AAAAAARG

Aaaaaarg. I am kicking myself today for being silly last week. I did not go into work on Friday since I was feeling ill, and I assumed that I could take a sick day, and not a vacation day for it. However, since I did not get a doctor's note, that is not the case. So I have less vacation days left than I originally thought, which sucks since I like vacation! And I could have secretly taken more but I am too earnest and honest and not sneaky or cunning or forward thinking enough! And so aaaaarg!

On Friday, when I was home in my futon wasting a vacation day, the doorbell rang. Thinking it was my office bringing me food since they felt bad for me, I answered it. It was not my office. It was my new next door neighbours and their extended family, or at least I think so. They gave me a box of detergent. I think it's customary to give gifts to your neighbours when you move to a new place. When I moved in, the attached bungalow beside me was empty, but a single dude with glasses and lots of green pants moved in sometime in November. He rang my doorbell one evening a few weeks after he moved and gave me a raisin cake. I took too long to open it and when I did it was gross. Not that I like raisins anyway. Then one day in January I came home to find a giant van blocking my parking dirt. My neighbour apologized and said a bunch of stuff that I didn't understand but I didn't think much of it, just that he was bringing in furniture that he just got. Alas, that was the last I saw of him. Maybe my singing and talking to myself scared him off. I hope it will do the same to these new neighbours, who could be anyone from a seventy year old man, a thirty something dude or a twenty something lady. Hopefully all three, because the place is so small that they'll want to leave sooner. And not block my spot, which is on the side of a cliff, if I didn't mention before (although for story purposes I may be embellishing a bit). I don't like them much to begin with, but maybe it's because they made me get out of bed and brought me bad detergent and I think were disgusted by the state of my flat. But why would anyone give detergent as a gift to an already residing tenant anyways? I could understand if I was just moving in, because I would need detergent, but I do wash my clothes and I mistakenly bought extra detergent when I already had some so now I have three boxes and I hate them all.

Which brings me to the laundry paragraph. Maybe because I'm about to go home, or this upsetting office surprise, or that last week was terribly terribly cold after a previous warm spell would have had me believe that the frozen toes and seeing my breath inside while the heat's on spell was over, but I'm in a complaining mood. This is not one of those charming animals entries, although tomorrow I may write about the wonderful kids at school that I love. But now on to laundry machines, and detergent, and why my clothes have not been properly cleaned in seven and a half months.

My washing machine, a standard model found in most homes, is terrible. It does the exact opposite of what a competent washing machine should. It doesn't actually succeed in successfully cleaning clothes, yet, somehow, it will destroy them. Every single time. My washing machine does not have a hot water option. All clothes are washed in cold water. Liquid detergent is hard to come by, and I'm adopting the Japanese habit of mottanai by not wasting what I have, so I have (now) three boxes of crap detergent to use up. It's crap because stained clothes stay stained, and those that weren't stained become so, with streaks of white detergent that don't disappear. Tomorrow is graduation day and I can't wear my nice pants because of said streaks. Nor can I wear my nice white shirt, because it's no longer nice and white. Somehow, despite the lack of hot water, a certain red tank top manages to stain all my white and grey clothes, this despite it having been washed numerous times in useful washing machines for the past two years.

So that is partially why I hate my washing machine, and why I (ir)rationally hate my new neighbours. This diatribe is already too long, and I no longer feel so grouchy.

In the continuing theme of bad grammar and mislabeled dates, in my last entry it looks like I say that my half birthday was on February 16th. That is wrong. It was on the 15^th. I swear I know when my own birthday is, although Blogger will have you believe otherwise.

I feel like since I didn’t do anything recently that involved seeing tame wild animals this entry will be boring. I guess the most noteworthy thing was that I booked a ticket back to Canada. I will be visiting in late March, and I plan on eating a lot of bagels and smoked salmon, drinking club soda, and going to every used English book store.　　Maybe seeing some friends and family too, if bagel-eating time permits.

Since life these past weeks has had that weird feeling of just waiting for something to happen, I will write a bit about school life. Things are going well. The school year, which begins in April in Japan, is closely coming to an end. Tomorrow is the last day of classes for the third year junior high school students. Next week they will write various high school entrance examinations and then in the following week will be the graduation ceremony. There is so much pressure on these kids to do well, and I really feel for them. One of the English teachers was telling me that normally the girls don’t eat a lot, but with the stress of the past tests and the upcoming ones, they are now eating a ton. I didn’t really believe her, but you can definitely see on some of them a noticeable weight gain. As if they don’t have enough to worry about.

Today was the last class with the good elective English class. There are two elective English classes, and for some reason the one on Tuesday is filled with a ton of boys who don’t actually like English. I think they all colluded to take the class together, and it can be pretty painful. But the Thursday class is amazing. It’s mostly girls, but the boys that are in it are awesome. For the last class, Iyo, the teacher, made them bilingual certificates of completion, with a class picture on the right hand side and the student’s written future goal on the left. I had to write their names in hiragana on their certificates, and took the time to read their dreams. Many of the girls had written that their dream was to pass the exam, or to be a beautician or a designer or a careworker, with a smattering of ‘My dream is to make a dream come true’ and my favourite, ‘To go to the Bump of Chicken’s concert’. The boys’s mostly the same. One boy wants to be a diplomat, a couple want to be a public employee or a ‘salaried man’, but there were two that really made me laugh. One kid wrote, in neon yellow highlighter, that his dream is to ‘Go to the sun and finish my life’. I spent a good five minutes trying to figure out if he’s suicidal, or if he just really wants to be an astronaut. I know if the answer is the former, then it shouldn’t be this funny, but I can’t help it. It was just so unexpected, and I just love goth undertones.

The second dream to make me laugh is a bit simpler. This kid, Ryuu, who had been one of my favourites since the beginning, wrote that his dream is to ‘be a burglar’. I’m cracking up just writing that. I can’t think of how he would know the word burglar without having looked it up, since I don’t think the New Crown textbooks really cover that line of work. When I told Iyo about this, she just shrugged it off and said that Ryuu really likes naughty English. My friend Carolyn and I, during our week long Japanese course in September, then again at mid-year in November, would think of dirty pick up lines and translate them into terrible incomprehensible Japanese. So basically Ryuu and I have the same sense of humour and maturity level, except that I’m not a male fourteen year old junior high school student.