The Apple Uses the Word Meta

Holy crap it became September.

This post is going to be meta. I am going to blog about blogging. I am going to talk about why I quit posting, basically. I am going to admit that the only reason I know the word meta is because I watch “Community” and saw that episode about the Jesus movie, but in this dog-eat-hipster world we all have to use words with no meaning.

The reason I stopped posting was, somewhere along the line, I gave up on my promise to be funny and interesting and starting just writing about Japan again. I went back to my first post:

I promise to make this blog as intersting as possible. Because, you see, I want to grow up to be Davis Sedaris. Not like him, I want to be him. I want to live the expat life with my partner and write books that make people spit-laugh onto the pages. A boring-ass blog (boring ass-blog!  ha) about generic Japan crap will not make me even 1/100th as interesting as I’d like to seem to the world. That’s why this blog is not called “Apple in Japan” or “Apple and her JET Program experience” because those are lame, sad, and boring. The last one even sounds like the title of a terribly written Freshman essay.

All my posts, including the ones that sat in the draftbox for ages, sort of sounded like all that latter garbage.

There’s nothing wrong with writing about Japan, per se, and in fact, it gives me a lot to write and think about in my own life, off the internet. But the crux of it is, if I am writing about life in Japan, it’s one thing, but if I am writing about recaps of large swaths of time, or narrowing everything down into whatever the heck the JET experience is, then it’s all going to be so, so boring.

The problem with thinking about this whole “living in Japan” thing as an experience is that it makes you want to look at it through the lens of a study abroad department or… some other metaphor I can’t think of. Either way, I think it puts it in the realm of “look at this weird/cool thing I’m doing” and not “this is my life.” Sometimes life here is fun. Most of the time it’s pretty regular. If you come to Japan expecting to have some life-altering experience where your personality drastically changes and you become every special thing you ever wanted to be in the world, then you’ll be sorely disappointed. Life is normal. I go to work, I eat, I talk to Blueberry, I sleep. In between that time, we watch a whole lot of TV, just like we did in the US. Only difference is I have this kickass job that tires me out like no one’s business, I live in a place where I have no car and am constantly humbled by the shittiness of it, and also I can hop a train and go to Kyoto whenever I want. You win some, you lose some, and mostly you maintain an even balance of life, just like you had before.

That’s why so many JET blogs die. Once you run out of “tee hee! this is different!” steam, it becomes hard to continue in that same trajectory.

So back to basics, well, my basics.

I could quit the blog, but I like having a means to share rambling and I think forcing myself to keep it open will keep me writing on a more regular basis.

So yea, super meta. Right? Did I use that right? Absolutely not, probably. I missed out on some key hipster vocabulary by watching nothing but ANYTHING OF LOVE on VH1 and NBC comedies over and over (I have since dropped the VH1 addiction, but NBC has stayed, mostly because when it comes to downloading TV, you have to look your choices right in the fact and decide what they mean to you).

Here’s a bee I made.

And I’ll post more. Not regularly or anything. What am I? Serious?

But don’t think for two seconds I’ll ever stop listing my posts with JET Programme tags. How else will anyone ever read this ever? No one goes to a website to see someone’s apple pictures and shitty, awesome bees.

Tags: blogging, Japan, JET program, JET Programme, life, writing