  This Thursday will be my last class with my summer Japanese teacher, so I'll have three or so weeks without any school whatsoever. I feel it's important that I train myself for the school year by doing "practice" study days. It sounds kind of strange, perhaps a little excessive, certainly very geeky, but the fact of the matter is that I know my nature very well at this point, or at least I know how a little vigilance can go a long way towards preventing myself from falling down that slippery slope right back into the waiting arms of old, bad habits. It's like a slasher flick, where the murderer always seems to be just a breath's reach away. I've got some books that I can read, so I can get used to extended reading sessions again, and I'll start reviewing all the Japanese vocabulary from last year (grammar's more or less okay, since I've been using it all summer), and continue to try to get ahead in this coming year's textbook. I want to be in a competitive condition right from the start of the school year, instead of having to warm up over the first few weeks.
I allowed myself guilty pleasure of a few hours of video game play over the past week, but it's only served to illustrate how easy it is for one of my own vices to enrapture and snare me all over again. The best thing for me, I think, would be to sell of my video games and related equipment, but I can't help but cling to them, telling myself that the last game I'll ever is just at the horizon, and once I've finished it, my gaming career will be over. I remember using a similar rationalization to justify the multiple "last" cigarettes I would smoke.
I hope Jet Li's upcoming film, urlLink Danny the Dog is the kind of hit that Jet Li deserves. Say what you will about the man's acting chops (or lack thereof), but the man has more martial arts talent in his toe nail clippings than the rest of the world combined. And who are you to criticize anyway? Can you do an inside jump kick-butterfly twist-aerial-into-front sweep combination? Yeah, I didn't think so. Anyway, this seems like the kind of role he's suited for, and he's got two strong co-stars, Morgan Freeman and Bob Hoskins. 
