I believe in fate, or perhaps destiny. I look back on the path my life has taken it just seems so... right, like everything was meant to happen. All the time I've spent in Calgary instead of my hometown, all the friends I've made here and the times I've had with them... it just seems like the decisions I've made or everything thats happened in my life these past five years were the correct ones. I feel like this next stage of my life - moving to Japan - was also meant to happen. I got accepted onto the JET program that generally only a fraction of people make it through and I'll test fate yet again next year when I apply to get into Grad school. It's funny how life steers you in certain directions without you even realizing it.

This may just be a poetic and roundabout way of saying it, but I got fired from my summer job a few days ago.

This is what happened:

We had a job on the third floor of an apartment building. It was an apartment cleanout meaning the tenant had been evicted and had left all of his stuff. If the tenant is evicted for over four weeks, the apartment and its possessions legally reverts back to the landlord. Naturally, they wanted to clean out the apartment so they called us (I worked at 1-800-Got-Junk?). The entire apartment was filled, literally to the roof, with stuff. The landlord had only booked us for 2.5 hours but this job would've taken all day, especially because it was awkwardly positioned on the third floor of the apartment. There was no balcony so all we had to use was a window positioned directly above the entrance to the building. In order to finish the job quicker, we had the go ahead from the landlord to park the truck next to the building so we could throw the junk into the truck from the window. So myself, being the driver, started to position the truck while my partner was upstairs in the apartment trying to organize everything into piles. It was a fairly tight fit to get next to the apartment building as I was driving a 14" truck on the grass and sidewalk. Since my partner was upstairs and I had no way to reach him, and also since I was a bit impatient to finish this colossal job, I was gently backing up the truck when I misjudged the distance behind me... and ended up denting a parked car. I made a 2-3 inch dent on the front panel of the passenger side which even left some blue paint from my truck. Luckily, the guy who owned the car came up shortly after and we were able to swap insurance information. I was a little shaken up because I knew what the consequences were so right after the accident I called the office and let them know what happened. They said to not worry about it and to just finish off the day. So putting that out of my mind, we managed to finish the job and the rest of the day without any more mishaps. They said they would call me the next morning and let me know what would happen with the insurance, etc.

The next morning I had some errands to do by the office so I called them and said I would stop by. When I got there I went directly into a meeting with my supervisors Alan and Corrin. They had just had a meeting half an hour earlier and had argued back-and-forth about what to do about the situation. They said I was a hard worker and good employee, even to the point where I was training new employees, and were looking for ways to keep me but would hit red tape each time. Basically what it came down to, if they allowed me to stay, was setting a precedence. Company policy clearly outlined what the consequence was for backing up a truck without a navigator and, regretfully, they had to let me go. They fired me in the nicest way possible, even offering me a good letter of reference despite what had happened. It was a bit sad having to leave the company because what I really enjoyed most about the job was the people and the friends I had made. I had already told them my last day of would be July 17th so the sudden gap in my schedule was surprising, to say the least.

There are two morals to this story: Patience is definitely a virtue and impatience can be costly, especially when your dealing with vehicles. The other is that there are always advantages to any situation. I may not be able to work and earn money, but I have virtually no obligations until I leave for Japan. Maybe I'm just putting a positive spin on a negative situation but either way, I plan on taking advantage of this unexpected vacation and make my last five weeks in Canada as meaningful as possible.

I love packing, and moving in general. It gives me a chance to get rid of all the crap I don't need, to whittle down my posessions until I'm left with the things I can't live without. I've been slowly doing this for the past month or so and mentally figuring out what I'm leaving and what I'm taking with me. I still have another 7 weeks to go before I take off but I'm the type of person who likes to get things done ahead of time.

