On relaxation and dancing like a crazy person

It's Friday, and time for Kpop Nonstop! Pony and I have a whole evening of kpop goodness planned. It suits me fine after an excellent day at Yasuragi spa yesterday, which was eight hours of onsen style baths, tea and fruit, yoga, some more onsen baths and swimming a few hundred meters in their swimming pool. Reading a book in warm water outside with the cold November wind in your hair while enjoying a day of almost complete silence was amazing. I even got to eat okonomiyaki for lunch, which I haven't done since I was in Kyoto, and it tasted almost the same and I felt really nostalgic. When I came back to town, I was relaxed in both body and mind, and it's kept on going like that for most of the day as well. I feel a little tired and my shoulders ache a bit from the yoga, but all in all I feel so much better for having gone. I'm filled with what the Puppy called a 'yogi calm. "You look so good! I like seeing this version of you. You're so giggly. It's adorable."

I wish all Thursdays were spa Thursdays.

On hungry games and gender bending

Going on what could only be construed as a date with your now-exboyfriend kinda feels a little odd. Hemingway's leaving for Hong Kong soon, and while we broke up I still like him as a person and quite like hanging out with him, so I want to be able to do it and at least feel kinda normal. Nine months of history don't just go out the window in a heartbeat. Anywho, we went to see the second installment of the Hunger Games triology (which the movie usher hilariously called the Hungry Games, which made me giggle), and it was pretty good. Not as good as the first movie, but then again the second book wasn't as good as the first one either, so I guess it was to be expected. Also I've gotta say that I wanted pretty much every single item of clothing Effie Trinket wears in that movie. Couture all the way, honey.

I like movies that at least try to deal with mental problems. The way both Katniss and Peeta are haunted by nightmares and panic attacks as a result of post traumatic stress disorder from the games was extremely sad and quite uplifting at the same time. None of this Hollywood strong-characters-don't-flip-out bullshit. Lifting up anxiety disorders like that, by showing that the heroes are affected in very real and serious ways by what they do, is something I really like seeing because it adds depth and believability to the movie as a whole.

On days of laziness to come

I'm ready to assume this position and keep it that way for the next few days.

Finally day nine of the nine day workathon came to an end, and I'm now comfortably at home cradling a massive wad of cash that were my tips for today, ready for sleep and five days of laziness. Today was busy. Shan joked that it was because everyone knew that I was going to have five days off now, and since they'd all miss me so much, they all showed up today instead. Cute, but ultimately untrue - most of the people who came tonight weren't regulars. Still, despite there being a lot of people, it wasn't hysterically stressful. I think I'm getting pretty good at handling things.

On things going to shit and other freakouts

My cold's still going strong, and while I've regained my voice, I've gotten my typical end-of-cold-cough-period, which leaves me coughing until I want to throw up in the mornings. G took pity on me and knocked on my door to offer me some tea to calm it down, which was really sweet. What turned less sweet about the day was trying to book a ticket to Kiruna for when T comes to visit this Christmas. They were running out, and was trying to get him to hurry up, and he kept taking his sweet time. Suddenly all the tickets were gone, and we were stuck in deep shit. I wanted to kick myself (and T as well) for not doing this earlier. Now we're kinda fucked over, and this has turned into a make-it-work-moment if there ever was one.

On nerves and power structures

OK, forget everything nice I ever wrote or said about Windows 8. It's a complete fuck-up. Akito, I love you, but you were born with a serious case of The Derp. I've yet to figure out how to access Skype, and their weird aps settings are just upsetting, if you'll pardon the pun. It's completely impossible to understand intuitively. I'm sure I'll get around to it sooner or later, but as of right now it's just another source of rage quit for me. Fuck you for forcing me to merge my Skype account with you, Microsoft. You may have won this battle but you'll never take me alive!

I love my computer with a passion, and I would never harm it like that, but fuck me, Windows 8 is annoying.

On breakups

You guys have probably some idea that something's up, given the cryptic messages and hints as I write this blog not only for you silent readers, but also for my own sake, but now I'm telling you what's up: Hemingway and I have broken up, and he'll be moving back to Hong Kong sometime early December. I can't say it was a mutual decision, nor an easy one, and it was a long and arduous process that stretched out over days of talking and trying to make sense of things, but it was something I'd been contemplating for a rather long while now and felt like I needed to do. It's much harder to go, even when you feel it's necessary, when you still love the person and they're in no way a jerk to you, but in the end I just felt like we just wanted much too different things, and were probably more different as people than we'd taken into account from the beginning. Even if the distance Tokyo-Hong Kong is shorter than Stockholm-Hong Kong, I couldn't really stand the idea of a distance relationship either. Still, it sucks though, and I don't like hurting people.

On having a new computer baby

This picture makes me want to dye my hair red once it grows a little longer.

So a few days of radio silence turned into approximately 36 hours or so of radio silence. G helped me find a new computer, and I thought I would have to wait until Monday to have it delivered, but here it is, in all its glory, in my kitchen. His name is Akito, because clearly a Fujitsu computer needs a Japanese name, and while he has the birth defect that is Windows 8, I'm already a little bit in love with this new, strong and silent character in my life. I mean, Konrad was great, but Akito here can just offer me so much more.

