I am currently armpits-deep in my third semester of Japanese. I chose to take the class because freshman year I needed to fill a space and wasn't sure what to take. I decided to fill my language requirement, which meant choosing between Arabic, French or Japanese. A friend offered to take Japanese with me, so I signed up.

The friend took one class and called it good, but I couldn't quite make myself stop. After all, why put so much into one semester and then let it go to waste?

So I signed up for Japanese II, struggled through and decided I was fascinated by Kanji. I wasn't going to sign up for the third class, but a friend from Japanese II convinced me to go on. He ended up going abroad the semester Japanese III was finally offered, but I had already signed up and wasn't about to drop a class.

Now here I am, my walls covered in Kanji (quite literally; it's the best way I've found to study) and in the middle of putting together a presentation about the haiku. Seventeen syllables: five, seven, five. A haiku should reference a season in some way, and should be written in such a way that the unsaid is just as important as the words that are visible.

While it seems like writing a haiku should be easy, I've found that truly connecting to nature and creating important white space is a difficult and fulfilling practice. I've been practicing, though, and here's one of my attempts:

Star tears are fingers,
dusting cobwebs from my face.
I will learn to grow.