On fireworks, crazy times and true love

Aaand I'm back. Sorry for the delay and all, but it's been a rough ride the past couple of weeks. Working three jobs is really beginning to take its toll on me, and still not really knowing what's up with the architecture job is stressful as hell. I want that job. I want it really bad.

Anywho, in short what's been going on: The presentation of the Shibuya building went well. This, in a best case scenario, means that they'll be thinking about taking over my visa, and my days of people anxiety and fake smiles are gone (most likely to be replaced with work anxiety and deer-in-the-headlights looks). Turtle worked a whole lot and was then adorable, as Turtle tends to be. Time's ticking, and my trip back to Sweden should be happening soon, and it's stressing mee out. A friend from back home is currently in Japan, right smack dab in the middle of all my crap I've got going on. Shit's cray, y'all.

On karaoke, police and text messages

You know how people say "Last night was crazy!" when they're talking about nights out, I'm pretty sure I still win in terms of craziness. Don't believe me? Try going out with Birdie and her boyfriend. We hit a karaoke place until 4 in the morning, at which point they had this screaming/crying match in the hallway and police were called to the scene. Luckily it wasn't serious and everyone was alright, nobody dragged off to sober up in a holding cell or anything, but it made for a pretty awkward end to the evening.

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 neglecting, birthdays and varying degrees of closeness

You guys know the drill - I drop off the face of the earth for a bit, come back, promise to get better, post responsibly for a few weeks, and then I'm gone again. I'm like the abusive, neglecting parent of blogging. I'd say I'm sorry, and that I'll change, but you know as well as I do that it's bullshit. And that's okay. I'm kinda okay with that.

Oh, and happy belated birthday, blog. You're two years old now. Honestly I thought I probably would've abandoned you by now. I guess I'm not that much of a neglecting parent after all.

On brain farts and melancholy

This first week of work has been really exhausting. You come back, you have to get into the swing of things - and fast, or you're fucked. I accidentally left the grocery store with the plastic shopping basket still in hand, which just goes to show what completely ridiculous brain farts will occur when I'm this out of it.

Oh the feelings.

Emotionally, I feel like today I reached my limit for the week. I'd love to go straight into hermit mode at this point, but unfortunately I've got my part time gig at Mr. Stone River's office tomorrow evening, so I'm still going to have to try to be presentable. By the time the day was over today, though, I was pretty far from presentable, and I can only tell you guys how beautiful it was to change into a new flannel pajama and cozy up with melancholy movies and feelings. Eventful Thursdays call for melancholy and pajamas. It's just one of those life rules.

On meeting gods

You guys know what's fun? Going out for the day to visit shrines and go grocery shopping and then realizing that your key for the front door no longer works. For real. I freaked out in the doorway, bags littered on the ground by my mailbox, and stood jamming a key that wouldn't enter into the lock, progressively freaking out more and more and imagining more or less crazy scenarios where my landlord switched the lock without telling me for some reason. I snuck in when a neighbour left, and was then deathly afraid of leaving again, lest I never get into my building, ever. 

On yearly highlights and a total lack of fireworks

And what a year it's been.

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 courage, knits and kitchy Christmas trees

I put up my Christmas tree today. It's hard to make a small pink tree fit in in an apartment that I'm striving to turn into a minimalist paradise, because I guess cyan pink plastic doesn't usually signify minimalism in any way, shape or form, but I like to think it kinda works. I just can't really figure out in which order I should sort my rice cooker, fruit tray and plant now that they have to compete with my plastic monstrosity (that I secretly love). Despite having absolutely zero Christmas cheer going on (since the weather here is identical to mid-October weather in Sweden and it in no way feels like Christmas yet), I kinda like having a little piece of winter wonderland hanging around.

On different kinds of hunger

People have an interesting views on relationships here in Japan. They're super casual about them in a lot of different ways, and completely confusing about them in others. It's pretty cool when they're super chill about one night stands and casual hookups, but maybe less cool when people who come to my lessons talk about going on dates and being in love with other women, despite being married. Like, it's cool if everyone's in on it, but something tells me that their wives are stuck at home, taking care of the kids, while the men hang out with women after work and have like a whole other world out there. Even the magazines that litter the break room are filled with classifieds where people are looking to cheat on their spouses. Stop it Japan, that shit ain't cute.

On reckless sleeping

I can't seem to get out of bed lately. I'll have my clock set for like 8 or 9 a.m., but once that time rolls around it's nigh on impossible to even get my eyes to focus, and I end up going back to sleep for a few hours, still feeling more or less exhausted when I wake up. I have no idea why. Maybe I'm getting sick? I have had a crappy sore throat the past few days after all, coupled with constant headaches, but not a fever or anything. Even if I'm nervous about Christmas, I'm really appreciating the thought of time off. This year's almost over now, and it's been a seriously crazy ride. A pit stop before lap two is pretty welcome, I think.

On potatoes and aqua men

"You're so oshare!" one of my favourite from the Japanese staff said today. I was a little taken aback, since 'oshare' means 'fashionable' and 'cool-looking', and I was just wearing my usual work getup (plus glasses, funky socks and a big-ass scarf). I guess drop crotch pants make me look cool even when I'm a square. I guess that's a plus. Even in my lessen observations, the people doing them write that I 'always look professional'. I'm just happy to be able to get away with this kind of stuff - as some of you may remember, that was one of my biggest issues with this job: having to wear business attire (because I'm a terribly vain person). Just give my Fashion Pajamas and I'm good to go.

