welcome to the about me page!
⯎ i'm keni! i'm 21, from the US, and i'm very passionate about language and art and lots of other things (currently realistic sci-fi! i love the martian by andy weir <3)
⯎ i got accepted to a language school in japan and i'll be moving this summer :D
⯎ i made this blog partially because i dislike social media. i also just love designing stuff :3 i thought this might be a great way to put my adventures out there so my friends & family and whoever else can see!
⯎ i'll mainly have blog-type posts talking about major events (hopefully posting most days), but i do plan on keeping a ジブン手帳 just for fun. we shall see!
⯎ my initial goals for this blog was to just have a platform that was easily accessible by any friends and family, but i've been thinking that maybe i could talk about some of my personal experiences with the school or just life in japan to help anyone else who stumbles on here. i was so lost when trying to find the right language school and it would have been so much easier if there was someone that outright told me their experience!
my life story
i won't go into too much detail of course, but basically i was fortunate to travel a lot when i was a kid. not only all over the states, but also abroad! of course i didn't appreciate it when i was little, at least not like i would now, but it really did shape me into the person i am today. i had an early concept of people who were completely different than me, who knew many different things than i did, and they all spoke different languages that i couldn't understand! i was so enamoured, especially because i come from a small town with little diversity. i always wanted to learn a second language (as i always said in those adorably embarassing "about yourself" paperworks that i had to write as an elementary student)
fast forward to middle school and, like every other nerd my age, i got into anime. yeah, typical, idc. anime is fun! anyways, at some point i convinced my dad to take me and my little brother to japan. i went in 2018 and it was sooo much fun. i don't think i had travelled abroad since maybe 10 years old or so, so it really put my life into perspective again. honestly there is a lot of stuff that i barely remember, so sometimes i have to relive it through photos. but i will say, it completely sparked my love for the japanese language and culture
well at some point in my life, high school is ending and i need to choose a college! i always knew i wanted to go into an art field, and at the time, graphic design was my passon.
so i decided to go to this super duper expensive school that i knew i could not afford but i wanted to get out of my small town as soon as possible and go to a cool aesthetic art school. i went to KCAI! it's a great school for artists, i think, and probably on the cheaper side of art colleges (my bank account still suffered 
well big plot twist.
on the night of our first AMAZING final/japanese christmas party (it was genuinely so much fun) our 先生 (teacher) told all of us that the osaka school decided to stop non-fluent students from entering (i was most likely N5 around this time). this was...well, really upsetting. i thought i was going to be fine at first, but i remember leaving after the final and called my boyfriend in tears so i could talk to somebody about it. it's a bit dramatic but i mean it really felt like my world was falling apart. i wanted to go to japan and experience life there more than just a couple weeks.
i went home for winter break and i was really pondering over what i could do to get over there. i had talked to my 先生 before i left and she thought it might be a good idea to transfer to a different school with a better exchange program. at some point, i was talking to my mom about it and she was like "well, why don't you just try to go to school straight from the source?"
so uh push came to shove and i withdrew from KCAI. even after just two years, i could tell graphic design was not my passion, at least not for my career, so i just didn't feel a need to go through with the rest of it. it was probably for the best anyways because dang that school really emptied my bank account and i did not like the idea of getting a loan. i did a lot of searching for what i should do next, and i decided the best first step is to enroll in language school. i pretty much decided i want to be a translator just like my 先生 was! it took me freaking forever to find a school that seemed to fit my needs, but i found it! i enrolled, got accepted back in january, and now i'm waiting on the immigration office to allow me into the country. after that, i just need to get my visa and then it should all be good!
anyways, i hope this blog can be an inspiration to people like me who want to finally dive head first into their passion! also, if you have any questions about my process of getting into a language school, feel free to email me at its.wabisabiish@gmail.com. i want to help as many people as i can, who are as stuck as i was when i first started this journey! seriously, it was so hard to find information on schools. if there was a website like this one to help me go through the process, i would have been saved sooo much stress.