I can't believe how quickly November has been going, and it's coming up fast on the end of the functional school term even though I still have to work into late December. These next few days are going to be a slog, though.

It's Parent-Teacher Meeting week, and my partner homeroom teacher, a Japanese teacher (as in he is and speaks Japanese, not that this is his subject area), I think tried to kind of shield me from boredom by not suggesting that I actually had to come to every single one of these meetings, but wanting to not get into trouble, I clarified, and I have to go to all of them because "parents got mad last year when the international teachers didn't come".

I don't know why, as only one of them could speak to me. One lady kindly tried to engage me despite the language barrier, too.

So, mostly, it's just me trying not to be visibly falling asleep while reading an iPad of sometimes hilariously wrong translation from live audio. It's not half bad most of the time, but it's SO boring. I dissociated long enough to get a little bit of thinking done about next term for the class I'm currently responsible for leading the planning on.

Thinking about changing from The Frogs to The Birds as an example of Greek Comedy because the comedies do not hit the way the tragedies do. Context and all that. But I feel like the latter is at least a little more universally applicable, and it didn't make me instantly want to fall asleep even harder.

I'm paying a girl from a group on Facebook for women living in Japan to come to my apartment and help me get a good couple hours of tidying done without a bunch of hard labor on my part. I feel like it'll be worth paying someone to be my big sister about it for a couple hours.

I haven't fallen into desperate squalor, but I definitely feel things are piling up, and it's just a pain to have the NEED to do something to get more organized hanging over my head.

Went to the doctor yesterday and my A1C was 0.6 points better. I haven't changed that much except no longer drinking soda EVERY day and swapping it sometimes for tea with some sugar but, certainly, far less than is in a bottle of soda. I've been trying to eat more fiber consciously, but it's hard to do when you rely on things you don't have to cook a lot.

I've been to get hotpot a couple times in the last month because I had this strong craving for eating lotus root out of broth like that. It has a very correct texture, in my opinion.

Just over a month, and I will be visiting my best friend in Canada, which is half of what I live for.