I will do my assignment on Chapter 3:
There are times when I feel really low or feel that there are no way to get out of the situation. When those times come, it's really hard for me to get out of that depression by myself-therefore I often ask for help from my friends and mother. Talking to my mother is especially helpful for me to regain confidence, and after talking to her, I repeat again and again that "time will tell". Sometimes, I just can't find a good way to solve the problem, and in those times, I always tell myself that time will tell me, and that time will make the situation better. I also tell myself that this is no big deal, that I have gone through more hazardous times before in my life, so that I can manage this time too. Another thing I do is to smile in the mirror, even though I may feel like bursting out in tears. Even though I feel really depressed and feel that there is no way I can manage this in my own, at least I make an effort to smile and jump and try to act fun in front of the mirror, which often helps to lighten up my feelings. Moreover, when I am in plight situation, I try to think about how fortunate I am--for example, how fortunate I am that I have a great family, have a nice house and have things to eat, have friends who support me through the difficulties, and the fact the sun still shines and the wind gives me cool breeze, and so forth. By telling myself how fortunate I am that I exist in this world, have so many things, and there are many people who are suffering even more than I am, I feel that what I am worrying about is not that big issue at all. I feel that I am even fortunate to be worrying about that kind of problem, considering how many people struggle to make a living every day. I think about all the things I have, tell myself how thankful I should be instead of mourning over something that is out of my capacity, which enables me to get out from the depression.
The biggest issue I am facing now is the fear that I may fall behind in the Chinese class. To solve this problem, I found that optimism is not enough- to stay optimistic is important, but at the same time I have to make certain efforts to feel that I am doing the best I can, such as doing all the work given in the class plus the extra work which I do during the jog and after/before the class. By putting a lot of effort, I feel good that I am at least trying, and is helping me to stay with the class activities. Although it is hard to catch up with the class considering the disadvantage I have compared to other classmates, I try not to excuse myself and see the reality, that mourning over such disadvantages would not make the situation any better. I tell myself that "I am doing the best I can, this effort must be returned". Studying hard and staying optimistic really give me incentive to work harder, and by working harder I get the optimistic feelings.
Sometimes the situation is so harsh that I just want to escape from the reality. It was so when I was trying to establish the drama club, that I sometimes wished I had never tried to built such club in the first place. In order to get back to reality, again I always relied on my mother and my friends for support, who sympathized with all the works I had to do and who criticized me for throwing away responsibility. I guess I was not a good person who made people comfortable telling me bad news, because every time the members told me bad news, I panicked. But now, after experiencing a lot of difficulties and hard times, I feel that I have grown up a little, and maybe if the similar things happened again, this time I may be able to manage a little better as I learned that panicking would not change anything. I learned that instead of just panicking over what had happened, it is much more efficient to think about what I can do now, instead of what just happened. Although it is much easier said than done, I am trying really hard not to upset over bad news, as I want the people to tell me the truth even if it is a bad news.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Sunday, April 24, 2011
What's my sentence??
It's really hard for me to describe myself in one sentence, as I have not really set up a definite goal for me.
However, considering this is about my dreams of becoming a special person, I will say:
"She humored many people with her acting and her songs"
Becoming an actress / sing-and-song writer had been my dream for couple of years, and I've always admired the middle aged talents whose appealing point is not prettiness or how gorgeous she is, but rather how charming her personality is and how good she is at acting.
I have always enjoyed making people laugh, to humor my friends with jokes and funny stories, and even if acting did not work well, I would like to find another way to humor people and make them feel better.
My dream is to make people cry and laugh with my acting and lighten up with my songs.
However, considering this is about my dreams of becoming a special person, I will say:
"She humored many people with her acting and her songs"
Becoming an actress / sing-and-song writer had been my dream for couple of years, and I've always admired the middle aged talents whose appealing point is not prettiness or how gorgeous she is, but rather how charming her personality is and how good she is at acting.
