After the last post, I just stopped caring about blogging for a while.  I just pretended like it didn’t exist.  It kind of helps that a medicine I’m taking seems to make me care less in general, which, knowing me, is a good thing.

My feelings about Japanese are still very conflicted, but as of right now, I’m just studying wanikani and letting the rest kind of sink in.  And I am seeing results.  Today I went to the local HEB and there was a real honest-to-gosh Japanese person manning the Sushiya!  I carried on a conversation with him, and he told me my Japanese was not perfect, but understandable.  I told him I’ll take it – understandable but not perfect means I’m only failing a little.  I am gaining a level of fluency – not the “wow, I can just rattle this off” level, but more the “if I know what I’m going to say and am familiar with the words, I don’t have to think too much about sentence structure” level.  For simple sentences anyway.  That’s at least a sense of accomplishment.  I may not know why I’m doing it yet, but I am doing it.  That’s something.

Ever since I was a child, I have always learned for the sake of learning.  I learned the periodic table at eight years old.  I had no clue what I was going to do with it, but I learned it.  I learned about electronics at around 9.  The same pattern showed itself – I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I learned about it.  The knowledge was something I kind of collected – like some people collected baseball cards, or dolls, etc.  But all of these things have one thing in common:  academics only take you so far.  You can learn all about chemistry, but if you never perform an experiment, there’s no point.  You can learn about electronics, but if you never quite wrap your head around the idea that it exists to actually do work, there’s, again no point.  The same applies to music, which I have also learned quite a bit about – if you don’t know why music exists, then knowing how to play it is useless.

But all that being said, the academics still have some value.  Not for what the discipline is intended – for example, learning Japanese really only exists for the sake of communicating with Japanese people.  But instead, for learning about how people, and the world, works.  Without practical applications it does not satisfy its core purpose, but it satisfies the purpose of adding to one’s filter on how one sees the world.

Japanese has been valuable to me for that purpose, and the rest of it… well, maybe it will come in handy eventually.  Right now, though, I guess I’ll keep on trucking.

For those who sent comments, thanks.  I always appreciate them.

I am not good at writing posts when I am discouraged.  I’m terrible at feigning enthusiasm, and there have been several posts I’ve written over the past couple of months that I abandoned halfway through, with the thought “what’s the point?”.  I tried to write another one tonight, and it met the same fate.  I just can’t pretend.  I can try to, but it never, ever works.  Maybe it’s just a peculiarity of my background or personality.

I keep coming back to one thought:  why am I doing this?  I’ve said before:  I don’t know.  I live in a city in Texas that has very few Japanese people, I am uninterested for the most part in nearly all Japanese media, I have little to no interest in going to Japan, and the best answer I can give myself is “because I can”.  That’s a perfectly legitimate reason, but it doesn’t, in my mind, justify the amount of time and money I’ve spent in a pursuit that has no purpose.  And yet I continue to do it, and I don’t know why.

Just like I don’t know why I blog here.  I think it’s partly because I want to help others who might be intimidated by the whole thing – no matter what my motivation, I’ve learned a few useful things over the past couple of years, and I think I have a few interesting things to share (that not even my native teacher knows!).  But I think it’s partly because I just want to convince myself that there’s a purpose for my studies.  It’s not working.

And it’s compounded by the fact that I am currently taking a medicine whose primary effect seems to be to make me care less.  In some ways that’s a very welcome thing, but it’s not very helpful when I am trying to convince myself to study in the evening and can’t even come up with one good reason to do it except that I committed to it for some unknown reason at some point in the past.  In fact, it is one of the few things I’ve managed to even remotely stick with – I don’t even practice piano as much as I do study Japanese vocabulary.

Maybe I understand myself even less than I do others.

And yet, tonight, I will study some more.  Why? It’s a complete mystery to me.  I wish I had a reason.