fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

the best laid plans of mice and men, right?

today i was suppose to go on an international hiking trip, instead i spent 90 minutes lost within the greater japanese train system.
this sucks for several reasons, which are best communicated when broken down and individually confronted:

1 - i am dying, dying, dying to speak with anyone from america or any english-speaking country. i've grown way more dependent on my own 'inner monologue' than is probably healthy - because i seriously need to vocalize my rants and raves into audible words so that in the very least, they consume space and energy outside my head rather than inside it. i can't yet do this in japanese, so like the chickenshit-student i am, whenever i get tired or run-down i retreat to english whenever i don't absolutely HAVE to speak japanese (like class or shopping).

2 - i am dying, dying, dying to go hiking. i have been going on a lot of outings since i got to japan, but they always involve a lot of trains (and i still haven't figured them out - what a smart one i am) and shopping centers, crowded city streets, the faint odor of cigarette smoke, etc. i spent the entirety of last summer living in the woods, swimming in a lagoon, and seeing the most specfuckingtacular sunset over water and mountains that any human could ever ask for. so... i really miss nature. she is my mother, she is calling me, i am sick and lonely without her. jogging on a crowded cement pathway along the LA-style perfectly-rectangular, concrete, structured, mukogawa river just isn't satisfying my itch for natural beauty.

3 - Mr. Mori has invested a ton of time and energy into helping me with this hiking trip. he was the one who heard about the trip, called JICA to register me, emailed me twice with two sets of infallible directions, made me a voodoo doll so that the weather would be good for the trip(no joke - check out yesterday's blog!), called the dormitory this at 7 am to see that i had left, called JICA at 8 am to see that i had (not) arrived....! i totally fucked up all of his beautiful plans, just because i am an incompetent fully-grown woman who can't seem to manage taking the same train that hundreds of thousands of uniformed school children masterfully take each and every day. fuck.

4 - i woke up at 6:30 and hopped out of bed like a happy little bunny headed for her forest. i made a bento. i put on my hiking shoes. i was wearing a cute little outdoors-y outfit. you know, that ratty old blue hooded sweater that i've had (literally) forever. i felt like a naive, incompetent, and completely foolish lost little girl in a blue hoodie.

so, when i got off the train at, some place i can't remember now, i pulled out my pocket phrasebook, and along with the knowledge from my classes, attempted to say to the conductor "hi. i do not speak japanese. i am lost. please help me. i want to go to nishinimiya (by this time i had totally missed the trip time and was just trying to go home) thank you very much." i stood beside the booth for almost five minutes before i alerted his attention, whispering these few simple sentences to myself over and over again. thinking and focusing on pronunciation, and accurate sentence order. well, i may as well have been speaking to him in french - he didn't understand a single word i ridicuously mouthed at him. in ENGLISH he then told me to get on the train that would arrive in 9 minutes at the platform on the left. wow - so fucking embarrassing.

so i went to the platform, sat down, and tried to recount the day thusfar to myself in my head. "OK, I woke up, rode my bike to the train station. bought my ticket. took the train to nish, then got on the train and totally screwed myself over. hmmm. now - i'm lost in japan, all by myself, couldn't ask for help if my life depended on it. i was suppose to meet people to talk with today, but now i don't even have that, so i'm talking to myself again. alone. lost."

One big fatty tear rolled down my cheek as i casually rummaged through my well-packed hiking bag looking for a tissue. from all the body language i portrayed, it may as well have been a stray raindrop from the gray skies above. i wiped it away, and stared across the train tracks in front of me. an old man in a grey shirt had been watching me. he saw through the facade. he didn't even look away when i stared back at him, watching me. his piercing eyes saw each and every teardrop in the ocean of saddness that was rising and pouring out of my heart. i looked down again and pretended that it was very important that i fidget with my bag. he continued watching me. i looked back up at him. looked down again, then stood up and walked to another seat on the platform that was hidden behind a tall, dirty newspaper rack. deep breath. "what am i doing here?"

i made it back home easily, it was so easy to trace my footsteps. but i decided i would rather just stay on the same train and overshoot my stop by a mile, than deal with transferring trains and getting taken precisely home to my stop. transferring is really super simple, i just couldn't rise up from my seat around all this busy trains and people. i got off at koshien, and ate my bento as i slowly walked back to narou to get my bike. i then rode to mwu to tell mori-san to stop looking for me, he had done his job well. i fucked up. of course, the entire ieo office overheard, which i had no option but to casually laugh off.

home in the dormitory, i shut my door, shut the curtains, and slept for about four hours. now i'm blogging this heinous experience, and feeling a little better about my silly melodrama. i'm still really bummed that i didn't meet anyone international today, but i'll get over it. i've got my running clothes on now, so i'm going to go vent with a nice long, headphoned jog along the muko river.