

Though this doesn't have much to do with Japanese or IUC, I think it's relevant to building good study habits so I'm including it. It's an article from the New Yorker about self-control... which I seem to have been lacking for the last couple of weeks and explains why I haven't made myself sit-down and write entries about all the cool things I've been doing.

Basically, I have a lot of "marshmallows" that have been 邪魔-ing my studies... this last quarter seems to have been the worst since things have been winding down and IUC is all about laissez-faire. My biggest time eaters can be boiled down to checking facebook/mixi far too often, watching streaming tv, and reading random articles online, which incidentally is how I found the article above.

I'm going to take a hint from Odysseus and try to prevent myself from wasting time before I can. And to do that, I need to reflect back to when I was a studying MACHINE in high school and figure out what's different now. What is it that I waste so much time on??? Argh, やっぱり INTERNET! I didn't have internet in high school so I had no choice but to focus all my energy on my homework for "fun." (本当だよ I didn't know what google was until I got to Yale.)

And now that I've recognized my beast- I'm going to pretend that it's not there... That is, of course, after allowing enough time to finish up this post. And done.