The origins of Captain Surly Pants (Part 1)

All my loyal readers probably already know most or at least parts of this story, but I decided it would be good to write a long version of my adventure up to this point just for posterity. It might be a little long, but I'll try and make it at least a little bit entertaining.

It all started long long ago in the early spring of 2005. By that time I had completed all but a few of my requirements for my Anthropology degree and I was faced with a plethora of elective credits I needed to fill. I had always been interested in foreign languages and I was regretting not sticking with Spanish even though I had neither the time nor the credits to take it throughout college. I realized that taking a foreign language would be a good use of the elective credits, but my Spanish had become very rusty at that point and I didn't want to have to start it over from scratch. Instead, I shifted my focus to the more exotic languages CSU offered and on little more than a whim I decided to take Japanese.

Fastfoward to Fall semester 2005. The professor keeps hammering how hard Japanese is and emphasizes just how important it is practice the language for hours a day. As you probably already know, this lead to an almost obsessive-compulsive doodling in Japanese is my classes to the detriment of me taking good notes. That didn't matter much to me as I had more motivation to sincerely try and learn a foreign language than to engage in discussion about medieval nuns.

A few weeks into the semester a former student of my Japanese professor came to the class and talked about this thing he was doing called the JET program(me). Essentially they ship off a bunch of underqualified college graduates off to anywhere in Japan and pay them to speak English to Japanese schoolkids. My parents had stamped out any hope I had for studying abroad pretty early in my college education, so the idea of being paid to live in a foreign country for a year sounded more than a little appealing to me. Despite the myriad of lucrative Anthropology jobs awaiting me upon graduation, I decided to follow my heart and pursue the JET program(me).

A day or two later I wound up going to the school career fair where the JET program(me) had a booth set up. I talked to the dude and he gave me a packet with all the things I needed to prepare along with the application: two references, proof of enrollment/expected date of graduation, my college transcript, a statement of purpose and probably about two or three other things that I can't remember. The actual application would pop up online in mid-October, but this gave me plenty of time to get everything ready by that point.

The part of the application package that worried me the most was the two letters of recommendation. I never really got to know many of my professors outside of class and I was pretty sure I didn't want anybody at Target writing one for me. This left me in quite the predicament. It was pretty clear to me that the Japanese professor would be a good first choice to write one of the letters, so I immediately started sucking up and brown-nosing.

For the next month or so I became the uber Japanese student. I did all the homework, I studied for hours a day and I always volunteered in class. This also directly lead to more in-class Japanese doodling instead of learning about the mechanics of bipedality. I had to get as much sucking up done in a short period of time because the application had to be in by the last week of November. I eventually built up the nerve to ask her to write the recommendation and she readily agreed. In fact, she added my sheet to a stack of about thirteen other students who had already asked her to write one. I felt pretty dumb at that point.

One recommendation down and one to go. I was completely stumped by who to ask for letter #2. There were only a couple professors that I had ever spoken two at of class and only one that I thought would recognize me outside of class. This particular professor was also my current capstone advisor. She shall remain nameless, but what I will say is that her last name begins with G and ends with antz. She will be known as Dr. G-antz for the purposes of this blog.

Anybody who has had a class with Dr. G-antz would probably understand my apprehension for asking her to write a recommendation. She tends to be very blunt and sometimes condescending. On top of that, she isn't known for her reliability, meaning that even if she agreed to write a recommendation for you that there's a strong chance she'll completely forget and/or not care and just not do it. After getting some encouragement, I finally manned up and asked her to write a recommendation after class one day.

Dr. G-antz readily agreed, much to my surprise; however, at that point she assumed I was just asking for a letter of recommendation for grad school. Once I explained the JET program to her she seemed to cool off to the idea. She seemed especially disgruntled after I showed her what she would have to write about me (my ability to teach, my ability to adapt to a foreign culture, why I wanted to participate, etc.), but since she had already agreed she said she would write the letter on the condition that I send her an e-mail which basically answered all those questions for her. Fair enough!