On Christmas crisis

The thought of going back to Sweden legitimately terrifies me.

On finding myself mainstream

Just as pop culture has taught us, Japanese girls are cute. Most of them are cute in that non-descript way that happens when people have the same haircut, same makeup style and look like they shop in the same store (i.e. probably 80% of all college girls around here), and it's a way that requires a lot of work. When I moved I was about as low maintenance as anyone could imagine. Since moving, however, I've grown far more interested in makeup and other girly things, and I've expanded my routines to things like bb cream, blush, makeup remover before bed, and shaving my legs with razors that aren't the cheap disposable kind (setting the bar high here, I know). In the Japanese mind, I'm still very low maintenance, but it's funny how much more effort I spend on this stuff now. It's funny how much I like spending effort on this stuff. I'm still me. I'm just a far more put together version of me than most people know me as.

Still as true as it ever was.

On hormones, walks and being, well... tall

I know I took all this time off to do something awesome this weekend, but frankly, I haven't really done shit. I don't know if this was a good thing or bad thing. Maybe it was something I really needed. I've been drawing a lot, and that's something I haven't done in a long time. It felt nice to reconnect with it, if you know what I mean. I felt a little lonely the first two days, and I didn't really open my mouth for 48 hours except to speak to my fish and the shop staff, but in a way, maybe that was restful too. I've been having crazy hormones too, resulting in both my body hating me and my head feeling kinda out of sorts. Gotta love all those wonderful female hormones, am I right?

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 scales, the subconscious and sad students

In accordance to starting working out, I've been wondering if I should get scales. This might not sound like such a big deal, but it's something I've been staying away from for five years. As people who know me know, I used to have an eating disorder around the time I was 19 - I'd weigh myself once a day and the number had to be lower than the day before, even by just a little, or I'd kick the whole not-eating thing up another notch. After I'd gotten over my food obsession, I didn't get on a scale for years. I didn't want to jinx it. But now I'm wondering if it's safe to try again, or if it'll just be the gateway to new obsessions. Are former eating disorders really something you can get rid of? Are relapses really relapses, or does it just never really go away? And would it definitely mean relapse to get one, or can it be just a piece of furniture the way I want it to be? I don't feel obsessive about it now, after all. I'm thinking I should be able to handle it. I mean, it's a scale - an inanimate object with numbers on it. I think I'm enough of an adult to have it not control my life.

I mean, I say I'm an adult, but I just noticed that the shirt I'm wearing is on backwards. SO YEAH WHATEVER. I also accidentally bought cereal with a 'light chocolate flavour' instead of the bran cereal I thought I was getting. Looks like my subconscious is set on being immature for a little longer.

My subconscious, were it a pupppet.

On hubs and dancing

Can we all just take a moment to appreciate how amazing this song is? Sakanaction are totally awesome on their own, but when they remix their own songs, it's like a whole new level of something that just makes the pleasure centers in my brain explode. It's like an 8 minute eargasm. It's the first song they played way back when T and I went to Sonicmania, and I've been searching for it ever since in an obsessive attempt to make it mine and listen to it every day. Luckily they released a new single a few weeks ago, and there it was. Listening to it again for the first time since that night yesterday, all I could do was to once again acknowledge Ichiro Yamaguchi as God, and bow down to his brilliance.

On dates, design and day dreams

Oh silent readers,  you really are sweet when you aren't silent. Time flies, and suddenly it's been like two weeks without posting and I have no idea how that happened. Things have been... I don't know, pretty happening I guess? No worries, I'm going to clue all you dolls in. I'm not dead anyway, nor are things all terrible over here. On the contrary - about a billion things have happened, a lot of them quite pleasant, and while I was feeling kinda low about stuff there for a while, the real turning point came when one of my friends and I were chilling on my balcony, watching the clouds in the night sky, and after telling him all about how I felt given everything going on, he paused for a bit before going: "You've left your home to go live far, far away. You're doing this all by yourself, and sure, it's hard, but you're doing it. I really respect that."

In a way, that felt like what I needed to hear at the time. A local, just acknowledging that this shit is hard. I wouldn't change it for the world, seeing as I love my life here, but hearing that you're admired for your efforts was like a turning point for me. A lot of the time I feel like people I meet view me as a strange but entertaining specimen, and they can't really understand why I came to Tokyo, but in that moment it was like at least one person here gets it, and can relate. It cheered me up more than I thought it would.

On deaths and magic

Things have been pretty up and down for the past few days. For one, there have been a number of casualties in the aquarium department despite my best intentions - Debu-chan and Gin-chan have both died, and the Tomson 5 have been decimated to the Tomson 3. That being said, they seem to be much happier chilling on their own in the tank, and I have hopes that they might be able to pull through. I was genuinely saddened by the death of Debu-chan, seeing the amount of work I put into keeping him alive, but I guess with everything from the new tank that hasn't cycled properly yet, the stress of being a festival fish, the ich and all that just escalated to the point where there wasn't really anything to do anymore. It sucks, but what can you do? At least now they have some greenery and a big-ass wooden stump to hide behind, and I'm hoping they'll pull through.