On stresses and stressers

Last night I was freaking out about my trip to Sweden, and decided to level with mom and ask her what her thoughts were on the matter. Now, I don't always get along with my mom, but sometimes talking to her will make some idea or other spring up. I tried explaining the whole visa issue to her, and while I'm not completely sure she understood what I meant, she suggested that I postpone my trip if it was causing me so much anxiety. "I think you need to come home and see people you love," she said. "Not just your family, but people that mean things to you. But if it's going to be a huge source of stress, it's better to opt out for now and plan it for Christmas or something." I guess that makes sense.

On fuckups and hero moms

Do you guys ever mess up, like to the point where you kinda want to vomit and wallow in anxiety? The kind of mistake where you run back and forth in a panic across your bedroom floor because you don't know what else you can do? I had two of those, separate ones, before breakfast today, and they were both due to my own damn incompetence.

On life as short stories

Good evening, Silent Readers! Bet you thought I wasn't going to stay true to my word and tell you about what's been going on? Well think again bitches. It's kinda late and I'm all wrapped up ready for bed, so they're going to be fairly short anecdotes without much coherence. Think of it as my life in short stories, or like me hastily going through a photo album while we're waiting for dinner to finish cooking on the stove.

On yearly highlights and a total lack of fireworks

And what a year it's been.

On sobs, hopes and homecoming

Going home ended up feeling a little rough. I mean, mom was visibly upset (while the others were being far more sombre about it), and hugging everyone just made me successively more bummed out. My niece kept hugging me over and over, and right before I walked out the door, she called my name. "Can you not be gone for such a long time?" she asked, her tiny voice quivering. "Because I'm going to miss you so much. But you know, even if you are gone for long, we'll still be together." And I broke down like a little shit. I'd managed to keep it together up until that point, but it was just impossible to not grab that adorable little munchkin and hug the crap out of her while sobbing.

Goddamn onion cutting ninjas are sneaking around my parents' house, that's for sure.

On mom tears and heartache

I can feel like such a dick when it comes to my family sometimes. I don't mean to be, but I'm pretty sure I'm a giant asshole every now and again. I think everyone probably is, but whenever I notice it I end up feeling really guilty about it. I'm still totally a non-confrontational kid at heart, and I hate making people sad or disappointed, so fights really get to me. Fights that aren't fights but rather just expressing negative emotions in a heartfelt way are the worst. There's just no guarding yourself from shit like that, is there?

On tequila, life goals and homesickness

Now this may be really pretentious of me to say, but you haven't lived unless you've been in a really sketchy bar in Tokyo at 2 a.m., downing tequila shots while people chant your name.

In Tokyo, I'm living the life I will one day be telling my grandkids about, and I am madly in love with every second of it, so going to Stockholm was obviously something that was a bit dreaded. Incoming: I'm totally going to unload what's been going on the past week. Wall of text incoming!

On Christmas delays

Merry Christmas, silent readers! As you may or may not have figured out, I'm currently hanging out in Sweden, celebrating Christmas with my family, thus leading to the non-existent blogging. Have no fear though! I'll be back soon enough, and with plenty to say, so stay tuned and have a lovely Christmas.

On Christmas crisis

The thought of going back to Sweden legitimately terrifies me.

On parental love and new work allies

Is my phone trying to tell me that it thinks I should stop being a loser, cleaning my aquarium, and go out and play instead?

On roads and growing

The Philosopher and I broke up last night. It was kinda long in the making, with things being bad for quite some time this fall, but it just got to the point where we wanted different things, and couldn't give the other what they wanted. I wanted space, he wanted more emotional availability. I'm not the type of person who likes to admit defeat, but the distance wasn't doable in the way we would've liked it to be. We still both deeply care for one another, and would've obviously wished that things could have progressed differently, but things don't happen in this world as they would in an ideal. I worried a lot about the future, since I don't want to leave Japan, and while he offered to try to find a graduate position in Tokyo, this life isn't easy. This place is different. It makes you different, and if you don't want that, or don't want to come here for your own sake, it's not going to work. For him to give up his entire life and move across the globe to a country he knows practically nothing about and with a language he knows literally nothing of, would have been too much weight on my shoulders. I didn't want that.

