Humbug

So, things have been a bit off recently.

Quite obviously I returned from Japan this summer. Following this was a whistle stop tour of London and the grand return to Blackpool with a parade and dancing girls for all to see. I slowly became accustomed to new and exciting things that were in fact old and boring but were new and exciting to me, such as the fact that…look! The sun, he shines! But where is the humidity? Also, what are these odd discs, heavy as a thousand yen and inscribed with the face of an old lady?

After further exploring the exotic weather and frankly massive monetary units, it became rather evident that the time was rapidly approaching when Hannah would be returning to her adopted homeland. Obviously, this thought wasn’t really relished, at least not by me. Unfortunately for our last day we had taken a trip to Leeds so I could revisit the old University stomping ground and Hannah could meet up with a pair of depressingly successful friends. I think one of them was pregnant. Successful at getting pregnant.

I say “unfortunately” because the experience of driving to Leeds at speeds of over 30mph warped my fragile brain, so used as it was to trailing behind some senile Japanese layman transporting a Nissan full of seed to market at a pace making the Nissan all but redundant. Basically I had a headache. As Hannah chewed the vegetarian Sunflower fat with Mses Pregnant and Successful I, rather than wandering around the city muttering about how young everyone looked as I had planned, lay prostrate in the car trying to keep the sun from my eyes and avoiding the stares of the suspicious car-park attendant. After a few hours, I was invited for a final drink with the threesome. I’d probably have enjoyed it under any other circumstances but I’m afraid that my mind was not only elsewhere, but in a place that seemingly involved prodding with red hot Lego bricks. I joined them regardless and did my best to keep up my end of the conversation but as this revolved mainly around being pregnant or successful I found myself at something of a loss. I’ve never been pregnant, nor have I known anyone suffering from it. Although the results of a pregnancy are well known, what can you say to someone who’s barely halfway to achieving their goal? Obviously weight gain comparisons aren’t going to go down well, no matter how self-defacing. Similarly, fat ankles and lack of breath aren’t usually something I like to point out to a person unless either is causing some sort of public obstruction. As for Ms Successful I didn’t even bother, just glared suspiciously.

Anyway, parting was indeed sweet sorrow especially as this particular parting took place on a dodgy Leeds backstreet with one party safely ensconced behind a thick sheet of Mega Bus brand safety glass and the other trying desperately to stop his brains falling from his ears onto the cold, hard pavement. It was sad. Even sadder, I had to drive back to Blackpool which is not a place I envisage fulfilling the role of happy ending. It’s quite an odd feeling being the one left behind, a role I inflicted on poor Hannah not 3 years ago. I suppose I deserved it really.

Fast forward 4 and a half months and you find me now, a shattered hulk of a man who’s had any and all thoughts of a successful, productive life blown from the water like an errant fishing boat failing to avoid being hit by a Japanese Aegis cruiser (http://www.japanprobe.com/?p=3821). 4 months into the job hunt and I can surmise these 3 things;

1: A recession is not the best time to return to a country.
2: The system wants me to live a cold, boring life shifting numbers from one page to another, and to thank it with the gift of my first born for the pleasure of doing so.
3: To be granted a work experience placement, you must first accrue significant work experience, which of course you need already significant work experience to have access to, which requires a mountain of work experience experience, which of course required you already possess a decade of work experience, which needed…etc etc

4 months. Exactly how many interviews would allow me to qualify 4 months as a successful period do you think? 4? 8? 10? In a 4 month period I have secured precisely 2 interviews, both for the same job. The same job, incidentally, that I did not receive. It’s quite hard not to get rather jaded. I must admit to considering other options over this extended period of prostitution. Perhaps I would say “bollocks!” to these capitalist pigs and abscond from their corrupt regime and travel the world, making sure to stop at the world’s remaining bastions of Socialism to drum up support for the eventual Revolution. Oh yes my friends, Barack is just the beginning. Perhaps I would become a lifelong jobless, a loveable rogue, a jack of all trades; the sort of person the local landlord calls a “rotter” but occasionally hires to move the barrels of IPA. A cheeky chappy. Or maybe I would dedicate myself to more flowery pursuits. I could write a radical account of the young and jobless while listening to the Ramones and channelling the New York scene of the 1960s. Instead, I found myself applying for job after meaningless job. Anything. Everything. Graduate schemes I found to be elitist snobs; sales jobs are snarling pimps demanding targets hit and quotas met. Even the lowly, street sleeping temp jobs evaded my grasp putting me, if we carry this metaphor through, squarely in the role of cancerous leper.

