Perhaps I took a bit of an abstract artistic license in my essay, one that I think left Kaneko-san more confused than ever. In my head this was my general plot: I used to like reading literature in high school and one of my favorite books was Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. In this book, Siddhartha says that he can do three things: he can think, he can fast, and he can wait (i.e. things that one can do). From here I explain that these three things are very difficult and that I cannot do them (things I cannot do). I say that there aren't many things that I can do, but there are a lot of things that I like to do (i.e. my hobbies). The following three short paragraphs talk about my interests in the far past, near past, present as well as future goals. I liked to sing in a choir in high school and read novels, but now I sing with the radio and read poetry. Before I came to Japan (this week I also learned how to say "before x, y") I started martial arts and took some dance lessons and now I practice on my own and with my teachers over Skype. I used to teach a lot of students and I plan to teach again when I go back to America. And I would like to be able to understand and speak more Japanese, but this will take time–maybe I can wait. (Note the thematic tie to the opening paragraph. Also, grammatically, something I would like to be able to do, my own creative merging of two sentence structures–to want something and to be able to do something; seems I have a ways to go in intuiting Japanese grammar)
At least I gave it a humble conclusion which just barely got us over the finish line, flat tired for sure.
I don't think Kaneko-san had read Siddhartha or knew what it was. He had heard of Hermann Hesse and was very excited about that, but when he read that Siddhartha could think, fast, and wait...."What is object?" Well, he wasn't really waiting for or thinking about anything perse. "I don't understand." Ok, well maybe we'll just move on and forget that first paragraph happened. I decided that this was a topic outside my abilities.
The experience reminded me of my high school senior English teacher. She was a very smart and well-grounded African American woman who had dealt with the creative wise cracks in our arts school for over a decade and was not a bit shy in her use of the red pen. The most talented of the creative writers among us received returned essays with entire paragraphs or pages with a giant red "X" through them. In the margins next to our most brilliant theories and well-turned phrases were the words "Oh please." Senior English was one of the best and most humbling classes I've ever taken.
But it reminded me that it takes a lot to learn to communicate in any language, even one in which you are "fluent." (Does that ever happen?) So I'll take the increased red pen from this morning's lesson as a well-worn battle scar and suture the wound accordingly. It'll be two weeks before we meet again, and hopefully we'll be well-rested, recovered and ready for another adventure in creative wordplay.
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