I have always enjoyed making people laugh, to humor my friends with jokes and funny stories, and even if acting did not work well, I would like to find another way to humor people and make them feel better.
My dream is to make people cry and laugh with my acting and lighten up with my songs.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Second Entry -Long and Short Term Goals
Long Term Goals
My long term goal is to become a trilingual--that is, to be able to speak Chinese as well as I can speak Japanese and English. So far, I am planning to go China to study one year as an exchange student, and I really want to improve my Chinese before going to China alone and living in a totally different environment. The reason I am specially interested in China is for one, I have already lived in China for a year and half, so at this point I can understand just a little bet of conversation. For two, and more importantly, I was actually born in China, Beijing, and that my name has the meaning of both Japan and China...Waka as in Wa means Japan and Ka represents China. So I feel some attachment toward China, and hope to be able to speak its language as well!
The challenge is that there are not much opportunity for me to hear somebody speaking Chinese or being forced to use Chinese in daily life now--as I live in Japan and Chinese is not really required of me to live through the environment. I need to speak Japanese and English in order to live comfortably in ICU, but definitely not Chinese....therefore, if I do not make a special effort, I will not be able to acquire Chinese language naturally.
Short Term Goals:
Having explained how it is almost impossible to acquire Chinese language naturally in current environment, I had decided to take Advanced Chinese Class, which creates an environment for me to use Chinese to communicate and write. Since I have not used Chinese for almost whole three years, it is really hard for me to keep up with the teacher and the class--but I am pushing myself to engage more in the class, such as sitting in the front of the classroom and asking many questions by throwing away hesitation. I am also always reviewing what I have just learned right after the class ends, so I would not forget the important things that the teacher has told us. I have actually started listening to the Chinese News Broadcast, which I do not understand most of them. Even though I cannot understand well, I always put Chinese News in my iPod and listen to them every morning while jogging around the ICU campus.
So for my short term goal, I am making an effort to participate actively in the Chinese Advanced Class, and also listen to the Chinese News everyday. It would have been very difficult to me to make some time to listen to the news, as I am quite busy with other things to do, but because all I do is to switch the music I have been listening to during the jog, it is not time consuming and is very easy to continue (as jogging is my everyday activity).
-Engaging Distractions-
Also to make my study more interesting and meaningful, I am planning to buy some Chinese music and probably watch Chinese movies during the Golden week so I can get the sense of "Chinese as an alive language" that is not just about studying on paper, but is a language used in people's daily lives.
My long term goal is to become a trilingual--that is, to be able to speak Chinese as well as I can speak Japanese and English. So far, I am planning to go China to study one year as an exchange student, and I really want to improve my Chinese before going to China alone and living in a totally different environment. The reason I am specially interested in China is for one, I have already lived in China for a year and half, so at this point I can understand just a little bet of conversation. For two, and more importantly, I was actually born in China, Beijing, and that my name has the meaning of both Japan and China...Waka as in Wa means Japan and Ka represents China. So I feel some attachment toward China, and hope to be able to speak its language as well!
The challenge is that there are not much opportunity for me to hear somebody speaking Chinese or being forced to use Chinese in daily life now--as I live in Japan and Chinese is not really required of me to live through the environment. I need to speak Japanese and English in order to live comfortably in ICU, but definitely not Chinese....therefore, if I do not make a special effort, I will not be able to acquire Chinese language naturally.
Short Term Goals:
Having explained how it is almost impossible to acquire Chinese language naturally in current environment, I had decided to take Advanced Chinese Class, which creates an environment for me to use Chinese to communicate and write. Since I have not used Chinese for almost whole three years, it is really hard for me to keep up with the teacher and the class--but I am pushing myself to engage more in the class, such as sitting in the front of the classroom and asking many questions by throwing away hesitation. I am also always reviewing what I have just learned right after the class ends, so I would not forget the important things that the teacher has told us. I have actually started listening to the Chinese News Broadcast, which I do not understand most of them. Even though I cannot understand well, I always put Chinese News in my iPod and listen to them every morning while jogging around the ICU campus.
