Bad Days

So. It's been a while since I've written here. March was more cold weather and April is skipping along with Winter holding on until the bitter end. But, today was officially the worst day I've had since I've come here.

It was no one big catastrophic event. No bad break-up. No major work screw-up. No tragedy by most definitions. Part of me even feels a little bit guilty for feeling so shitty. Instead, it was the combined effort of many little things that finally had me running to the bathroom to cry (I'm not proud of it, but I did manage to do it quietly).

Other teachers that sprung lessons on me unexpectedly. Not being told that today was staff photo day-the one time I haven't washed my hair, or put on make-up, or brought a suit jacket to work and so will look like the frumpy, rubbish foreigner. This is on top of weeks of loneliness, and days of not speaking to anyone else because of language barriers, and not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing because nobody fucking tells me anything, and a weight problem I didn't use to have, and missing dust and noise and chaos and sunshine that feels like walking through apple juice, and always being tired, and not knowing what comes after this, and why did I come here in the first place?

chocolate dream lovers and obligations gone amiss

I emerged from my apartment at 7pm, having finally slopped myself off my living room floor and taken a shower, because I was hungry and I smelled like closing time at a pub. But, mainly because I was hungry. Oh, I also got dressed; public nudity generally not being acceptable, even though it might make picking a mate a far less risky business (clothing being a deceptive art, often resulting in disapointment, especially if you're not drunk enough). Although, the most time I currently spend naked is the ten minutes I spend in the shower, or as I hop in front of my impotent heater when I get dressed.

The supermarket is alive with the voices of harpies screeching out Valentine's specials on chocolate! chocolate! chocolate! For a country that is thought of as the waistline haven, they do like their sugar. I don't know how they stay so slim. There are fried, sugarpumped, fibreless orgies everywhere. At first, I thought Japanese women just didn't eat. Now I realize that they have secret glands that take all the excess calories and pump them into their hair to be used for Anime hairstyles.

I loathe Valentine's Day. It is a cursed day, invented to make everyone miserable. Singletons are reminded how lonely and pathetic they are, and how long it has been since they've had a good, solid fuck. Sex has become a fantastical creature, perfected by the imagination, meant for people with smaller bums and bigger breasts. All the disappointments, the tequila cocks and the premature ejaculations are erased from the mind; until all that is left is an Eden of smooth skin and mind obliterating orgasms that you may not enter.

And for those dating or in a relationship, someone is going to lie about how it means nothing to them ( but really it's very, very, very important) and someone will believe them (thus fucking up royally for not being psychic, and hence being cast out of aforemeantioned Eden). There's just too much Goddamned pressure.

Valentine's Day in Japan is a little different. Firstly, it's only women that give out chocolate to men. Wow! If this had been the case when I was a teenager, I would have been spared many years of high school humiliation, when the only Valentine's gifts I received were from a well-meaning, but misguided mother.

However, this tradition is not without its drawbacks. They have a term "giri chocolate", meaning "obligation chocolate"-meant for all the men in their life that politeness dictates they give to (like work colleagues). Although, this sounds like a recipe for a giri chocolate being interpreted as a "I'll show you my sushi, if you'll show me yours" chocolate - which results in the That guy in the office (the one whose hair is a permanent oil slick and smells like wet clothes) thinking that the Wikkan Love Spell he performed in his bathroom (he still lives with his mother) involving freshly squeezed semen and raw eggs, has actually worked. Leading to missing underwareand dead mice in your potplants. Ultimately ending in an untimely dismemberment (in a lace wedding dress, of course) in a bathtub as you're consumed over three weeks in the form of sausages, pies and sushi so that you may both be joined forever in wedded bliss.

Enjoy the silence

Japan is a lonely place. Lonely for foreigners living here. And, just as lonely for the natives - if the proliferation of pornography and iPods are anything to go by.

School has started again, although the students are still on vacation. Unless I wish to whittle away my paid leave on nurturing greasy hair and cheese melting techniques in my pajamas while I chain-smoke episodes of Qi (though I do believe that this is a very honorable way in which to spend my life), I have to occupy myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy(crap! the y key has come lose again - an old injury from a Japanese textbook that was hurtled at my laptop)self for eight hours a day.

Conversation with the few co-workers that are at school is not really possible. OK, well, possible, yes. Painful, definitely. My smattering of Japanese just doesn't allow for it, and dialogue is usually comprised of strangled words, aching smiles and my "I have no idea what you're saying, but I'm just gonna go ahead and nod anyway" face.

Wikipedia has become my saving grace and Hellish Mistress (contraryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy to popular belief, not all ALTs are lazy louses).

So, I arrive home only to realize that I have had, at a push, five lines in today's script. Most of which was when I ran into a friend's girlfriend on my way out of the gym, and by then I was beyond conversation.

