The title of this infrequent blog has changed to “James Gets Through.” The intention is for the new title is to act as a prefix to each new post. Initially I was going to write up something centering around 2024. This was the year I got into some great habits. I lost a bunch of weight. I ran a couple of 5Ks. Then I finally caught COVID for the first time and it was all downhill from there. But I’ve decided to focus more on the title change of this seemingly annual blog of mine. So this should be read as “James Gets Through ‘Your Experience May Vary.'”
“Your Experience May Vary” was originally a record of strange things that happened to me in Japan through the lens of my self-isolated mind. There were dark times, absurd times, and hopeful times tossed out to the Internet because that’s the foolish sort of thing we started doing back then. There we a few popular blogs from awkward westerners who had found their way to Japan and I threw my hat in on that rather niche genre. Most of the posts from 2008 to 2018 are gone, backed up on a hard drive somewhere unlikely to see the light of a glowing monitor again. I went to Japan with a mess of personal issues, and while I got through some of them, calling my experiences there indicative of what one might commonly go through would be disingenuous. Your experience most certainly will vary, unless you’re a 6’4″ overweight, sarcastic male human who decided to get a job teaching children English while surrounded by cabbage in 2007. Then there’s a chance it would have been pretty similar.
I moved back to the US over 10 years ago, so whatever useful bits of information one could have extracted from my older ramblings are no doubt outdated and irrelevant to anyone trying to follow that path in modern times. The days of needing to wander the farmlands hoping to find an unsecured wifi signal so one could email people by arduously typing out messages on a Playstation Portable are long gone. Flip phones requiring 19 key presses to navigate your way to an English style comma are thankfully a thing of the past. Twitter just doesn’t exist anymore. The things I missed having access to then are now mostly readily available. There’s a Costco a reasonable distance from where I used to live, and when we visit the family in Japan I always look at it thinking how much nicer it would have been if that had opened there ten years earlier. There are even reasonably accessible stores where one can buy shoes in sizes over 29.5cm. Wonders truly never cease.
So out with the old title. Then and now, most of my reflections strike me as being a record of endurance rather than memoirs of experience. That’s not to say I don’t get to legitimately enjoy myself from time to time, but more often than not I look back on each day as “well good job getting through that.” There’s a spectrum of jokiness one can apply to enduring each day that I find myself enjoying. I suspect as we get into 2025 that this will be the communal sense of many, jokingly or not. We’ll all be enduring a great number of things in the coming years and hopefully doing our best to help each other through it. A year from now I hope I’ll be writing the entry for “James Gets Through 2025” and hopefully there will be more positive than negative to summarize, or at least there will be some humor to find in it.
Perhaps this is the year I’ll catch the bug again to try and write something up more than once in the calendar year. I know I have quite a lot of writing and rewriting I should be doing otherwise. The dead bird has been replaced by elephants and butterflies for anyone paying enough attention to care. Things have changed. Maybe it’ll be enough to shake me back into my not-so-old, but presently all-too-neglected habits.
James Gets Through 