So for my short term goal, I am making an effort to participate actively in the Chinese Advanced Class, and also listen to the Chinese News everyday. It would have been very difficult to me to make some time to listen to the news, as I am quite busy with other things to do, but because all I do is to switch the music I have been listening to during the jog, it is not time consuming and is very easy to continue (as jogging is my everyday activity).
-Engaging Distractions-
Also to make my study more interesting and meaningful, I am planning to buy some Chinese music and probably watch Chinese movies during the Golden week so I can get the sense of "Chinese as an alive language" that is not just about studying on paper, but is a language used in people's daily lives.
Friday, April 15, 2011
First Jounal Entry -Preface-
The most difficult experience I had as a leader was when I was still in high school around age 15 or so. At that time I was really interested in acting, so even before entering into the high school I had already set my mind to join the drama club--but my dream soon sank as soon as I found out that there was no drama club in ICU High School. Although at first I gave up and joined a dance club, soon I found that dancing is not exactly the best of my interest, so as a first year student I had decided to make a drama club myself--which turned out to be an extreme burden.
First of all, it was not easy to gather the members, as basically no one had heard of such thing as 'drama club' before so people were skeptical about joining it. But what made it even more difficult for me was the teachers discouraging attitude toward my effort to build a new club. Instead of giving me support or offering for help, majority of the teachers whom I asked support or help coldly turned down my offer by saying 'I don't know if that club is really necessary' or 'I wonder if your club still exists a year later'. All of these heartless comments really made me down, and at one time I really thought about giving up. We were literally on the brink of edge.
However, to tell the conclusion first, the drama club did succeed--the members dramatically increased after the first performance, and now it is accepted as one of the club activities of ICU High School--and it still exists today (I heard they have performance a month later).
To be honest, I was not good at combining members at all. I tried to be a good leader and so made an attempt to listen to all the member's voices (as I thought that was what a 'good leader' would do), but consequently it made me look ambiguous and made the members think that I lacked in self-confidence. Therefore, when it came to making decisions, I was often criticized by members for not leading the club well. Also, I had this strong sense of responsibility, so strong that I basically tried to handle all the problems by myself and of course that was out of my capacity so I often made mistakes which angered the members. To be fair, I did not have many qualities to be a good leader- such as decisiveness, sense of authority or charisma.
Looking back now, one thing that enabled me to attract members to stay with me was probably my excessive enthusiasm toward building the club. Even though I was severely discouraged by numerous teachers, I tried again and again--I even went to the Principle's Office to ask him to be the club teacher, as no other teachers offered to be one. Unexpectedly, he turned out to be once the manager of the drama club, and even though he could not become the manager for our club, he gave me support by giving me words of encouragement such as 'I really hope to see the drama club again'. Later on, though the change was not dramatic, the teachers started to show some sympathy toward my efforts, and then one teacher actually offered to be the manager of our club. I think my never-giving-up behavior and enthusiasm made the teachers to reconsider and enabled to keep the members to stay with me.
As the time passed, the members started to support me more actively, and I think it was because they feared that if they leave it all to me, the club would eventually collapse. Also as we spent more time together, I had started to realize that there were certain things that they were good at. I found that one of the members of the club was actually better at making decisions and leading people than I was, so I let her handle the decision making process while I did other jobs such as negotiation and campaigning around the school (the jobs which I was good at). With two leaders, the club started to function ever more smoother than before, and as a result our first performance turned out to be a success.
I think another quality I had that enabled us to pursue our goal was the strong feeling of responsibility. I had the strong feeling that I was responsible for the success of the club, and that strong feeling made me able to endure difficulties and drove me to do anything to not let the members down.