I find myself in strange territory. My previous job requirement was to do almost nothing but talk - to the point where I began to loath the sound of my own voice. Now, it's not quite sure what to do when it's called to the front. Like an indecisive politician, it gets stuck in the corridor until someone else takes over. Usually the proletariat, or very fashionable fascists.

I suspect that the Japanese are just as lonely too - trapped by their families and paper walls. So much of Freak Japan is built to escape; even if for a few squirts of time in a masturbation cubicle. The love hotels are temples to solitude with a chosen other. Alcoholism in women is increasing as housewives escape their prisons of boredom. iPods are shrines to freedom from everyone else.

To be a foreigner living in Japan is to thrust oneself into the lonely sphere of always being outside. To be Japanese is to be born into the loneliness of never being alone.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Maybe they're all just fetish freaks polite enough to keep their J-POP to themselves.

Enjoy the silence.

Random Autumn Musings

I understand why the Japanese are so obsessed with the seasons here - because they are so god damned beautiful and definite. The past weeks have been a riot of glorious death in red and gold.

I'm accustomed to a slow ease into frost and thermal underware. Perhaps it feels easier in warmer climes because there isn't a far distance to crawl into winter. Here, it is only Autumn and already I am at my chill limit.

The sun sets by five, which makes me sad. I enjoy my new job, but have begun to resent the brief hours of sun spent indoors.

The trees that line the street outside my school are now bare. That makes me sad, too. I enjoyed kicking through their fallen leaves as I trotted to my bus stop.

When I first arrived, I didn't understand how anyone could get fat here, especially if you don't have a car. The walking you have to do each day alone should keep you trim. But as I had to do a vertical limbo around a plump, sour-faced high school girl I sighed at how easy it is to drown yourself in a swimming pool of cream donuts (or ramen, should you decide to go the more traditional route). I have myself developed an obsession with white bread - a food I had almost completely shunned in my former life. Bread here is pretty shit, and yet I spend hours fantasizing about inhaling a loaf of squishy, gooey, chewy wheat Heaven. It's become my porn.

Dazzlement

Last night, while I was paying at the combini (the ubiquitous Japanese convenience store - purveyors of all necessities from snack food to porn) counter, I was hypnotized by a promotional cigarette box. Not so much "box" as a miniature vending machine of girly cigarettes dressed up in 80s Disco, individually smaller than a pack of tampons. A glitter ball fantasy of Madonna pink, garish green, a-doesn't-suit-anyone purple, and a gold that can only be described as "cheap perfume" - like the Tinkerbell cat's piss that my mother used to buy me as a child so that I could pretend to be a grown-up. For, being a child, I did not know what a hellish slog nightmare awaits everyone when they reach Adult. Should you purchase one of these sparkling collections of death trinkets, you will not only be investing in nausea inducing fashion statements, but you will also be treated to a clutch bag in primary red, blue or yellow. With a bow on top.

They must have an astounding marketing team. As the rest of the developed world increasingly treat smokers as paedophiles and serial killers, Japan can still make smoking cute*. It was in this moment beneath the fluorescent lights that I realized how dazzled I had been by this island.

I believed that the shift, the excitement had merely been because it was Different. A change. The freedom that I feel here - to walk at night, to ride a bike, the subways, the secure job, meeting new people. All so different from my life in South Africa. But I really have been dazzled and knocked off my feet. As a daily routine settles in, I've been overlooking that. The bright lights. The bright colours. All the God damned glitter. Like a Disney version of Vegas. I've never actually been to Vegas, but I've watched CSI. That totally counts.

I felt a deep and disappointing sorrow that it had so quickly all become so dull and flat. Was that all it had to offer me? A few cheap, superficial tricks to dazzle the eye and overload the senses, then withdraw like a psychedelic trip. Was that all I was going to get?

I had moved halfway across the world, have only barely begun to find my feet after months of free-falling, and I my muscles ached with the urge to run to the subway, get to Tokyo and catch the next flight to another rush. (What I really wanted to do was teleport, but my latent psychic powers are yet to show themselves).

Find something new. Another dazzlement.

It's rather depressing to discover how shallow you are capable of being. It had nothing to do with Japan, but my own restless nature. The first two months here had offered a reprise from myself. I had to focus so much of my energy outward just to perform the basic survival activities. Now I am more capable. I have my routines. You begin to overlook.

Perhaps we are an attention deficit generation, easily bored, always searching for something to distract us from ourselves. You could be living in a Baz Lehrman musical universe, and still you drown in the whirlpool of your own self-involvement.

I wish I could write a poignant life-shattering Fight Club-esque manifesto, a solution to disenchantment. But there is only, "Get over yourself."


*(And just in case the reader may be sensing an anti-smoking bias, the reason I was at the combini was to buy a pack of cigarettes).