Out with the Old, in with the Yuu

So last month I was seeing a woman, Yuriko, who was the PE teacher at one of my elementary schools. This was not unawesome. She was real sweet and, being the PE teacher, she was in great shape. And we had some nice times together, although we didn’t go out very much. But it was kind of a mixed bag. On the one hand, I was really happy to just be dating someone. Winter got to be pretty lonely, yo. And it was cool to be dating a hot teacher. We had this whole super-secret-affair, making out in the office break room behind the file cabinets thing going. As the other boy JETs told me, this was a manifestation of “living the dream” on JET. So this was cool. But on the downsides, she was 30, and she was a PE teacher, and she was leaving. Something to do with prefectural teaching licensing stuff, she was moving to Kyoto at the end of March, and this would be the terminus of our romantic project. Which, let’s be serious, probably was what allowed for us to have a big secret affair in the first place – we knew it wouldn’t really go anywhere. So, she’s left. A little sad, sure, but as they say in the Japanese, shoganai. Or as we say in English, “c’est la vie.”

That was March, right before the end of the school year (wacky, huh?), and also right before my parents came to visit (also pretty wacky, huh?). And now, this Monday morning April 10^th, a gray raining beautiful spring day, this Monday, April morning finds me with a girlfriend. Yes friends, I am girlfriended. Yuu-chan. The co-ed. Yesterday we got together for the first time since the middle of March, and it was magic. I don’t know what it is, but I think I really like her. She just drives me crazy. Yuu-chan’s just started her last year of college at Matsuyama Daigaku, and in fact as I write this she’s racing to her professor’s office to try and change some of her classes around after the deadline. Ah, school. How well I recall the days of your never never met deadlines. In addition being apparently perennially just a little bit late to everything, Yuu chan and I have some other things in common, the big one being aikido. We met at the Matsuyama dojo’s new years party, but we’ve never gotten to train together yet. Which is good, because she is much, much better than I am. She’s been training with the amazing teacher in Matsuyama for three years, and is one of his favorite students. He likes me a lot too, but mostly because I make a lot of mistakes. I’m slightly-to-moderately nervous about when Yuu and I finally train together and I embarrass myself terribly by totally sucking. But, as the French say, “whatever.” For now, life is great.