Japan: Year Three

On June 13th, less than one month before our two-year anniversary… my fiance dumped me on the phone.

This was “the big one”. The beginning of the end. Or, at least, the beginning of the end of my stay in Japan, at any rate.

There was nothing more I would have liked in those few days after the break-up than to curl up in a tiny space and be miserable. But, as life would have it, I had such an immense amount of pure crap to deal with that I hardly had any time to grieve. Apparently, some of my male friends simply didn’t have the notions of “inappropriate” or “too soon”. One day after my break-up, one of my “friends” quite literally tried to entice me to sleep together. Erm… no, thanks. And go die in a fire, please.

My ex-fiance tried to convince me that we’d “stay friends” and “give our relationship another go” for the next month… until he finally admitted that he’d just said that because he was worried that otherwise I’d kill myself. Funny that. After he finally confessed to this new chick he’d been digging since a while before the actual break-up, I told him where to shove it. Of course, I was falling apart through it all. After all… surviving a break-up may be easy, but surviving breaking up with your first-ever “true love” is just… /wrists. (Let’s see how many people get the pun.) Last I heard of him, he’d gotten rid of the new chick (or maybe she dumped him… boy, would I laugh at the irony…) and was already involved with someone else. Talk about a real eye-opener here.

The summer exams came and went. I don’t remember much, to be honest — just that I only went to a couple exams (okay, three of them) and I passed them all. The reports I wrote for the other classes even got me an A and a B. I didn’t really care, though. I was starting to get tired of being the perpetual idiot, the only one who “didn’t get it” — because, hey!, the teacher and I literally happened to speak different languages. As for peer support, I had none. To most of my classmates, I didn’t even exist.

Summer itself was a long, boring chain of uneventful days. The single most important thing that happened was me getting a haircut. Other than that, I stayed at home, played World of Warcraft like there was no tomorrow, read, wrote, played my music, and hoped that, come autumn, I would actually have something useful to do. Other random happenings include a laptop cooler that almost caught fire, a pizza that did catch fire, and a rediscovered passion for music, gaming, and Photoshop.

Once the summer heat finally died down and university started, I tried to keep myself busy. Didn’t work. Some classes were interesting, but most were just pure drudgery. What’s worse, there were at least three classes based on group work. And I am so not a team player… especially when my opinion is passed over as irrelevant (or ignored without further comments) and I daresay I have a teeny bit more experience than the rest of the team and should be heard, at least. One of the girls on a research group even went so far as to try and shut me up with the token line of, “I don’t know how you do things in America, but this is Japan.” Except that I’m not American. Sigh.

Anyway, going to university turned out to be just… sad. What I did was ride my bike over there, take a seat, get bored for an hour and a half, have a smoke, get bored for another hour and a half, ride home, eat, ride back, get bored for yet another hour and a half… rinse and repeat. I didn’t see the point of any of that.

On the good side of things, I only had one idiot try (and fail) to “court” me… a poor Japanese fellow who had never been with a girl before and tried to get a free smooch on our first (supposed) date. The reason? “I thought I’d try to bag myself a foreign girlfriend.” Best of luck with that, buddy. Also, find the tallest building in town and jump off the roof, please. Thank you.

Christmas was a sad and lonely ordeal. As for New Year, I spent the night chatting with my friends and family back home over Skype and getting drunk on sake all by myself. On January 1st, 2010, I made a New Year’s resolution: “Screw this shit. I’m going home.”

The three years I spent in Japan were good. And bad. And ugly. And one of the best things that ever happened to me, too. At any rate, here’s one for the world at large: I’m here, I’m still goin’ strong, and I’m ready to kick butt.

It’s time to pwn.