Friday, November 9, 2007

DQM and my intermediate writing skills

Playing:
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (Nintendo DS)

けっこう楽しいぞ。It's essentially DQVIII + Pokemon, which more or less explains the 1.4 million units sold in Japan alone. After all, what do Japanese folks like more than Dragon Quest and Pokemon? White rice? Impossibly small cars? Baseball? Koda Kumi? E-mail? With the exception of Koda Kumi, that's a pretty select list of wonderful things right there...I'm surprised the game didn't sell 2 million.

Recently I've been chatting a lot with my Japanese professor regarding my application to get into JET, and a couple of days ago, he sort of offhandedly noted to me that I was a good writer. Then, as if remembering that I had a BA in Journalism, he amended that and said that I was actually a "great" writer. Normally, I'd gladly take either as a compliment, but I'm fairly certain that he was just being very amiable. And regardless, I'm at a point in my life where I've come to terms with the fact that I'm merely above average as a writer anyway. I lack the drive and the commitment to become a truly great journalist, and in terms tackling something substantial like a book, I'm really totally devoid of the dedication necessary to write anything of consequence outside of cute feature pieces. It's no longer really all that depressing or even sobering, it just means that I'm very, very normal. Which is fine. Anyway, my old Japanese instructor is such a cool, intelligent cat, and I think that if I had taken a course from him earlier in my college career, I would have seriously considered majoring in Japanese. No joke.

1 comment:

C K Okada said...

Yeah, I feel the same way. If I hadn't even attempted engineering, I probably would've majored in Japanese, too. I suppose it's another one of those "things about college you regret".