20th December
Bad days
Sometimes you have a bad day. It’s perfectly normal, you might think. It happens to everyone. Even to Daniel Powter. However, it never ceases to fascinate me how bad things always happen in batches, one mishap after another in frustratingly long sequences. Which is quite handy, I think: it’s Nature’s (or God’s, or Fate’s, or Chaos’) way to warn us of things to come. At least you won’t be caught off-guard.
Why warning us AND making the bad stuff happen instead of just granting us a lifetime of happiness? Maybe accidents and strokes of luck are generated by two different sentient forces. Maybe we make our own fortune and bad luck is completely random, so that detecting its patterns is our only defense. Or maybe we are just in karma debit. And we have to pay. But this is getting too metaphysical.
Anyway, I made all this up in order to justify almost two weeks of prolonged silence. To all of you who sent emails without receiving an answer, I’m sorry, I will start replying now. It all started when the Japanese police displayed their dismay over my famously annoying parking spots by attaching lots of friendly tickets such as this one to the handle of my bike:
I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Now, what would a well-behaved, conscientious citizen do? Ignore them altogether of course! It turned out that it wasn’t such a great idea. You see, in Japan bikes are everywhere, and they all look the same. So you can easily imagine that this could be very confusing for a person like me with very limited memory for details like where the hell did I park my bike? or where do I live? or, waking up the morning after, what is your name again?. That is why I was quite happy when I found that my bike had a bright yellow umbrella horizontally stuck in the middle of the front basket: I could spot my bike from thirty metres away in a crowded parking spot.
Unfortunately, so could the police. And I have the vague suspicion that they wanted to teach a lesson to the moron who kept on parking in no parking areas with a big bright yellow umbrella flagging his bike. And so they did… my bike disappeared without a note. But is it really my fault if no parking areas are in such convenient places? I mean, seriously, why don’t they put them where nobody parks? Honestly, some people…
No worries, I could still go and take it back. Unfortunately the bike depot was VERY far away, so there was only one way to go and get my bike back. To go there by bike. It makes perfect sense. Jesus. I actually tried to get there. By bike. I mean, another bike. And I got lost. So I lost half a day and I had to spend another week without bike, since obviously the only day I could go to the depot to get my bike back was Saturday.
In the meantime, I was experiencing life as a pedestrian. Life in slow motion, I might say… it was so frustrating, it takes so long to get anywhere. And then I was actually going to work as if I was riding a bike, often finding myself walking in the middle of the road and wondering why people were looking at me weirdly.
And then one night, after a very hard day at work, I felt the sudden craving for a big bucket of KFC. You know what I mean. It’s one of those itches that cannot be satisfied without the real thing. A yearning for fat, greasy chicken. Yes, that nice juicy chicken in crispy breadcrumbs… and in Japan it’s served with Coke, not with Pepsi. Perfection in a bucket. Anyway, it was late, I was tired, and it was freezing cold outside, so I asked a friend of mine to lend me his bike to go to the city centre.
As I was cycling along, eagerly anticipating the tasty meal, I get stopped by a group of four policemen. Policemen in Japan really are Jedis, as you can see from the lightsabers in the picture below. At night, they light them up and you can see the evil red flashing beams from several dozens of metres away. Well, I would have seen them if everything on Earth in that moment wasn’t looking like a fried chicken to me.
Anyway, I get stopped and these guys ask me to turn the bike’s light on. It takes a while, since it’s not my bike and I’m not particularly gifted for mechanical things, and I struggle long enough for them to realise that what I’m riding is not my bike. So they ask me whose it is. My stupidly naive answer: “A friend’s”. I could almost read their minds: gaijin behaving suspiciously + night + borrowed bike = dirty foreigner stealing our honourable bicycles.
So they held me a good twenty minutes in the freezing cold while calling the central to check whether the bike was stolen. As a pleasant way to kill some time, they started asking me questions answered in rudimentary Japanese like:
“Where are you going?”
“To the city centre”
“What for?”
“To eat chicken”
“Is Maruko your name?”
-_giggles from the female officer, since it’s a girl’s name_
“Yes”
“Such an Italian name”
-_If only these guys did not have a lightsaber….
Ok, they got my details and they let me go. I started speeding like a madman towards KFC, nothing, NOTHING could stop me now. So I thought. Because of the time lost with the evil policemen, KFC was closed, and I had to resort to an instant ramen. The satisfaction I got from it was directly proportional to its cost: about 50p. So sad.
As expected, things got downhill from there: at work I got assigned the most boring task one can possibly imagine and I got ill. Obviously I didn’t take any days off since they are a very precious (and scarce) commodity here in Japan, and this plus not being able to rest during weekends because of ethanol-based parties (more about that in another post) only prolonged my suffering. As a consequence, things started stacking up, and I found myself with laundry to do, room to clean, work and study to catch up with and, of course, blog posts to write.
When trying to catch up with a lot of things there is always the problem of fitting a small tablecloth onto a large table: you pull one corner, and the opposite one gets exposed. Trying to so many things at once just increased my stress level without actually helping me in getting anything done. And haste causes bad accidents:
Yes, that is my carpet. And yes, I hate ironing. Now I hate it even more. So, this is what I usually do when I’m in this kind of situation: first of all, I get over and done with the things that have to be sorted out before I can take on everything else. Such as cleaning up my room and doing my laundry. Order brings order and inner peace. Then I make a statement: I create a perfect evening where I do some small things that I really like. It’s like a romantic date. Without any annoying girlfriend. This perfect evening will be the starting point, the cornerstone for the comeback.
So, what did I do? I set the air-con to 30 degrees, I got my DVD rental card, I rented “Four weddings and a funeral” (which I never managed to watch beyond the first half) and I prepared fried eggs with bacon. What more can a man want 
?
PS: I have a new bike now. It’s orange. And pigeons keep on crapping on it. Geez…