Well, Nova may not think I'm worth much as a teacher...

...but some of my students think I'm pretty swell.

Well, I might as well get right to it. I resigned from Nova three weeks ago, and my last day will be July 31st.

Two days later, I'll be embarking on what I hope will be a much improved lifestyle—one in which I'll be working only two to four hours a day as a freelance English instructor, with my evenings and weekends free. It's my sincere hope that, as a result, I'll be able to make more (read: any) Japanese friends and also that I'll be able to do a better job exploring Japan than I've been doing so far.

I'm not terribly interested in badmouthing my soon-to-be-former employer; my opinions about Nova haven't changed much since I got here. It's a giant corporation that sells English the way McDonalds sells food, and it'll hire just about anyone who can speak the language. It's pretty upfront about this, and as with so many experiences in this world, you get out of it what you put into it. In my case, I developed a genuine appreciation of the nuts & bolts of my native language, improved my small-talk skills, and had friendly, down-to-earth conversations with about two thousand Japanese people.

For the curious, here's my spin on why I left:

1. My irregular schedule made socializing with non-Nova people virtually impossible. When you work for Nova, half your workdays will end at 9pm, and the other half will start at 10am. Your days off will likely be Tuesday/Wednesday or Wednesday/Thursday. The total number of working hours involved is barely forty, but the way they're distributed makes it difficult to establish a routine. If you worked 'till nine every night, your body would adjust, but when you do it only on, say, Fridays, Mondays and Tuesdays, and have to get up early the rest of the time, it's a bit more taxing. So evenings are out. And so are weekends, since you're working then. Which means your Japanese friends can possibly hang out with you Friday nights after 9:00, when you're exhausted, or maybe Saturday evenings, though you can't stay up too late since you're working early the next day. Sunday night might be okay, since you can sleep in Monday morning, but your Japanese friend likely can't, so...

'Course, if you have any private students, say goodbye to the rest of those evenings.

2. I don't think anyone should work at Nova more than a year or two, anyway. It's a dead-end job, with no real advancement opportunities, and no chance to hone your craft, since your craft is talking. Sure, you could work your way up to Trainer, but that's like being Assistant Manager at McDonalds—it beats working the french-fry machine, but so what?

3. Oh, you wanted the juicy reasons? Well, the truth is, I failed to get a bonus when I renewed my contract last April, and that's really when I knew I had to leave. Nova usually bumps an instructor's salary when they re-sign—anywhere from 5000 to 20,000 yen a month (about $45-$180), with 5000 being the standard thanks-for-sticking-around-for-a-year bonus, and 20,000 being the wow-you-boosted-our-sales-figures bonus. Even 5000 is kind of an insult, since it implies that the recipient is completely unremarkable. So you can imagine what 0 means. It's essentially an invitation to quit.

It was conflicting. If you get almost-fired from McDonalds, should you be happy or sad? Being told you're a lousy burger-flipper is quite a blow to the ego, to be sure. But so is being told you're a world-class burger-flipper, you know what I mean?

In the end, I decided that sticking around would eventually cost me my remaining self-respect. I began looking for alternative employment, and eventually amassed enough private-lesson work to keep me from going bankrupt. I hope.

And that's that. Starting August 2nd, I'll be working minimal hours for significantly less money, and hopefully making friends and sightseeing and working on video/animation stuff.

If it doesn't work out, well, you'll be the first to know...

What store are people getting this stuff from?

This has nothing to do with the picture, but I wanted to share. There's a nice series of interviews with all five members of the Kids In The Hall over at The Onion right now. Something Bruce McCulloch says really struck a nerve with me. The interviewer asks him about how his feelings about comedy have changed over the years, and he says:

It's like being a football player. When he's young, he just loves the feel of the football in his hands. Then, as he gets older, he realizes that football is all about grid systems and reading the defense. The fun of it goes away a little bit.

Eight new desktops, in Desktops.

If you like these, be sure to let me know, because they are not easy to make. Here's what goes into these simple little panoramas:

• Sifting through the hundreds of similar photos I've accumulated
  
• Trying out each candidate to see if it looks good as a desktop picture
  
• Color & contrast correcting
  
• Cropping
  
• Carefully designing letterbox versions to be as close in spirit to the original versions as possible
  
• Resizing each image to custom dimensions and exporting as JPEGs
  
• Re-naming each of the resulting files according to its resolution
  
• Converting each one to a .zip archive
  
• Uploading .zip files to server
  
• Uploading preview images; generating thumbnails
  
• Updating the HTML on the Desktops page
  
• Whining about it on my blog
  

Don't get me wrong; I think these are some of the best photos I've taken. I'm just saying, there's a reason I only do this two or three times a year.

Enjoy!