...and 6 months to go.

It's unfortunate that I'm counting down my time until the end of my contract, but I'm finding this particular part of rural Japan a bit short on the culture, fellowship, and all the wonderful things that are usually associated with the JET Program experience.

Such things happen; nobody's really at fault. It's just the place where I live.

So I occupy lots of time by thinking about what I'll do at the end of my time. Stuff I'm tossing around in my head right now:

1. Work at Google. I applied to two positions at Google, one in Tokyo and one in Santa Monica. I'd love either, but I'm partial to Tokyo. I still find myself very comfortable in Tokyo and I'm really pretty sure I want to live there. The things that I'd miss, if I left Japan, can all be found in Tokyo, and it's lots of small things like the stuff you see waiting for a train, or going to really obscure, hidden restaurants with your friends after work.

2. Teach English in Tokyo. I've got a connection for this, so I could do the same work I do now but, say, inside an hour of central Tokyo. I'd get to live in Tokyo like I want, but I'd take a massive pay cut to get there. I'd say it's worth it, but it'd be a pain.

3. Go back to Texas and start a business playing video games for a living. Basically it'd be gaming events outsourcing - the kind of stuff I did as prez of the Texas Gaming Association, but this time for a living. And I'd have a warehouse full of gaming hardware :D

What do you amigos think?

I miss people, and sometimes I think about how nice it'd be to come home and get a new car and an iPhone and be with my friends again. But I just feel like I'd constantly miss the buzz of being in Japan, and especially in Tokyo. I want to look for a serious girlfriend, and my odds are better when I'm in a country of fluent English speakers (it's hard, and tiring, to have serious relationship discussions in a foreign language). But I'd get to play games with Americans, which means I could play PC games again and I could play online games with my friends instead of people who are all up all night in the States and thus awake when I play. This back-and-forth could go on forever.

5 years from now, people will record the Daft Punk Alive tour as one of the great cultural events of our time.

People will ask if you went and which city's show you hit. It's the KISS, the Dead, the Stones of our time.

And it deserves to be, when [according to legend] a guy pronounced legally dead in 1986 is the opening act.

And I will answer "Yes, I was there. Tokyo."

I made a very sudden and impromptu decision to visit home for the holidays. Between the loneliness that had been my birthday, the lack of holiday plans, and the fact that I've seen Tokyo (which is where all my Japanese friends were for the holiday break), I "cracked" and took Mom's offer of a flight back to the States for the holiday break.

I spent it getting reacquainted with a number of things, including: cars that don't suck, feeling like my normal self among close friends, and central heating. All very nice and comforting things.

Unfortunately, I spent it getting to know one thing that's always bothered me: sunrise. I've written before about how sunrise was nature's way of telling me "You should have gone to bed before now, but now it's too late," but it almost became a familiar sight as I spent the last week getting destroyed by jetlag.

As such, I spent the more valuable daylight hours getting to know my bed instead of things like Texan winter, my damn-near-estranged friends (who, like myself, are off to careers and aging), and copious amounts of Mexican, BBQ, real pizza, and breakfast tacos (I had each just once).

Still, the friends and food that I had were just enough. I grew to ignore the sun as it staged its intervention at 7:30 each morning, and the isolation that accompanied me at that hour was nothing compared to the rural Japanese isolation I had come from.

It didn't take me long to fall into old habits. Whatever new character traits I had developed in Japan dissolved as I settled back into the older me, which was more comfortable and relaxed, but as good as an altar boy compared to my newer alter ego. I think the relative boredom of rural Japan left me needing excitement badly enough to finally develop a bad side, and it's one I've thoroughly explored and always come back reeking of cigarette smoke.

I've been back in rural Japan for 24 hours, and I've realized that what I feared about a US trip came true - it's made it that much harder to actually live here. Whereas I could be enjoying the life of a good American boy, or the still-inspiring whirlwind Tokyo lifestyle, here I am with my new stock of video games, American candy, and a small bottle of BBQ sauce with no proper BBQ to put it on.

That said, life in big-city Japan looks more tempting with each passing day. Two recent visits to Tokyo just cemented that belief more and more. It truly is my favorite place in the world, so I might as well try as hard as I can to live there.

5 months down, 7 to go. But hey, I got a bunch of frequent flier miles.