The Week in Review

It's official: another year on the horizon. I will finish here in July of 2008. I'm sure, at this juncture, that three years will be enough and it will be time to get back to American and Life As You Know It.

Life As I Know It continues more or less how I left it: curiously absorbing. I can't ascertain if its a quirk of island life or of living in another culture. I think some might find it suffocating, but part of me finds it comforting. I almost view it as an extended hermitage.

For certain, the other teachers don't look at it that way. Ryoko, the 9th grade English teacher, has inferred that living on ie-jima is restricting. Of all the teachers, she is perhaps the most cosmopolitan and most informed of what's OUT THERE. I can recall few teachers in my junior high or high school years that saw far beyond their immediate surroundings. I can understand why now, more than I care to admit.

In her defense, it is restricting. There's stuff to do, of course, but the variety is sparse. It isn't easy for a young teacher either. How the system works here in Okinawa is that, every few years, a teacher moves to a different school and starts again. On the Okinawan mainland, the tenure is five years, but since ie-jima is an island off the coast of a larger island, the length is three years, and on some of the farther islands, two. When your time is up, you're shifted somewhere else and someone new moves into your position. Nice job security, but going from a larger city to a small island that might have less than a thousand people, or even a few hundred, and you can begin to imagine how isolating it can be. I know at least three of the teachers have spouses that live off island they only see on weekends.

So you make your own entertainment. This week I've plowed through the first season of My Name is Earl and about half of the second while catching up with House. Thankfully my books arrived today: (Catch-22, 1984, The Thirteenth Tale. "Thankfully," since I'm going through The Lord of the Rings for the third or fourth time in the last year.

Those will keep me busy for a bit.