Vegetarians, Mental Health

On Saturday night we invited over a couple of my former students for a Mexican dinner. Both of them are quite young, one of them is my coworker in the same department, and I wanted to thank him for taking care of me the last year.

They seemed to really like the carnitas that we served, and after they saw my music setup they were excited to play some of their own music from their iphones over the stereo system. It was kind of like they were guest DJs, and it was fun to listen to some new music.

One thing that was a little odd was that they were really caught up in their smartphones during the evening, and sometimes Kuniko and I were left to just look at each other and roll our eyes when they got distracted by some email message, social network post, or a blog post. Kuniko and I both enjoy our smartphones, but these guys were locked in.

Still, it was a good night, and they enjoyed some cocktails made in our kitchen and headed home at a reasonable hour. One of them was off to Singapore the next day on business, so it was early to bed for him.

Sunday was spent completely indoors watching movies and eating leftovers, and then it was back to work on Monday. I had totally forgotten that I had to attend a mental health seminar that is compulsory for all third year employees. Even though I’ve been working there for longer than three years, I have only been an official employee at the company for three years, so my time had come.

There were about a hundred attendees, and the seminar was given by a very nice guy who is a professor at a university in Osaka. I wasn’t impressed with the organization of the presentation and materials, and it felt like way too much information crammed into two and a half hours. I teach how to do presentations (in English) for a living, so I wanted to give this guy some pointers. However, everyone worked hard to make things easy for me. One of the medical staff gave me an English version of some of the handouts, and even the lecturer stopped by to check on me and see how everything was going. We did some pair work once or twice and luckily I had a former student as a partner and he tried his best to speak in English during our discussion.

In the end I think that it was probably not such a great use of our time, but it had to be done to satisfy the human resources department. Maybe my stress level will go up in the future and the information may become more meaningful.

Tonight Kuniko got roped into attending an informal wine tasting at a French restaurant in Kobe. She’s not a big fan of French wine, and she’s already pretty tired out on Tuesday, so I think she’ll probably be home early tonight. I’ll be digging into the leftovers trying to clear some space in our fridge.


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