"It's been a bad day, another bad day"

Today has downright sucked. It was cold this morning—really cold, frost cold. My legs were partially numb by the time I got to campus. At least it was sunny. And my kanji quiz went very well, I think.

I had an hour between my two classes this morning, so I decided to go grocery shopping during that time. But when I went to get my bike from the parking lot, I started having big trouble. I couldn’t get the kickstand to budge. I had been able to unlock the lock and wiggle the bike out of the crowded part of the parking lot so I could have room to work with it. But no matter how hard I pushed or pulled or leaned with all my weight, I simply could not get the kickstand up. I tried holding the kickstand still with my foot while I pushed as hard as I could against the handle bars. I flipped the bike over and tried pulling from another angle. I stood on the other side of the bike and tried the same things. I kicked the bike in several places and even punched the seat a little. I made grunting sounds like the ones tennis players make on TV as I pulled and pushed. For fifteen minutes I wrestled with that stupid kickstand. For fifteen minutes other students walked by, staring. Nobody offered to help; that bothered me.

Finally, one of the security guards came by; they occasionally patrol the parking lot to make sure Rude Bicycles don’t cause trouble or anything. The guard, thank goodness, asked if something was wrong. I said I couldn’t get the kickstand to move. (Well, I couldn’t say that in Japanese, but I think he got the point.) And then he gave me this look like “How incredibly dim are you?” He flipped this little switch contraption on the kickstand, and it was fixed. Apparently there was some sort of parking brake mechanism that I didn’t know the bike had, and I had accidentally put it on when I parked this morning. Yes, I spent fifteen minutes literally wrestling with an orange bicycle because I didn’t know its parking brake was on. At that point, I wasn’t even terribly happy that my bike now worked, I was just pissed off and embarrassed. I just looked at the security guard, who had this expression of, “Well, is that all?” and thanked him. It was all I could do to load my books into the basket and pedal off a bit before I burst into tears.

Everything I do here is humiliating. I’m really sick of it. I’m tired of being the tourist, the one who doesn’t understand, the fat American, the foreigner, the only girl not wearing makeup, the one no one will sit by on the train. (Really, you should watch how the train cars fill up; people stand before they take a seat next to me.) It’s not fun anymore. I want to go home.

I’m just not very good at living here, and I hate not being good at things. I don’t like feeling stupid, and Japan makes me feel stupid. Like, really stupid, all the time. Today I remembered that, back at home, I'm really smart--at least in the school sense--and that surprised me. I had forgotten that I am capable; that's not a good thing. I need to go home.

Anyway, I made it to the QQ and did my shopping, and quickly headed back to school for speaking class, which went well. I had a Skype date with David set for 12:15, so I grabbed some McDonald’s to eat at home after class. By this time I was feeling all tingly because of going in and out of the cold so much, but I just wanted to get home, basically.

But when I got online, David wasn’t there. I checked my email, and had a message from him asking if everything was okay, because he hadn’t heard from me in a long time. A long time? I emailed him last night! I have suspected this for a while now, but now I know: my Internet connection eats emails. It picks and chooses which emails of mine it wants to deliver. So I’m really sorry, but I may have been sending you emails all semester that you didn’t get. Apparently like none of the four or five emails I sent David last week arrived at their destination. That meant that he didn’t know that I was expecting to see him on Skype, so the date was off.

So now, in addition to having ridiculous parking brakes on bicycles, this place also sabotages communications with my boyfriend. AND tomorrow is our first anniversary, which it’s bad enough that I have to miss. Great. Just great. I totally lost it at that point, and frantically tried to get ahold of David using Skype, Skype Chat, meebo, email, and Facebook. I also tried to reach some of his fraternity brothers to see if they could go down the hall and find him for me, but that didn’t work. Luckily, I was able to contact Michael, David’s brother, via Facebook. I got Michael to call David and ask him to get online.

Finally, then, we got to talk on Skype. And that was good. Things are going well for him. I felt much better after our chat.

Well, that was the major trauma for the day; nothing else really terrible has happened. Oh, but last night I had a dream that I stabbed myself in the stomach with my vegetable knife. I still have two big papers due on Friday that I haven’t really started on. And tonight when I was cooking supper the kitchen was a total mess and all the small skillets were dirty because other people don’t do their dishes like they should, so I had to use a big skillet so my eggs didn’t cook as nicely as I wanted.

And that has been my bad day so far. Hopefully nothing else bad will happen. And in the grand scheme of things, nothing bad really did happen. I was delayed for a few minutes by the bike I could afford to buy to use to get to the conveniently close grocery that always has food and stable prices that I can also afford to pay. And then I had to wait a few minutes to talk to a fantastic guy who loves me from halfway around the world using amazing technology and a computer that I received as a gift. Oh, boo hoo. I guess I really can’t complain too much. At the end of the day, I’m warm and fed and safe; much better off than many people can say.

I’m going to go take a nice hot shower before I buckle down on the homework.