On nests and disco homes

So far I'm pretty convinced that Debu-chan has something known as Ich. This morning now all I could really do was watch him, since I was waiting for my IKEA delivery and kinda couldn't leave my apartment, but I was freaking out a little internally. I wanted to run out and buy a heater, a siphon and some fish salt, along with some plants for comfort, but time-wise I was in a really bad place. I needed to head to work, and even though it was pretty much as far from a busy day as humanly possible,  I was scared that they might not be alive by the time I came back home. Luckily, since pretty much no one showed up to work today, student-wise, I was able to take two of my coworkers to the very serious goldfish shop during my food break. Getting home, I immediately cleaned the tank, changed the water and medicated the whole thing, turning the water blue. The fish seemed to like their new disco home, until one of the Tomson 5 promptly died. Disco homes must not be for everybody. While this saddens me a bit, my main priority in this case is Debu-chan, who does seem to look happier. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what will happen now.

On pet ponderings

It's nice to have pets. It's nice to have something waiting for you when you get home in the evening, silently chilling in the corner with only the low soothing bubbling of the filter making any noise. I understand why fish are so popular here. They make for really nice decoration in relatively cramped conditions, and they're kinda personable when you really look at them. Enough so to make me kinda anxious about everything they do and don't do. These goldfish are now my babies, and no matter how resilient the good people of the internet tell me that they are, I'm terrified that I'll end up fucking them up.

On two weeks of radio silence, part two

One of the things that felt really hard for me during my radio silence was the fact that I felt completely isolated from my family. How isolated? Well, when visiting Sankeien, my brother texted me asking if I wanted to be in on my cousin's wedding gift. I was not invited to this wedding.

Now obviously that probably wasn't a slight, but more of a 'Well, it's not like she can come anyway'-type deal, but to not even be asked when clearly everyone else in the family was, felt harsh. When talking to mom later, she mentioned a funeral they were going to on the weekend. Apparently the wife of my dad's twin brother had died. No one had told me.

So yeah, that was fun. Feeling like the world has moved on without you, and that just four months can make your own family stop thinking about you was something that quite upset me. It's like because I'm not there, I don't matter. And what helps when you're feeling upset?

On yo-yo work and yo-yo days

August has so far not been the most stellar of months for me, at least not work-wise. Everyone in Japan is currently celebrating Obon, which means that everyone who's not originally from Tokyo is leaving the city to hang out with relatives, and everyone who's actually from Tokyo is deciding to not give a shit about English. My bookings are low, and I got another pesky negative yesterday. It ended up making me feel rather crushed. Luckily though, the blow was significantly softened in that I'd already asked my bosses for my lesson score comments, so that I'd know what to improve and what I was doing right. This apparently impressed the both of them to the degree that they even mentioned it to the Gaba higher-ups. I've gotta hand it to Peewee, him telling me to ask my superiors really put me in an awesome light. One of them came by my booth today to tell me to not mind the negative, and that he 'got more negatives in the first few months than I can count with all of my fingers and toes'. My colleagues also tell me not to freak out about it either. I'm working on caring less. Some students are just messed up, I guess.

On storms and solitude

My parents left this morning, and I'm finding it a little difficult to function today. I don't know if it's because I'm exhausted from the past two weeks, or if it's because I'm kinda nervous and hiding from responsibilities now that I really am all alone and everything is on me. It's a pretty terrifying thought. I should at least make an attempt to get down to the Nakano ward office to change my address from where I'm staying now to my new apartment, which feels daunting despite the fact that it all worked out without a hitch last time I did it. Now I won't have my parental paparazzi following me either, so I guess that source of stress has dissipated. Then again, the fact that I felt kinda like I was wilting when my mom texted me "Miss you already. Should've hugged you more. Love you." goes to show that even though I find them to be super annoying at times, they just want to help out and be there for me. One could wish it wasn't in such an at times overbearing way, but that's just their way. Annoying traits and all, family is family, and I really do love them. From here on out though, things are for real.