My entire life as I move to Japan has to be condensed into: 100 lbs of checked baggage, 22 lbs of carry-on baggage, and 22 lbs of a "personal items". It sounds like a lot but when you think of how much stuff you've collected over your entire lifetime, it ends up being not a whole lot. However, I've realized I can get by with a surprisingly small amount of stuff. I've already decided the essentials that I am taking with me: 1) my laptop 2) camera and 3) snowboard. Aside from clothes, I plan on selling everything I own and buying what I need when I get to Japan. Luckily there isn't an airplane weight restriction on the amount of Yen I can bring.

The one thing that's going to be a bit tricky is my snowboard. With Air Canada, the length of my board alone exceeds the maximum linear dimension restriction so it will cost me an extra $100 to take it with me. To get around this (and to protect my board from being bumped around) I invested in a travel snowboard bag. It's still in the mail but I'm pretty stoked about it. I've already bought my big 29" suitcase and decided that the snowboard bag would be my second piece of checked baggage. The extra stuff I can cram into the snowboard bag will be worth the extra $100. It will also save me the cost of shipping it over via snail mail (like I'll be doing with my books I need to bring with me..) I also figured the bag will come in handy later on since one of my life goals is to snowboard the mountains in New Zealand and the Alps in Switzerland.

So if anyone is looking for anything, John's stuff is for sale at bargain prices.

For those of you who don't know, I am moving to Japan at the end of July to live and work for a year teaching English. I applied through the JET Programme and after a gruesome year-long application process, I was accepted. I'll be living in a small town called Kamiyubetsu on the northern shore of Hokkaido. Basically, at the northern edge of Japan, facing the Sea of Okhotsk (don't ask me how to pronounce it). It's in a small subprefecture (province) of Abashiri with a size of 160 sq. km and a population of 6,000. Considering it's less than a 10 min drive from some larger cities, I'm not too worried about the location. What I'm really excited about is that I got Hokkaido even though I didn't ask for it during the application process. I was a little worried I would get somewhere in the deep south, such as Okinawa or Shikoku since I don't think I'd be able to hand the heat and humidity there! Hokkaido is about the size of Ireland and Kamiyubetsu is at the same latitude as Toronto, so the climate is similar to Canada's. It's also not as people-packed as the rest of Japan so it's a well known for it's wilderness and mountains, and during the winter, it gets some of the best powder for snowboarding in the world. W00T! Just to give an idea of where I'll be, it's pretty close to here:

I fly out in exactly two months from now. I'm working full time and trying to pay off some bills and save up some money for my first month there. I'm planning on staying in Japan for a few years afterwards to work on a Masters degree so these last two months will be my last in Canada for a while to come..

So what does J-Hat mean? It's actually Ĵ, which is hard to type so "J-Hat" is a good compromise. Basically, it's a coordinate vector. If you want the nerdy explanation, you may remember from high school math that the three dimensions can be written in the Cartesian coordinates (x,y,z). If you think of the origin (0,0,0) and draw a vector of length 1 out from the origin along each axis, they become the coordinate vectors (î,ĵ,k). (k has a vector symbol too but I can't type it)

A few years ago in my classical mechanics class our prof, Dr. Hobill was teaching us rotational mechanics, which uses a lot of vectors. Dr. Hobill is the type of prof who likes to read out what he is writing on the board so for a whole 30 minutes we hear "e-theta-hat-dot plus e-phi-hat-double-dot minus one over theta r-hat-dot.." and so on. A girl in our class is a little confused so she raises her hand and asks, "Are all of those vectors?" to which he answers, "Yeah, anything with a hat is a vector." I usually wear my hat everyday and by this time I was falling asleep during the lecture (which is a bad habit of mine) with my hat pulled low. She points at me and says, "Does that mean John is a vector too?" Hearing my name mentioned jolts me awake but I have no idea what everyone is laughing at me for. I try to pretend that I've paying attention all along by faking a laugh, which must've been unconvincing since everyone including the prof is laughing at me. Afterwards, we were standing in the hallway outside of the classroom talking about the lecture when my friend Katie jokingly dubs me J-Hat. It's been my nickname ever since.