???? IMG_5981 by sullivan™ on Flickr.
????? IMG_6006 by sullivan™ on Flickr.
sem tيtulo by Lee Wei-I on Flickr.
Lush Green River Flows Through (by Frank Gruber)
Today was a day of random encounters. There was the Japanese store clerk who insisted on speaking English to me even when I equally persistently spoke in Japanese to her. We agreed to disagree, I suppose.
I found, to my embarrassment, another man on the train had the exact same Marimekko tote-bag that I did. I quickly moved to another car to avoid any sort of awkwardness, feeling gauche.
Sitting on the stuffy train, I had not one but two slumbering seat-mates, one for each shoulder. Considering that most people will leave the seats next to a foreigner empty until the last possible second, I felt somewhat accepted. The young man on my right was a bit twitchy, and I tried to compose an expression of infinite patience. There is something odd about sleeping in public in strangers’ company, and something else equally odd about the duty of responsibility one feels towards sleeping strangers.
This contrasts a bit with last night’s soda acquiring expedition, where the car was so crowded that someone else was jammed against every inch of me, and I was doing my best not to crush a petite Japanese woman against the door. She was unconcerned, or at least resigned. Somehow she even managed to read a book, looking dignified with her head only centimeters away from several armpits. My first reaction to being pushed is to stand ground and push back. I suppose that says more about my disharmonious nature than anything else.
For the last few months, we have been unable to open the bedroom window because the only place one can put the bed precludes it. Finally I grew tired of this arrangement and moved my desk to be in front of the window. Now I have pleasant scenery to gaze upon instead of a blank wall, and the window is finally a useful feature of the apartment. I’m not sure why I waited so long to do this.
The washing machine made a sinister noise today and my heart sank. I have terrible luck with washing machines. The ones we had when I was young were forever breaking. When I grew up and moved to Taiwan, we had then purchased one secondhand. I think a mouse had once made a nest inside it, for it delighted in spitting bits of shredded paper all over the clothes and finally, one afternoon, it stopped working all together. If I stood next to it, threateningly, while it was in the rinse cycle it would finish properly, but if I left the room it started beeping frantically and refused to continue. It thus became a game of me getting bored with waiting and thinking I could steal away, only to rush back in dismay and try the cycle out again. It was an unhealthy relationship based on codependency and mistrust.
It became clear the washing machine was haunted by something or other, as that could be the only logical solution. Eventually we gave up and some tiny Taiwanese man carried it down four flights of stairs on his back and took it to his junk shop where presumably he exorcised whatever was housed there. Two weeks before we moved away, we found there was a laundromat right down the street the whole time.
Sigh.
(Image by gullevek)
untitled by AaronS85 on Flickr.
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