Buggirl's Increasingly Strange Tokyo Tales...

If you saw me on Friday, the day before I hung my show, you’d probably have realized that I was on the verge of seriously cracking up. But you didn’t see me, Wataguy did. Sometimes I thrive on stress and run myself a little more ragged then I should. I say I know my limits, how much I can mess with my sleep schedule, stress myself out, run against deadlines, and for the most part that is true. I’ve gotten better over the years but I’ve probably slipped into old habits in Japan.  Back home I usually see friends, or people who know me well, fairly often…and when they see that half-crazed glassy look in my eyes they ask what’s up or encourage me to join them for lunch or something until I’m a little more human. But I don’t see my friends that often in Japan. In fact, Wataguy only saw me for two minutes, but what he saw was enough for him to worry.

The next morning I received a concerned text message from him. He’d checked my online journal and was glad that I’d finished the frames (and that they looked good,) but he hoped I hadn’t stayed up all night because I’d looked damned exhausted when he saw me. He was worried about my health and well-being. He’d also read an email in which I explained my plan for staying out all night in Shibuya, Tokyo after I hung the show (walk to Shibuya, nurse drinks at my old bar, check into a manga-internet booth for the night and stay awake typing and such…) He wasn’t going to be able to help me with hanging the show or sleeping quarters on Saturday night, and neither was anyone else I had asked, but he urged me to seek alternatives to staying up all night if I missed my last train. Couldn’t I stay with my American friend who lived near Tokyo? Surely I could catch a later train and arrive or even get a taxi…it would probably be cheaper than the bar and manga-café and I’d get that night’s sleep I needed.

( the long story )

Today wasn’t so great. An English teacher at my school died last night. He wasn’t yet 40 and was recently married. The only explanation I have right now (aside from the school being cursed, a theory popular with some teachers due to our rather high death toll in recent years…a topic for another post) is he had some odd sort of high-blood-pressure attack and keeled over. We weren’t close, but I’d taught with him and before I quit smoking I spent more time with him smoking constantly in the teacher's smoking area my first year of school. It wasn’t the sort of news I was ready to hear over my cell-phone at a Starbucks at 1pm.

And then I went to meet a friend of mine, which leads me to this vague, whiney, melodramatic post you can feel free to skip over. It’s the sort of details but no details posts that can be so tedious on live journals…but these posts happen because everyone has moments which can’t be melted into amusing tales but from which they need some cathartic release. It reminds me of the scene in Magnolia, when the male nurse is on the phone explaining how the moment is “like the moment in a film where….” And then follows up that he thinks those moments are in films because those moments are in real life…

( These things happen )