You ever have one of those days? You're rushing for the door in the morning, glance in the mirror and see you didn't get all the shampoo out. OK, splash your hands and run them through your hair a bit and try to make the most of it. And rush out the door... only to realize you don't have your USB thumb drive in your bag with all the info you need for the meeting. Shit! Run back up the stairs and dig around to find it. Then leave again, and notice you're not wearing any gloves. So go back up again.
Now it's only 5 minutes till you need to be at work and you have a 20 minute drive. All right, so I'm late so it can't be that bad, can it? And then you notice the garbage truck slowly plodding along in your lane, and there isn't any way around it.
OK, maybe my morning wasn't quite that bad. But it seems like when one thing pops up in your way, more than one other thing follows it. This week overall has been decent (I'm an optimist, generally speaking), but there have been just enough annoyances to really irk me. So I decided to make a list for my reader's out there to glance over. Here goes:
10 Things That Get Under My Skin
(as a result of me living in Japan)
1. People who drive 10mph under the speed limit in front of you, slide up to a green light that's old enough to be sprouting mushrooms, then time it right to hit the yellow light and take their time turning perfectly so you are sliced off from behind them on the red. Jesus Christ people, pull your head out of your ass and just drive. This happens in the US for sure, but in Japan people make annoying driving into an art form. Tho at least you're unlikely to get shot for bad driving here... So maybe it ain't all bad.
2. The modern Japanese way of building. It's not that cold in winter, so let's not put in any insulation at all... making it feel colder than anything I felt back home in Illinois. Trust me, a long, numbing slight cold can be worse than the short bursts of real cold you get up north.
3. Not being able to buy anything more or less at a supermarket depending on its size. Bigger just means they'll have 10x as many of the same products, unless you're able to find a real international market. Meaning for the most part, you're always better off going to the smallest, seemingly worst stocked supermarket you can find.
4. Lack of labelling on meat products. Buy beef in Japan and unless it's super special meat from one specific place or it's an import, they will just label it as "Made in Japan"... which to my eyes reads as "Made in Fukushima, right outside the nuke plant. And no the cows weren't glowing per se, but they did have laser beams they could shoot from eyestalks and a few had a tentacle or two."
Even before 3.11 this got on my nerves, because you hear all kinds of stuff about dioxins and other crap getting into beans grown here, pigs raised there, and whatnot on the news, and labelling for vegetables now is great, but for whatever reason no one seems to want (or care about) labelling for meat.
5. TV programs that make "best of" lists, because in Japan there's a rule: at least one of the top 5 in any category has to involve Japan. It's kind of like Americans and their insistence that no matter how much something might suck in the US (healthcare, school lunches, crime rates, whatever), that particular thing is still somehow evidence that the US is #1.
6. The obsessiveness this country has with Mao Asada. Yes, she's a great technical skater, but her performances and facial expressions are usually wooden at best. Tho maybe now that she's taking time off and is doing TV commercials she'll be able to take what she learns selling meat products and whatnot and come out next year as a much better skater. We'll see.
7. PM Abe. Has anyone seen the look Shinzo Abe gets on his face from time to time? Man, is it annoying, because it looks exactly the same as the smirk George W Bush got, when his face was saying, "ha ha, I just fooled these suckers."
8. Being asked by people if something exists "abroad." They will always say, gaikoku de wa (外国では), and I'll be asked if we have everything from chopsticks and heated toilets to seasons, Japanese style sticky rice, or whatever. OK, asking is fine... but I am not from abroad (the land of elves, fairies and leprechauns); I have a country. If it's the first time we've met, sure, but I get this statement from people who should know me. Just odd and also a bit off putting.
9. People taking pictures of a stack of camera lenses, a line of lenses, old lenses on new cameras, new lenses with newer cameras, lenses on fire... OK the last one might be interesting. But the rest aren't. Posting pics of your camera lens collection to Flickr is the equivalent of posting a pic of your drooling 1 year old as your Facebook profile. Just stop. Well... I'll allow one post per person, but that's my limit.
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And for the last one, this one is a personal issue for me, and it pops up annoyingly quite a bit:
10. Repeatedly asking people with food issues to explain themselves. I can't eat hijiki (a brown sea vegetable like nori seaweed but different). I just can't, and it's not because I'm picky. Every time I've tried it for the past decade or so it makes me physically sick to my stomach. OK, it may be a bit unusual but one would think that explaining something like that once would be enough - I mean, wouldn't something odd like that stick in your mind?
But not here apparently, because I have had to explain why I can't eat it to some people several times (I think the record holder is sitting around 7 times). Fuck me. That's just beyond my ability to explain.
And it isn't just me. I have a friend who's lactose intolerant, friends who have dietary restrictions because they're vegetarians and others who don't eat certain things because of their religion, and a certain type of person here just refuses to understand.
For the non-Japanese like me, often times it feels like our inability to consume something is brushed aside and it's assumed we can't eat it simply because we're foreigners. It's the natto argument - that some foods are too Japanese for us to get. But even Japanese people I know get the same kind of ignorance thrust in their faces, again and again and again.
And it gets tiring, and on some levels feels like a kind of bullying (いじめ) at a very callous unfeeling level.
But you know, the easy answer is for us to just ignore them.
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OK, that's all for today's long rant. I hope you have a nice weekend, and if you're living in a concrete slab of an apartment like me, try to stay warm.
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