The Misadventures of José Faxner

Not too long ago, by way of the very cool and interesting independent games blog TIGSource, I caught wind of equally cool and interesting FreeRice.com.

The basic concept of FreeRice.com is that it lets the reader test his or her vocabulary, and for every word you manage to guess correctly, 10 grains of rice will be donated to The United Nations World Food Program. It’s a very fun and addictive game, and knowing that playing it actually might do some good only serves to make things even sweeter.

I always strive to improve my English vocabulary, and as far as alternatives to reading the dictionary go, FreeRice.com ranks pretty highly in my eyes. The game keeps track of your “Vocabulary Level” and decides the difficulty on words given thereafter, so the addictive nature of the game isn’t so much due the excitement of donating rice, but rather a result of the never-ending struggle to raise your Vocabulary Level.

How high can you get?

As you might be aware, I haven’t written much lately. Not at all, even. It’s certainly not the first time, and it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that my efforts to actually start updating this thing on a regular basis were as pointless as I had perhaps somehow feared. I have to say though - for good or for bad - that that isn’t quite the case.

To make a long story short, I’ve simply been pretty depressed lately. My job situation seems to go nowhere, and I’m stuck in a vicious circle where I need to put more effort into job hunting, but the situation I’m in robs me of all the motivation I might’ve had. The fact that it’s getting colder and darker outside; something that usually manages to get me down on its own, is not helping matters. And don’t get me started on how much I miss Japan and all of my friends there.

There have been better days, and there have been worse days, but generally speaking I just haven’t been in a good mood at all for quite some time now. It’s not like I’m crying myself to sleep every night, but those times where I don’t feel anxious and sad, I feel more like I’m staving off the looming unhappiness than feeling genuinely good. My lack of motivation isn’t just limited to the job hunt - I never feel like I can be bothered to do anything, and in fact I seem to have a difficult time finding much joy in anything I do.

I realise that going all emo and whining on your blog about your dark, depressing life is about the most cliché use of internet technology imaginable, but please bear with me. I’ll definitely try not to make a habit out of it. To be frank though, as far as going-ons in my life are concerned, there really isn’t alot more to be said. I still sit around doing very little while dreading going to my job those few nights a week… Of course there are other things to write about, but, well, with the current situation I just haven’t felt like writing. Maybe writing would take my mind off things, I dunno, and it’s possible I’ll give it a try, I guess. But as usual I can’t really make any promises, so we’ll just see what happens.