It's kinda special, doing everything for the first time on a new computer. First blog post. First surfing the news sites. First facebook visit. First k-pop video (which turned out to be VIXX's new song Voodoo Doll - I can't believe I didn't like these guys a month ago). I almost don't want to touch it too much, lest it lose its shiny new-ness.

On a few days of radio silence

In the wake of my darling computer Konrad passing away, I'm taking a short hiatus from blogging until I can find a replacement for him. Please bear with me, and I'll be back shortly!

Love,

NotAWeeaboo

On plants and plant metaphors

Is it weird to have a very emotional bond to a plant?

On tea and slumps

 

Total exhaustion led me to sleep until 1 p.m. today and wake up with a sore throat and a bit of a cold. This is day one of nine consecutive days of work, since the other two Swedish girls' grandma is sick and they can't work this weekend. I figured it was easier to just charge right through and then get my time off at the end of next week for a three day weekend, but maybe I'm one step behind my body and it really would've needed the rest now. Anyways, it's not a terrible cold, and as long as I have my voice and not a fever, I can do my job just fine. It's Monday anyways. Mondays are pushovers.

On things that hurt

“It won’t be easy, when the tears that
the leaving heart had to shed
and the ones shed by the heart staying behind were so uneven.
Nothing’s gonna be alright, but
There were the moments; 
where every minute and second was precious,
where I missed even when I was there with you.
Only remember those.”

On good weekends and tough decisions

It's been a pretty neat weekend, all things considered. Friday night I met my adopted little brother after work for beer. He came by the restaurant, and as there was only another half-hour until closing time, Mafune let me leave early so that we could sit and talk shit before meeting a biologist friend of mine, having a greasy burger and then going home. Is this how working adults spend their Fridays? Two beers tops and then they're all done? I remember being 19-20-ish, where everyone would start drinking at like 8 p.m., go on until 3 a.m. and then hit an after-party. I have no idea where all that energy came from. I'd probably die if I tried pulling that shit now. Give me a nice night in with comedy shows and tea. I can handle that.

On unreasonable demands and finishing up the TEFL

Because self-restraint is overrated.

I can get so ridiculously provoked by some things my sister K does, but mostly I can't stand her all-or-nothing kind of attitude that she shares with her husband, or rather, I would be able to stand it if they would stick to anything longer than after the initial thrill wears off. They decided one day that they didn't like IKEA anymore. Instead of doing the reasonable thing of going "Hey, IKEA is probably good for some stuff, but let's not buy any more IKEA furniture", they went full-on purge-it-with-fire mode. "We're never shopping from IKEA ever again!" which of course only lasted a few months, and then they got mad when I called them on it. Same thing with every time they try to go on a diet. Instead of changing their lifestyle gradually, they go crazy with fad diets or unreasonable demands. "We're never having candy again!" And then a month later, there they are having broken their promise to themselves because they set themselves up for failure by just not being realistic. It's incredibly frustrating. K's new idea is that their family should no longer buy bread, but instead rely on K baking fresh bread whenever it's needed. "We're never buying bread from the store again!" Is this sounding familiar to anyone but me? I'm just waiting to see how long it'll take before that crashes and burns due to K's absolute inability to handle stressful situations. One day, in what I predict to be a not too far off future, they'll be out of bread, she'll throw a tantrum, and they'll never bake bread again.

On fridge hang-ups and tip dilemmas

I try to tell myself that it doesn't bother me that much when our new roomie puts his food on my shelf in the fridge. I don't keep all that much there myself since I don't really eat at home all that often because of work, so it's not like there's no space for him to borrow, but just in terms of my general OCD, it's extremely annoying. I don't like being petty, and going "Hey dude, you can't have your stuff on my obviously very empty shelf" does seem to be one of those enormously petty things, but it irks me. I like our new roomie, but between this fridge dilemma and frying bacon almost every morning... man, I don't know. I can't wait until I have my own place in Japan with my own fridge that I can be anal about.

Cue the unrealistic expectations.

On exhaustion and k-pop related disappointment

Today Pony dropped the bomb on me - possibly no more K-pop Nonstop parties after their season finale on November 29th, that Pony won't even be able to attend, and man, the depression that followed! There are other k-pop venues in Stockholm, sometimes, but the K-pop Nonstop parties were the ones Pony and I really liked going to. We're going to have to find new outlets for k-pop, and finding parties that only play it might be hard. There's always Fried Rice and Kpop+, but Fried Rice doesn't do just k-pop, and Kpop+ is mostly based in Gothenburg and don't really do that many parties in Stockholm. Sigh. Wednesdays really do suck. Luckily Pony redeemed the situation a bit by sending me an upbeat k-pop playlist on youtube, but I'm left wondering what to do now with my pent-up need to dance to awesome music.

