journal entry #7 - april fool's is only funny when you're actually joking

Thursday April 1, 2010 6:00 pm JST

Just kidding! Wow. How ironic that today is April Fool’s Day. Ha ha I just had one more curve ball thrown my way! So, it turns out that I am in Sendai (as planned). However, in the company’s rushed efforts to find me housing on the other side of the country than they originally anticipated, they apparently forgot to take into account the distance between where I would live and where I would work. They realized late last night that my apartment in Sendai was several hours from where I would be teaching (as I have no car in Japan)...luckily for me, they decided to find me another apartment. I remained completely incognizant of all of this until I stood talking with my manager at the subway station this morning, ready to board my train from Tokyo to Sendai. Unfortunately, I posted my suitcases from the hotel last night to arrive at the apartment address I had been given earlier, so now I’m unsure when or where I’ll get them.

In the meantime, I am going to be staying with a friend of a friend from the company...ha ha I can’t believe I’m saying this on April Fool’s Day and yet I’m completely serious. I am sitting on the floor of a storage room in the home of a random family that I’ve never met or spoken with before in my life. I will be here for up to another week while my company tries to secure me a new apartment! I start teaching next week, so it is quite possible that I won’t have a place to live before I am actually working in my schools. Awesome! :-/

I know I said that everything would work out and that I was comfortable adapting to “plan changes,” but wow, seriously? All I can do is laugh at the irony. In all honesty, my only real concern is that I start teaching next week...and I do not even have a place to live...by now I was hoping to be unpacked, settled in, and writing lesson plans for my classes. I know it will all be ok. I know that this is, in reality, a blessing because I will be living closer to the school than if I had moved in today—I’m truly not upset about that at all; I feel blessed by it. Rather, I am simply anxious to get started and I do not want these complications to interfere with my professionalism and competency at work. I hope details get sorted quickly because poor organization on my company’s end will only result in a poor first impression of me to the teachers, students, and Boards of Education. I would love to be able to wash my clothes and press my suits before I show up in them at work! Hopefully, my luggage can get redirected here within the next couple of days because I doubt that strolling into school while wearing Brad’s hoodie and my lounge pants will help with that whole first-impression thing...

Fortunately, I am constantly reminding myself to breathe and relax. :-) I am stepping completely outside my organized, detail-oriented, and sometimes (ok maybe often...or constant?) OCD-like comfort zone and taking everything as it comes. I am quickly learning that although it is wise to be prepared, it is better to be flexible. Nothing can go the way we think we want it to all the time...I say “think” because I definitely believe that things work out how they are supposed to – and that as long as we are open to the changes and seeking the blessings that follow, we will never regret a single experience in our lives.

I am committed to embracing this bump in my road. I have a rare opportunity to intimately participate in Japanese culture for the next week and I am going to make the most of it. No one in the family speaks much English and I can’t speak a sentence of Japanese...so either way it’s going to be entertaining. Well, at least I can say my time in Japan has not been dull! I have many tender emotions and constant pricks of fear that I’m trying to suppress in my heart at this moment, but I am going to get off my computer and head downstairs to make my first attempts at overcoming some overwhelming culture and language barriers—wish me luck!