Well, here we are at the final day of 2008. It’s 7:30AM and I’ve been awake for the past 3 hours because of jet lag, which is terrible because in about 27 hours I leave on a plane back to Japan where I’m sure reverse jet lag is going to really screw me up.

It’s been a good trip home. Got back into St. Louis on Christmas Day, and had the big family dinner. After that I spent the week mostly relaxing around my parents house, going shopping here and there, visiting some friends, etc. It seems like the older I get the more satisfied I am with just staying in the house when I come back to visit. I don’t feel the need to go out and “see the town” every night. It’s not that it’s not great to see people, but especially when I’m jet lagged, I see nothing wrong with staying at home and falling asleep before 10. I hate to think that part of that has to do with becoming old. After all, I have passed the quarter of a century mark, meaning that I only have a few more hundreds of years to live. Oops, I mean less than that.

So how was everyone’s 08? For me…I guess it was normal? It wasn’t an especially bad year, but I can’t say that it was an amazingly great year either. Just a normal year. It’s not like I’m depressed or anything, but I’m not the kind of guy to say “wow that was such a great year! omglololowtf”. 2008 was just a normal year, which in my book is a good thing. I went to China, finally started working full-time again, soon thereafter decided that working as a Japanese salaryman wasn’t exactly for me, and thus even figured out the next step in life. I’m looking forward to 2009 as a year I finally start working a job where I can both dedicate myself to work and actually get paid for it at the same time. It may very well be a first for me.

So that was just a short post to close out the year. Thanks everyone for all your help, etc over the past 12 months. I’m looking forward to a great 2009 and hope everyone has the same. I’ll also hopefully be traveling a lot more in the coming year, so if you’re living in the US and have been crying your eyes out every night for the past year or two hoping that you’d see me again, we might be able to arrange that. Happy New Year everyone!