My So-Called Japanese Life

Lately, I've noticed that my strongest impulse to make blog posts seems to come within 15 or fewer minutes of a lesson starting with one...

For several years, I was part of an on-line ( Usenet ) community for a particular on-line multiplayer game. I started off as an outsider in ...

Before any of my readers are mislead into thinking this is going to be a list of well-worn "dos" and " don'ts ", let...

My previous post was a caveat for the answer I'm about to give to this question that I was asked in the comments section of a former po...

Sometimes I get very interesting questions from my commenters (and luckily I almost always get excellent comments as well). The questions w...

Image pinched from the Charisma Man home page where one can order a comic book of the strips. Click this version to see a more readable siz...

When I was a child, I was sleeping over at my grandmother's house and had been relegated to the sofa for lack of any other space to slee...

A home-style design on the 1959 book. Teaching students privately is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, you tend to get a better quality o...

Back in my former company's former office, we had a tiny little kitchen that barely two people could squeeze into for food-related tasks...

Part 1 is here . The way in which our lives are shaped by environment is something which happens not only on an individual level, but on a c...

I remember the day the nail went in the coffin of my Christian beliefs. I was sitting in a history class with one of the most boring teacher...

While sitting on my bike at a pedestrian crosswalk, waiting for the little man to go from red man standing patiently at attention to change ...

One of my students attends a U.S. college on a military base. The people she meets in her classes are mostly from poor areas of the southern...

One of my students works creating subtitles for whatever television shows and movies come her way. Sometimes she works with bad B-movies (or...

Before I started blogging, I carefully considered a lot of aspects of the experience and purposefully set out to avoid certain behaviors whi...

When I was working in an office in Japan, I worked in a little cubicle alone much of the time. When my boss came into the room and spoke to ...

My first visit to Japan was for a one-month vacation and to meet my (then) pen pal and future husband face-to-face for the first time. My hu...

When I was about 12, my cousin and I were making cupcakes at my grandmother's house. We mixed the batter up in a big plastic bowl and we...