Now we find ourselves once more in the grasp of the festive spirit. Christmas. Anyone who knows me will also know that I adore Christmas. It is, contrary to the rest of the populace it seems, my favourite time of year. This year is obviously different. For one I can’t find a bloody advent calendar. Between the emailing of licky-licky emails to Aldi and The British Coalminers Union I have conducted an extensive search of nearby newsagents, supermarkets, off licences, pet shops, butchers, chiropodists, plumbers and tanners in a vain effort to procure a numbered box containing bits of manky chocolate. Not a single one. Everywhere, sold out. I wonder, did people hear our government urging public spending and apply it solely to advent calendars? Did the manufacturers think people would revert, Cromwell-like, to a sort of post-Christmas state in the glare of collapsing society? Who knows, but I can’t bloody find one. An advent calendar-less Christmas. If there’s a better analogy for my current mental state I for one cannot imagine it.

Laziness

The fact that I haven’t written anything here for, ooh going on 6 months (actually closer to a year, looking at my blog dates), is probably an indicator of how much I’ve been up to. In fact, it should be seen as a testament to my laziness of late. I have actually been writing entries but either decided against posting them for all to see or have simply forgotten to, hence the laziness. Those in the former category are usually omitted as they’d hold as much interest to people who aren’t me as would listening to the rumblings of someone dissatisfied with daily inane goings-on. Which is, coincidently, exactly what most of them consisted of. Also, I’ve discovered that this blog is accessible from Google under the search term “choseibi”. Try it. I command not only the pole position on the list of results, but also second place as well. I almost deleted the entire thing when I was told of this; thankfully another ALT discovered the fact rather than one of my JTEs. Hello Rachel! Still, a lot of my unpublished entries were negative in the extreme and covered such fascinating topics as the Japanese medical system and cash flow. Oh, and a review of Cloverfield. Most of these entries were therapeutic rants rather than observations of any interest and posting them here seems an unnecessary risk. Anyway.

Three months to go. This is a fact I have to keep reminding myself of, as it seems so ridiculous. Three months? Surely not. It was six months only last week. Wasn’t it? No, it wasn’t. Time has not so much flown as chartered a jet, and taken its best mates Day, Week and Month too. My exact date of return has yet to be set but I’m grasping at the idea of it being sometime in early August. Because of the proximity of my triumphant repatriation, job applications stream constantly from my computer into the jungle that is the interwebnet. So far all appear to be lost, no doubt eaten by some backwards tribe of Email Filters, their remains shovelled hastily into the rapids of the great river Rejection. Never mind, I have plenty of volunteers left.

I’ve been experiencing a great deal of Lasts recently: my last Golden Week holiday, my last Self Introduction lesson, my last birthday in Japan. Even with all these minor farewells the imposing fact of my imminent departure seems to evade my mind, meaning that I’m not all that worried about leaving. No doubt I’ll cast a furtive look back as I enter the plane at Tokyo in six (no wait, three) months time but from where I sit now it’s hard to see much I’ll think of during the inevitable fits of manic tears after I return home. I don’t want this entry to veer into my own un-publishable territory but there’s little of my current day-to-day situation that I’ll miss with much enthusiasm. There’s the obvious apprehension that precedes any life change, but so far it hasn’t overwhelmed my current disposition of pleasant oblivion. By that I suppose I mean that I’m not really anywhere, mentally, at the moment. My daily life consists of appearances, being at a certain place at a certain time like a soap star’s supermarket opening schedule. I imagine the job satisfaction is of a comparable level also.

Still, I owe it to my future self, as disease ridden and incontinent as he may be, to make the best of the time yet available. Hannah and I are in the planning stages of a trip to Okinawa where we shall dance on the ancient fields of victory, singing the American national anthem and raising the Stars and Stripes, adorned as we shall be in George W. Bush masks. Hannah has decided to stay for another year, a prudent decision based on the fact that I won’t be here, but will accompany me home for a fortnight’s holiday. It works for her; family reunion, much missed cockney bantering, and it works for me; a gentle learning curve and an excuse to do nothing for a while longer. Aside from these pleasant distractions, Mum and Dad are visiting at the moment. No doubt at this very moment of typing they find themselves in Narita airport surrounded by otakus and hentai. Assuming they emerge unsullied we’ll be meeting them in Fukuoka this weekend.

This brings me quite nicely onto my final paragraph, that being the one you, the reader, is reading right now; my wants. There are certainly more than a few activities I wish to avail myself of before I leave and this paragraph has been reserved for the purpose of listing them and perhaps expanding upon them by giving a few circumstantial causes of interest. First, and best connected to the last paragraph’s closing of Fukuoka, is a baseball match. At home, the television is often switched on and inevitably enough a baseball match will appear on its magic face once or twice a week. They look fun. There are balloons and big foam fingers, the kind my friend who had been to see Gladiators came to school with back in 97. I wish to buy a foam finger and if this means watching a bunch of eager Japanese and portly, has been Americans amble around randomly for a while then so be it. Unfortunately, my premature booking of this entire paragraph to list my desire was exactly that, premature, as I can’t at the moment think of anything else I actually want to do over here. Is this a case of having done everything of interest already, or has the blade of my imagination dulled itself against the thick armour of boredom? I know not. Either way, it is time to take my leave. Lunchtime approaches and I have some bitches to pimp, courtesy of GTA IV. Forsooth and away!