便座カバー!

Something that made me disproportionately upset: At the party at my house on Friday, I discovered, someone took it upon him- or herself to switch the orientation of my toilet paper. I keep it so that it spins toward the wall. I have realized this is not standard, but it is what I prefer. So I understand someone maybe thinking "huh, that's kind of an awkward way to have toilet paper oriented." But how do you go from there to "and it's totally my place to correct this obvious flaw in the way this house is organized"? It's not like it's impossibly difficult to use the damn toilet paper that way. Just shrug your shoulders (yes, shrug, there are times when it is called for!!), use the toilet paper, and walk out. It's not your house! This bothered me. I'm sure it wasn't meant maliciously. But it seems to me like part of what you hear described as the shame culture of Japan: if they think you keep your toilet paper wrong, they won't ask you about it, tease you about it, or just ignore it as not their problem -- no, they'll just fix it for you, and you'll notice, and you'll know that someone disapproved so much of how you keep your toilet paper that they felt compelled to change it.

Why I was in a mood to be disproportionately upset by things: I let them cook meat in my house. I was considering putting this one also under the same heading as the last one, and leaving the underlying reason for my mood as something vague and chemical, like that I'd had two drinks, or prolonged PMS, or something. But no -- I have decided this was the underlying cause. I had said in an email to Jarryd that I didn't want meat cooked in my house, and yet when he showed up, he said "okay, so one of the nabe will be meat, and then we'll make a vegetarian one for you, too." "Oh..." I said. "So, you didn't read my email?" "Huh?" "...Never mind," I said. And I was never quite in a good mood for the rest of the night. Because I was disappointed in and angry with myself. Because all I the protest I could manage was "it's just, I don't want to have to clean up a bunch of meat afterward..." and so when they assured me there would be nothing to clean but a few bowls, and Valerie promised to take care of that, I had nothing left to object to. I try not to be an obnoxious vegetarian. I don't scowl at people in restaurants when they order meat. I don't wrinkle my nose at their food. I don't lecture them. And I am not, really, of the opinion that any individual person choosing to eat meat is an evil thing. It's not that simple. Perhaps mainly I don't feel justified being morally superior about it because my vegetarianism was handed to me. If I'd been raised eating meat, I can't honestly say I have any conviction that I would have made the choice to give it up. I love the food I love very deeply. I could easily see myself not wanting to give them up, rationalizing that humans are carnivores, that animals eat each other all the time, that I am not a large enough percentage of the world to make any real difference in any case. So I have no moral high ground, just the fact that my parents are vegetarian.

But, here is the truth: I don't believe in eating meat. It makes me sad and guilty to see the corpses of animals being eaten, whether that's fair or not, whether I hold it against the individual people doing the eating or not. And this is my house. This is my space. I didn't want people eating meat inside of it, and not just because I'm physically grossed out by the idea of having my sink full of leftover meat scraps. Because it made me feel guilty. Because it was too close, psychologically, to me buying, ordering, cooking meat. It's my house. And I was a complete pushover. This did not make me pleased with myself.

Something that makes me (disproportionately?) happy: When I woke up the next morning, one of the emails on my cell phone informed me that Miss Gratzer had friended me on facebook. Miss Gratzer is one of my high school math teachers. How random. I confirmed her friend request and scanned over her profile. She was friends with a handful of other teachers from my high school. Who knew? I guess it never explicitly occurred to me after facebook shifted to including grownups that this might include some of my high school teachers. So I friended Miss Dunnell, and Mrs. Dutta.

"I wonder..." I wondered. I searched. There were a dozen or so people with the name of my Spanish teacher; one of them had a picture that could have been him, but at the small size I couldn't tell. Oh well, I thought. Mrs. Dutta accepted my friend request. Just for fun I searched within her friends. Up popped that picture. So it was him. "Should I friend him?" I asked Andrew. "Of course," he said, "go for it." A few hours later I did -- with a little message saying "hey, Miss Gratzer randomly friended me and it led me to realize a lot of my old teachers are on here!" Well, I wouldn't want it to seem too personal, right?

And when I got home last night, after staying for three hours at a dinner party I expected to stay at for half an hour tops -- it turned out not to be the normal crowd of loud, drunk young men making loud, drunk jokes, but rather a crowd dominated mostly by sweet, friendly middle-aged Japanese women who asked me about my hobbies and what I like to cook and took pictures with me and made me exchange phone numbers with them...but I'm getting onto a tangent, aren't I? -- I found a message in my inbox. From my Spanish teacher! Saying it was nice to hear from me, and asking what I was up to. Hee! This was exciting. I wrote him back, perhaps a slightly rambly message, and this morning he has replied and his reply includes the sentence "I'd love to hear more about your linguistics thesis..." I'm trying to figure out how to respond to that without going overboard and babbling on and on about things...heh. But I figure I'll give myself a day or two to reply, and not do it right away.

Mr. Gajendragadkar, sadly, remains outside the world of facebook...

My plans for today: hang out at home, listen to baseball (maybe), talk to Andrew, finish 白河 (yes, finish finish!), finish the scene of my story I was in the middle of, and cook myself something nice for dinner.

Whether or not I read the essay my aunt posted on facebook a few days ago and am blatantly stealing from it in the format of this post: Yes.

But that's enough for this post I think. Thank you to anyone who informed me that you do in fact read this; it's very good to know. ^_^ (少ないのに。。。) I have various little anecdotes I've been meaning for a while to post on here, but I think I'll just keep meaning for now. It's time to find myself some food. I think I shall try looking in the grocery store...

さあ　これから何をするんだい　僕はもう行かなきゃ
ほら　またどこかで　涙の落ちる音。。。

P.S. If you don't know what the title of this post means, I recommend a Google image search. If you then don't know why it's the title of this post, rest assured -- there is no deep logic to it. I couldn't think of a title, and so a random reference to an anime no one who reads this will have seen was the best I could do.