ネイティブが教える英会話のジェムスクール☆Teachers☆

Today's horoscope reads: The clouds in your personal sky are parting to reveal distant horizons that were previously out of sight. You are enthusiastically anticipating the next chapter of your life. You realize the future is yours to create, but in your heart, you know what must be done. Continue tying up loose ends so they don’t hold you back from your destiny.

You know, Oprah Winfrey said, “I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky.”

It's time to get lucky!  

Hello All! This is an exciting week for me. I'm starting to drive to and from work. It's an eye opening experience. I haven't drove a car in two and a half years since I lived home so I was surprised how comfortable I was driving again. I have to get use to driving on the opposite sides of the road as well as a lot of the narrow streets Japan has but I'm up for the challenge.  

We all need heroes, someone to look up, or what we call role models. I am the firstborn to my parents and so I personally didn’t have one, nor do I pretend to say that I was any role model to my siblings. In fact, I was probably a pretty awful person to be around and compare oneself against. That’s because I was fairly selfish, self-centered, and, frankly, mean. There was a lot of pressure on me from my parents to “succeed” so I grew up with a sort of arrogant attitude. I am still working hard to put aside my ego and just be kinder and less judgmental. So over time I started to develop an awareness of the world around me, which meant that I started to read and think more seriously. In high school I started playing guitar and writing poetry, then in junior college I started writing stories, and then in my first university I majored in English with an emphasis in creative writing. At my second university I started to write theoretically and critically in response to some major Western thinkers, typically of French origin. Pictured above is someone that I admired for a long time, since my university days in fact. He goes by the name of Slavoj Zizek. His writing is incredibly accessible even when he is writing on very difficult concepts like system, dialectics, subjectivity, and the symbolic Other. He is a real model for how to write for the public, illustrating all his ideas with many pop culture examples while also inserting quotes from the original canonical philosophy texts to prove his arguments. Whenever I need some motivation or inspiration I like to open any one of his books to a random page and just read from there to get my brain jumpstarted!