Running to Stand Still

Today is Monday. Monday is a jogging day.

This morning, I got up, swung my feet out of bed, and sat there for a good long while before deciding, “Nope. I’m not doing this anymore.”

Katee Sackhoff enjoying her jog? ACTING!

In the interest of full disclosure, I think I knew I was going to do this before I even went to bed last night. I was having a lovely time, playing Skyrim in between watching episodes of Battlestar Galactica with The Boyfriend, when all of a sudden I realized: tomorrow is a jogging day. I stared into the middle distance for a while, and the first word out of my mouth was a long, drawn-out “Fuck,” and I’m pretty sure that was the point where I decided that this wasn’t going to happen.

I’ve tried to like it, I really have. I’ve tried to find that “I like jogging” switch in my brain. I’ve taken refuge in the oft-repeated factoid that if you do something for three weeks [1] then it becomes a habit that is part of your life now. I understand the health benefits. I know it helped me lose weight. I know that there are millions and millions of people around the world who wake up in the morning and think, “Thank god I get to go running today.”

I am not one of them, and I’m pretty sure I never will be. And I really can’t abide lying to myself about this any longer.

Go online and find jogging forums and jogging websites, and they are full of success stories. People who’ve been jogging for years and people who just started Couch-to-5K alike, they all seem to have become enraptured by this activity of putting one foot in front of the other at a moderate pace. They talk about how good it makes them feel, how it starts off the day right and how they miss it when they can’t go out. They have found something worthwhile to do with their time that brings them a sense of accomplishment and well-being. Even those who find it difficult seem to take solace in the faith that it will pay off someday. [2]

Where do I get some of that? Not from jogging, that’s for damn sure.

In all fairness, it’s not like I’m beating puppies to death with kittens or anything. I still hate it, though.

When I come back home, my thoughts aren’t, “Thank god I went jogging.” They’re, “Thank god that’s over.” It makes me feel tired and uncomfortable physically, and it inevitably leaves me in a worse emotional place than where I would have been if I had just gotten an extra half hour of sleep. I honestly come home feeling bad about myself – bad for having gone out, and bad for making myself doing something I so clearly hate to do and then bad for feeling bad about something I should feel good about.

Of course, with this failure, my dear Scumbag Brain has decided to daisy-chain all of my other failures together in a horrible slide show of ignominy and defeat.

So the facts are as follows:

• I’m no longer young enough to not care about what my body does in its free time.
• Therefore, I have to do some kind of maintenance.
• Jogging makes me hate myself.
• So do all other forms of exercise.
• So does failure.
• My capacity for self-loathing has its limits.
• Nevertheless, I like being able to fit into all my clothes.
• Dammit.

That leaves us with the real Question of the Day: How do you force yourself to do something you detest?

Or the other question: When is the right time to quit?

Or this question. This question is good too.

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[1] Or nine weeks, or three months, or whatever duration is, by odd coincidence, longer than the time you’ve actually been doing it.
[2] I wonder if there’s a correlation between religious faith and engagement in fitness activities. In both cases, you’re performing arduous work now in the hopes of a payoff later – a payoff that isn’t guaranteed to ever happen.

Who Has Two Thumbs and a Permanent Resident Visa?

Photo taken by The Boyfriend, who is just bossy enough as a photographer to go pro…

This guy!

Yes, after a very long process, a goodly amount of money and no small amount of stress and needless fretting, I am officially a Permanent Resident of Japan.

What this means for me is that my residence here is more secure. I don’t have to renew the visa every three years as before, and I don’t have to worry about the unfortunate confluence of an expired visa and an expired job contract again. If I do find myself out of work, I’ll be able to take time getting a new one without wondering how I’ll pack up my whole life and return to the United States in ignominy. [1] In addition, there are more types of work available to me. Previously, my visa status had me as a teacher or a professor, and that was what I was legally allowed to do. Now I could do anything, provided someone wants to hire me for it. If I were so inclined, this would make it easier to start a business, as well as buy property and gods know what else.

All told, this buys me some amount of security, which makes me very happy. One less thing to worry about.

That’s me, baby.

If you’ve come to this page to find out about getting a PR visa, here’s what I did: I got a lawyer. More expensive, yes, but this process is complicated and long and drawn-out, and I wanted to minimize the chances of screwing everything up, especially considering I had a time limit in front of me. My guy was Kawazoe Satoshi, who took care of everything and was very patient when I started to get twitchy and nag him for details. [2]

Also, I need to thank The Boyfriend, who stood as guarantor for me despite really not being comfortable doing so. This was partly because he didn’t like the idea of handing over personal information to some lawyer he didn’t know, but also because he was worried that the whole process might fail because he wasn’t financially or professionally stable enough for the Department of Justice. Fortunately, he was acceptable to the Powers That Be. He stepped up for me and helped make this possible. Good man.

Speaking of jobs, there’s an update there as well – Ritsumeikan Uji hasn’t gotten rid of me yet. While my regular contract does expire in April, I was taken on board by the International Baccalaureate program at our school, where I will be teaching Literature and Theory of Knowledge for at least another two years. For those of you not familiar with the IB Diploma program, it’s an internationally administered course that puts high school students through two years of rigorous academic work in various fields of study. It’s not for the faint of heart, and that applies to teachers as well as students, but the kids who come out of it are more likely to propel themselves to greater success in the years after high school.

So I’ll be teaching literature, which is exactly what it sounds like, and Theory Of Knowledge, which I’m learning about at the moment. Basically it’s a “How do we know what we know?” kind of course, which has the potential of making me absolutely insufferable on Facebook for a while. My apologies in advance.

All of this means that my 2012 Existential Crisis has come to a close, and has done so in a good and satisfying way. No doubt I’ll come up with something else to worry about at some point, but right now I’m just going to revel in my stability.

Pictured: My idea of stability

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[1] Which is still an option, mind you. Just not quite as likely as before.
[2] Of which there were, usually, none. Immigration is kind of a black hole – all the documents get submitted and then you wait until they’re done. You have no idea how they’re progressing, and no matter how you nag your lawyer, he won’t be able to tell you anything more than, “Just be patient.”