On new encounters, good music and becoming one with the Snorlax

Last night, while studying late, I felt really cold. I crawled into my Snorlax suit and kept going for another hour or two, before falling asleep. I now never ever want to take it off, as it was the most comfortable thing I've ever slept in (or walked around in, or lounged around in, or done anything in). It's like this suit is channeling the spirit of Snorlax, and if I keep wearing it as constantly as I've been since finishing it Saturday, sooner or later we'll fuse together and I'll become Snorlax for real.

On nervous new people and Adventure Time

Why is this not my hair? Stupid work dress codes.

Pony came over today with all her hair chopped off and a really cool purple colour. It looked pretty sweet, and I was instantly jealous that I couldn't dye my hair funky colours as well. I'm so sick of my hair, but since I'm letting it grow out I don't want to touch it. I kinda wanted to go by Pony's apartment, take her hair and glue it to my head though. I miss fun hair. Being an adult with adult hair is far less fun than people make it out to be.

On pokemon partying and awesome suits.

I'd like to think it looked something like this, but exchange the mushrooms for near-obscene amounts of candy and alcohol.

 Against all odds I managed to blast through sewing my Snorlax costume in time for the party last night, and it was all kinds of fun. As always when the Pokemon Drinking Game is in action, there's way too much drinking going on, and after having slept much too little for way too long I ended up falling asleep around 1.30 am cuddled up between Knives Chau (dressed as Mew) and Honeybadger (dressed as Brock) while around us, Blastoise (the Puppy), Slowpoke, Pikachu, Jigglypuff and Oddish were joking around and telling stories and laughing at stuff, and poor Jessie from Team Rocket had too much to drink and was sitting it out on the balcony to regain some composure before going home. And let's just say I have a waiting list a mile long for Pokemon suits.

On flu shots and ice cream

Anime boy Yohei came back to work to get his flu shot, and I found myself disproportionately sad that he spent his time talking to Karate Husband's wife rather than me. I mean, I had to work obviously, but I still felt a bit left out. I just want people to like me so desperately that I feel like a kicked puppy when I'm not clearly adored at all times. I mean, I know Yohei thinks I'm cool to be around, as he always small-talks in encouraging ways before leaving for work (and he called me 'nee-chan', 'sis', the other day), but my brain works in mysterious ways and if I don't get constant validation I think that somehow people have magically started to hate me.

On needlessly worrying about competition that doesn't measure up

Tuesday, this young half Japanese kid came into work to meet Karate Husband to discuss work. Me being me (and on Shan's insistence), I sneaked around as discretely as I could, trying to pick up what they were saying as the interview was conducted in Japanese. I didn't want to be obvious about it as that would seem kinda rude to Karate Husband. This kid seemed to want to work evenings after school, but I'm not entirely sure he was over twenty, and that's one of our rules for serving alcohol. There seemed to be some issues, and I'm not sure the meeting went in his favour, as he left pretty quickly without being introduced to either Shan or me and Karate Husband later didn't mention it at all, but I still spent the entire time he was there fretting, mentally going 'please don't take my hours' over and over in my head.

I found the ad for the job online, and it seems like it's more of a kitchen duty kind of job, like anime boy Yohei's job, which is comforting to me. Also they put 'being able to speak Japanese' as a must, so I don't think we'll be seeing a surge of candidates anytime soon.

On pattern people being evil and meeting the most American man in the world

Man, sometimes some days are just a big pile of crap. Like yesterday, everything went wrong and I felt like I was under water all day, being slow and sluggish and stupid. I hate it. I couldn't make sense of my pattern, because some idiot decided that red and green are the best colours to use to differentiate between pattern pieces. Never mind that colourblind people in the world, like yours truly, might like to make something from these pieces. "Fuck colourblind people," the people at the pattern company seem to have thought. "Fuck them all." Fuck you, pattern people.

On early mornings and busy weeks

I woke up much too early today with a sore throat. I wish I could stay home, but I went by work with the Puppy to have a beer after having come back from my parents' house looking distinctly un-ill, so they wouldn't buy that it was for real. Ah well, Mondays aren't that bad anyway. If this keeps up, I'll take Wednesday or whatever other bullshit day of the week off. No worries.

It feels pretty good waking up early. This way I can compensate for going out drinking yesterday instead of studying. It was really nice - since I work with people who drink every day and tend to be much too tired on the weekends to even want to go out then, I don't drink all that often, and just talking shit with the Puppy was really relaxing. I was pretty tired after hanging out with my parents, my sister-in-law and my niece, even though it was a slow weekend. There were some weight-related concerns raised, as dad went to poke my side and jabbed straight into a rib, but they seem to get that it's not intentional and instead tried to think of creative ways for me to eat more at work.

On weekend plans and pokemon

What Fridays at the restaurant feel like.

Friday rolled around, and as always I'm approaching it with a slight feeling of dread. There's always so much to do, despite being two people. Shan says that the number of people who come in the fall and winter dwindles the darker the days get, but I've gotta say that I've noticed more of an increase. I feel like we're always busy, and while that's good for the restaurant, it's so damn tiring. Luckily I'm not alone on Fridays, and this week I'll probably even have Mafune there to save the day, but I can't wait for the weekend to start.