US hardwire

Hello all!  I've been silent on here for long enough.  Is it possible to have 'overload' from life?  I think that sums up how I've been the last few months.  I'm sure you all have this great image of how my life must be so fun and exciting.  And it is.  But it's also tiring.  Some of it is my fault and some of it is just because my brain is hardwired for life in the US and it spends a lot of time freaking out.  At least the part that's my fault is fun: for instance, yesterday I watched the Lord of the Rings movie in entirety.  It finished at about 1 am.  

Recently I've been watching a lot of US movies and TV.  I haven't wanted to go out as much, and I've taken on a lot of projects around my apartment.  These aren't things that necessarily cost a lot of money, but may take a lot of time.  It seems like whenever I go out I get bored and exhausted.  Not always.  It mostly depends on if I'm hanging out with acquaintances or they're friends.  Friends in smaller groups, not too bad.  But larger groups just make me long for home.  

I like the projects I do around the house because they are straightforward, take a lot of work and have a great sense of accomplishment at the end.  For about five minutes.  Then I want the next project.  When I'm just sitting around I feel badly because I could be doing something.

The emergence of these projects may have arisen from the fact that Civilization won't play on my computer.  I've downloaded the patch, I've read all the online instructions, and it still can't.  Usually when I'm in this kind of a mood I play Civilization pretty much non-stop.  I love my mac, but why can't they make the game work for it?  I think it's cuz they wanted to game to be prettier so they changed the mac version or something to depend more on the graphics card, and mine is obviously not up to par.

So I've resorted to doing things that I myself wonder, 'Why am I doing this?  Why do I worry about it? I'm only here for three years?'  But I just have this need to keep doing them.  Great.  I'm sure some people would say it's culture shock, or homesickness.  But I used to go through these periods before in the US.  Hmmm.

Well, without further ado, here are some pictures from Okinawa.  I went there over spring break.  If you're wondering why they're are only five, I was passing my camera to someone to take a picture for me and we dropped it.  Still haven't gotten it fixed.

The first beach we found.  We got lost.

Okinawa's Aquarium: Ocean Expo Park

Ferry to a nearby island.  A big wave just soaked me.

The island we went to.  The beachy part is to the left.  There's coral right there and we went snorkeling.  

The four of us at Pineapple Park.  Eugene (behind), Diana (left), Me (middle), and Patty (right).  

I was the only one of the group who looked like the stereotypical American so we got a lot of weird looks.  By coincidence Diana and I wound up riding the same bus to the airport.  So we were walking around (that girl has an obsession with food samples) and we bought something at the convenience store.  The lady asked her if she wanted a bag.  She looked at me to see what she said, and I told her.  The clerk looked like she was having a brain aneurysm.  She probably thought she was in a Outerlimits episode or something.  Diana's family are Japanese Americans, but they moved to the US five or so generations ago.  She can't speak Japanese really well. 

Well, lots of fun.  Hope you all had a good Golden Week.  Mine was pretty good.  I went to an all you can eat buffet, watched movies, hung out at home, cleaned the screen frames, replaced the screens, washed the windows and the surrounding tracks for 9 windows and 2 doors, started hemming the curtains in the tatami room, put together a new bookshelf, moved other bookshelf into my office and re-organized my office.  I did a couple other things too.