ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

My friend from Japanese class came over last night. When my roommate and I got back from the Two Towers midnight release at Hastings, we saw his light on the third floor of our building, so we began yelling at him. Eventually he came downstairs to our apartment, and we chatted with him for a while. It was great to see him, but I felt sort of depressed knowing that he’s still in Japanese and I’m not. Our same sensei from last year is teaching third year conversation, and finding this out made me feel awful that I was missing it. Of my own volition, no less. All night at work I tried to think of what I could do to avoid getting totally left behind in Japanese. In all honesty, I’ll probably never be going back to this school, so I don’t know why I’m concerned about what the rest of my class is learning. But I love my Japanese, and I hate the idea of just having to totally ditch it. I’ve never been good with follow-through on much of anything, and more than anything I want to just finish getting acceptably fluent. I’m terrified that I’ll just lose it bit by bit without realizing it, and I spent all evening trying to think of how I can keep that from happening.

The lack of conversation practice is what worries me most. There’s an Asian girl working in medical records, the same shift I work. All night I pretended in my head, what if she was Japanese, and she found out I’d taken some Japanese and was all happy to talk to me and give me conversation practice. If I had to guess from her looks, I’d say she was actually Vietnamese, but it was just an excuse to silently made up both halves of our Japanese conversation in my head to see if I could remember everything from our conversation drills in school last year. Then I conjugated verbs in my head. When I go to the grocery store, I mentally review all my greetings in case I run into any of the Japanese people I know—don’t laugh, it’s actually happened a couple times in the past. I don’t want them to shake their heads and think, she’s really slipped since she stopped school. I think I’m spending way too much time thinking about this. I even make up fake conversations about the weather while I’m in the shower every morning. “Pretty rainy today, isn’t it?” “Yep. It’s supposed to rain for another ten minutes or so, I heard.” Ha, ha.

I have a couple of ideas what to do. My first idea was, well, when I’m done at medical records I’ll be working full time at the payday loans store. It’s looking like I’ll be working Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday there. That leaves me two weekdays off, and all I could think was, “Maybe I can make a sort of deal with the sensei from last year, that I can help them around their little office Mondays and Wednesdays in return for a little conversation practice and direction in terms of my study.” Then I felt like I was just being ridiculous. I’m already going to have a full courseload and be working full time, and I’m all worried about my Japanese lapsing?

It’s just that I don’t want to be a boring English-speaking accountant. I want to be an exciting bilingual accountant.