Hey! I’m Reika, and I’m a third-year psych major. Don’t want to give myself too much existential dread by trying to lay out what exactly I want to do in the future, but let’s just say exploring the unconscious. I’m from Japan, but my father is half Japanese and half American, making me a quarter American and three-quarters Japanese. Despite this, because I’ve gone to international schools all my life, English is my dominant language. If anyone else in this course is also Japanese, or anyone who’s open, I would love to connect! Contact me on Instagram @reika.js anytime. I love playing volleyball, and most of all, I love singing. Though I’m a bit shy around people, you can find me singing nonstop when I’m alone at home and especially in the shower.
I wanted to take this course, honestly, to fulfill my literature requirement, but also because I’d love to vicariously experience all kinds of romance, regardless if a romance world does not exist, through our course literature. Overall, my hopes for this course are to find some good novels I can look back on and think, “damn, that was a good read.” I used to love reading, but it became a passion buried under the advance of more new shiny things, namely social media, which I do feel a bit ashamed of. I feel like sometimes I just need someone to force me into a book for me to finally realize it was worth reading. Some books I really enjoyed that were part of my IB literature course were Wide Sargasso Sea, Slaughterhouse 5, and The Vegetarian. None of these are inherently romance novels, I’d say, but nonetheless, I look forward to the contents of this course.
Something that makes me a little nervous for this class is the contracts. Of course, I want to get the highest grade I can get, but I’m still weighing out the consequences. Because I don’t indulge myself in books or novels on the regular, I find it hard to imagine that I’d be able to stick to a new routine and schedule. Anyone else feeling the same way? I think it’s also a battle with whether or not the contents of the materials will pique my interests, because one thing I know for sure about myself is that I cannot slog through a boring book. I’ll think about it a little more this next week. If anyone does read this, what are you guys thinking for yourselves? I’d love to know.