Things I Miss

I’m slowly approaching a milestone of sorts – one unbroken year outside American borders. Fittingly, the last day I slept on American soil was my birthday, February 4th. With no plans to return home in the foreseeable future, I am just over 3 months away from hitting that aforementioned mark.

Therefore, I think it be high time to compose a short list of the things I’m beginning to long for most. This group is by no means complete, nor in any sort of order either of importance or of strength of longing. I’m just gonna toss stuff out as it comes to me…

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Drew Goes to the Hospital

Several weeks from now I will become a patient at Oita University Hospital. In April of 2005, during a game of IM basketball at the end of my senior year at W&L, I tore the ACL in my right knee. You may or may not know that as a freshman in high school I tore the ACL in my left knee. For that injury I had a patellar tendon graft, went through roughly 9 months of hellish rehabilitation, and emerged on the other side well enough to continue playing competitive soccer for another five years.

Spending three hours hunched over a chairback getting my tattoo done was the most painful thing I’ve ever done *voluntarily*, but my ACL reconstruction and the following rehabilitation? I wouldn’t wish that upon my worst enemy.

Having to go through all that AGAIN?

…I try not to think about it…

But I must, because 3 weeks from now on December 6th I’ll begin about a one month stay at the hospital. They do things a little differently here in Japan. My actual date of surgery is December 12th, yet I have to report a week early “for tests.” Ma Li gave ’em hell over the phone as to what exactly “tests” meant, but they stood firm and just insisted that I show up on December 6th for these mystery “tests.”

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Drew in the Press

Time to clean some house around here. I’ve got snippets of this and tidbits of that that I need to get rid of, so without further ado, I present: Drew in the Press!

We’re gonna run through these chronologically, with pictures linked at the end of each section. The pictures today are all scans, so if they’re slightly crooked it’s because I scanned them poorly, not because I have no sense of balance…

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