Also, I kept myself as honest as possible to all the members who supported me. At first, I wanted to appear to be a good leader so I made a futile attempt to do everything by myself and take all the responsibilities, but soon I realized that I had to be honest and tell everybody that I simply could not do this alone--obviously because I was forgetting a lot of important things. Therefore, I confessed that I could not do this alone, and that I wanted to share the burden with them. I think this honesty led to creating trust among the members, and helped us to create the sense of unity--that 'I' was not the only one who was aiming to achieve the goal, but we all were.
Therefore, considering what led us to succeed, I think it was the enthusiasm, the feeling of responsibility, and the honesty that made us able to develop trust among one another. The club would have not existed if one of the members were lacking, as every single member of the club had strong responsibility and enthusiasm toward establishing our own club.
First of all, it was not easy to gather the members, as basically no one had heard of such thing as 'drama club' before so people were skeptical about joining it. But what made it even more difficult for me was the teachers discouraging attitude toward my effort to build a new club. Instead of giving me support or offering for help, majority of the teachers whom I asked support or help coldly turned down my offer by saying 'I don't know if that club is really necessary' or 'I wonder if your club still exists a year later'. All of these heartless comments really made me down, and at one time I really thought about giving up. We were literally on the brink of edge.
However, to tell the conclusion first, the drama club did succeed--the members dramatically increased after the first performance, and now it is accepted as one of the club activities of ICU High School--and it still exists today (I heard they have performance a month later).
To be honest, I was not good at combining members at all. I tried to be a good leader and so made an attempt to listen to all the member's voices (as I thought that was what a 'good leader' would do), but consequently it made me look ambiguous and made the members think that I lacked in self-confidence. Therefore, when it came to making decisions, I was often criticized by members for not leading the club well. Also, I had this strong sense of responsibility, so strong that I basically tried to handle all the problems by myself and of course that was out of my capacity so I often made mistakes which angered the members. To be fair, I did not have many qualities to be a good leader- such as decisiveness, sense of authority or charisma.
Looking back now, one thing that enabled me to attract members to stay with me was probably my excessive enthusiasm toward building the club. Even though I was severely discouraged by numerous teachers, I tried again and again--I even went to the Principle's Office to ask him to be the club teacher, as no other teachers offered to be one. Unexpectedly, he turned out to be once the manager of the drama club, and even though he could not become the manager for our club, he gave me support by giving me words of encouragement such as 'I really hope to see the drama club again'. Later on, though the change was not dramatic, the teachers started to show some sympathy toward my efforts, and then one teacher actually offered to be the manager of our club. I think my never-giving-up behavior and enthusiasm made the teachers to reconsider and enabled to keep the members to stay with me.
As the time passed, the members started to support me more actively, and I think it was because they feared that if they leave it all to me, the club would eventually collapse. Also as we spent more time together, I had started to realize that there were certain things that they were good at. I found that one of the members of the club was actually better at making decisions and leading people than I was, so I let her handle the decision making process while I did other jobs such as negotiation and campaigning around the school (the jobs which I was good at). With two leaders, the club started to function ever more smoother than before, and as a result our first performance turned out to be a success.
I think another quality I had that enabled us to pursue our goal was the strong feeling of responsibility. I had the strong feeling that I was responsible for the success of the club, and that strong feeling made me able to endure difficulties and drove me to do anything to not let the members down.
Also, I kept myself as honest as possible to all the members who supported me. At first, I wanted to appear to be a good leader so I made a futile attempt to do everything by myself and take all the responsibilities, but soon I realized that I had to be honest and tell everybody that I simply could not do this alone--obviously because I was forgetting a lot of important things. Therefore, I confessed that I could not do this alone, and that I wanted to share the burden with them. I think this honesty led to creating trust among the members, and helped us to create the sense of unity--that 'I' was not the only one who was aiming to achieve the goal, but we all were.
Therefore, considering what led us to succeed, I think it was the enthusiasm, the feeling of responsibility, and the honesty that made us able to develop trust among one another. The club would have not existed if one of the members were lacking, as every single member of the club had strong responsibility and enthusiasm toward establishing our own club.
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