On anger issues and luxury work bathrooms

Parental grievances were no less today than yesterday, and today I'm beginning to really feel pissed. We were going to meet to go to Ikea in Tachikawa, because why deny the Swedish stereotype? Anywho, I left early to go pay the rent and then go to work, and my parents told me to call if there were any snags, and that we would meet up later in Shinjuku to take the train together. They couldn't do my practice lesson today at the Learning Studio in Ikebukuro, so I got off about an hour and a half earlier than predicted. I tried calling them to no avail, but texted to tell them to call me back before heading to a cafe for some lunch.

Now, two and a half hours, 3 more texts and a thousand unanswered phone calls later, I'm still alone at a cafe in Shinjuku, waiting to hear from them. At this point there's not even much of a point of even going all the way to Tachikawa, as that will take half an hour, and Ikea closes at seven. Ikea trips are never fast. This is going to be a long night.

On mother issues and money issues

I wonder if I'm being ungrateful by thinking that my parents, or at least my mom, is being kinda ungrateful. It's been happening quite a lot here in Tokyo, where I feel like I've been bending over backwards to try to accomodate to her by being a combined tour guide and interpreter, and it feels like she's just throwing it back in my face. Like today, when she was trying to find a specific kind of tea kettle, she snapped at me for not wanting to go check out rice cookers and leaving her with the poor tiny Japanese girl who didn't know English. "We've been doing just fine without you!" The other day when I wanted to meet T, but developed a migraine, she told me to just cancel the whole thing, because "Well, it's not like it's super fun for us or anything," as if the shit she's dragged me to has been super fun for me. Also mid-migraine she told me to stop being such a wuzz, and despite never ever having had a real migraine told me that "It's just a headache, I get headaches all the time", refused to let me take some of her painkillers to work and told me to go buy my own at the store in my own time as well. Yeah, I need my own painkillers, but I'll be at a desk from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. How difficult would it have been to just give me two? How was that even an issue? And now that I realized that I wouldn't be able to pay the initial money for the apartment via internet but instead would have to either go to the bank or to do a transfer via ATM, she decided to go ahead and go to the Bunka Gakkuen Costume Museum without me, because I told her I was nervous about making my 1 p.m. deadline for work in Ikebukuro. "That's not my problem. It's not like you have to go. I'm going though."

On air con fears and the appeal of skirts

I have this weird love-hate relationship with the air conditioning here. Today was roughly 29 degrees out at its hottest, so all day it was pretty sweltering. I get home, I'm exhausted, and I relax by turning on the air conditioning. No matter what the temperature I set it to though, I get chilly after like five or ten minutes, and have to turn it off, leaving me to like five or ten comfortable minutes before it gets too hot again and I have to turn it back on. I just can't get comfortable with it. I wonder if it's one of those things I'll get used to. I'm a little bit scared of getting a cold, like last time I was here when I got the worst air con cold ever, snivveling and being gross in general all across Kyoto. Not to be recommended.

On house shopping and boundless narcissism

Today turned into a day of apartment hunting. Hot apartment hunting in sunny Ikebukuro in near 30 degree weather. It was extremely tiring, and mid-walking I got my period early, so hey, that was fun. The rather small woman with the cute pixie cut who was out showing us the properties, Yagami, was really sweet, and walking for four hours between properties didn't really feel all that bad. The first was a traditional Japanese apartment with tatami mats, from sometime during the 80's. It was nice, and I was pretty tempted to take it, but in the end I went with the fourth property, on the top floor of a building overlooking a shrine close to Ikebukuro station. Mom argued that it would've been better to go with a bigger (and marginally cheaper) brand new apartment at Kita-ikebukuro, about 15 minutes from the station, but so much of the space was lost on a strangely large corridor, and the actual room was quite a bit smaller, on the second floor and overlooking a highway. Not so impressive. Dad took like a million pictures while I was filling out forms with the realtor, which was super awkward. As always I forgot to take pictures while out and about, but that shouldn't be too much of an issue. I'm signing the contract next Friday, and moving in next Saturday, so you'll be seeing a whole lot more of the final thing. Oh, and I'll be living like next door to a Muji store, so if you'll excuse me I've got some minimalist interior designs to consider.