Self's Introduction

Writing about one's self is difficult. Difficult, because there is choice in the person that you choose to portray. I could conjure up lies or put on some front, presenting myself as an entirely different person. I could tell people that I'm someone that I'm not, and no one besides my close friends and family would be any wiser. As opposed to a character in a story, a fictional character is a lie, and those lies have to be made believable in order to engage and build interest within the reader. It's no mistake that so many works are done in the second or third person. Saying "you" or "he" is less frightening than "I." Less personal that way, despite the fact that every character ever written is, in all actuality, a reflection of the author. "To gaze upon the works of an artist is to stare directly at the artist himself," I once read and am quoting now, from a source quite unknown to me. Perhaps I made it up?

This blog will be, as you have probably guessed, about me. Not the character "me," but me for me. Me while I travel through Japan, while I visit schools and tell all the adorable and well-mannered children that I meet when to say "he" and when to say "I" — It's "i" before "e," isn't it? Except after...? Sea of Japan. Correct.

Please enjoy, and please feel free to comment. The blog will last for three months, with several updates per week. I will post as many pictures as I can, because I'm certain that all of you will want to see the beauty of Japan that I, too, will soon have the privilege of witnessing.

In the meantime, wish me luck. I leave in 27 hours, and have yet to fit my belongings into this decently-sized and compartmentalized box of mine that will be hurled into the belly of some large metallic and bird-shaped object with enormous jet engines on it, a thing which I will also be boarding quite shortly to sit in a blue polyester chair that will fly me a quarter distance's way around the globe in less than half a day's time. It's going to be great.