Man, I'm so going to kill that guy

Placed in: transtu,

Everything is permeated with a smell I've hitherto only experienced when opening a freezer door. It's terribly disconcerting, and I frequently slip into confusion over what I'm doing- am I about to go outside, or am I reaching for a popsicle?

It feels like that line from Holy Grail: "Then winter gave spring and summer a miss, and went straight into autumn"-- only this time it's autumn which skipped all the usual coy 'Ooh, chilly ain't it' to jump us with marrow-splintering enthusiasm. I reek of cold.

And so-- surrounded by unseasonably crispy, snow-filled air and afflicted by a strange malaise of torpid irritability, I went to take the Japanese Proficiency Nikyu test.

Our small industrial Southern-Fukuoka city is one of three testing sites on the entire island of Kyushu.. another being Fukuoka city, which is only 30 minutes away. Oh well, yay for us.

The campus was dreary, and the desks in the lecture hall actually occluded the chairs before and behind them. Nothing like that "halfway up a fellow student's ass" feeling to be conductive to learning. In between testing sections we'd all reconvene in the hall to shiver, snack, and bitch about how hard it was and how annoying the people around us were.

With four proctors and over 100 test-takers, policing was impossible. People were looking up kanji on their cell phones. Apparently some girls down near the front had an elaborate system of hand-signals to check answers with each other. People would mutter to themselves, or in some cases even sing. (a-shi-ta wa, dou shi-ma-su-ka, la la la la) And the guy in front of me would let me know every time he hit a difficult question by vibrating like a cell phone. He also kept leaning backwards over my desk, necessitating my leaning back. A casual brush to say 'hey, there's someone back here' proved ineffective. I frequently contemplated his back and the point of my Naginata-Kitty pencil (I collect the weapon-wielding Hello Kitty stuff- cuteness + danger = irresistible)

Then there was the listening test, which was supposed to be our saving grace, the only section which people living in Japan consistently score higher on. After all the fast-talking jabberwocky over distracting background sound effects, the ambiguous advertisements and the keigo-spewing assholes who collect osatsu, in the end all we could do was choose whichever voice sounded the least angry. I know guy-in-front found it difficult too, cuz he went off like an unbalanced washload. I had to consciously quell several alarmingly strong impulses to stab. Yes, tempers were running high. Well, after one too many long stretches which concealed my paper, I finally just hit him. In what I hope was a びみょうに accidentally-on-purpose way. But possibly wasn't.

Grammar/reading comprehension was an absolute debacle. Speed-skimming passages then trying to figure out what the questions were getting at while juggling grammar eventually numbed my mind to the point that I could no longer recognize even hiragana.

Results are due in February (world's laziest scantron technician?) but i've already decided that pass or fail, next year I'm taking 1kyu. You always gotta aim higher. And if that guy's there again, well my Musashi-Kitty HB 0.7mm has a blood groove. We'll be ready.

Placed in: [ Cultural Osmosis ]