1. What is your biggest waste of time in your home?

Constantly trying to keep the hair off the floor. It gets everywhere and seems more neverending than it is on my head.

2. When at work, what is the activity that you find wastes the most time?

Attending to random new procedural things everyone forgets about a month later because decision by consensus without every explicitly stating the consensus is the stupidest Japanese thing I have yet discovered. Meetings that can be emails. Meetings that often are emails prior to the in-person meeting beacuse we have to sit there and be uncomfortable for an hour and a half every few weeks for morale.

3. When getting busy with a date or significant other, what ritual could you do without?

Not relevant to me, lol. I guess I sort of think kissing seems cooler in concept than the few times I've done it.

4. What is the biggest waste of time on the Internet?

Infinite scrolling.

5. What do you do at a restaurant to waste time when waiting for your meal?

Listen to YouTube talk about true crime or reddit stories. I do wish having people to eat with, ever.

Exhausted and looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow. Feeling generally okay about work and stuff but utterly worn out from it.

Felt a weird wave of nostalgia on the walk to my bus from work today.

My entire weekend was a blur, if not an entirely unpleasant one. On Friday, during a glance at my phone at work, I saw an ad for an exhibition of light art in Shinjuku-Chuo Park that was on through 5/31. Since I actually had a full weekend, and I hardly ever do anything out of the ordinary, I decided to go, even though going through Shinjuku Station makes me feel misanthropic, depressed, and enraged fro a bit nearly every time.

I keep thinking about how I know I don't want to be in Japan for the rest of my life but that I did so want to be back here for five years until I got back here... two years ago. Time is going by so quickly, and I feel like I shouldn't waste it. On the other hand, I am stuck doing everything I ever do alone, but the thought of cultivating a more active social life -- or a more active anything, really -- sounds like it might finish killing me.

The light thing was really cool.

I feel like that in a few years, I will probably look back on this time in my life with nostalgia. I would like to have certain things I did to even feel nostalgic for. So, I don't regret going to the thing, but I was one of the only people there who wasn't on the clock or whatever who was just... alone.

I talked to my dad a bit while seated in a place that wasn't obtrusive. Then, I went home and went to bed.

Saturday was chill, but I mostly did laundry and slept with a little bit of Genshin Impact co-op with my best friend.

I remember a time when I used to get on Genshin almost every single day, but I cannot figure out how I had the energy to do that. I guess it was because I was getting home at 5:00 or before back then.

On Sunday, I went to church, because I had kind of committed myself to trying to go to this Grief Small Group ting that started the week before. I didn't go the first week, even though I went to church, because I wasn't sure where it was meeting and was too shy and nervous to ask strangers even though I hung around and spoke to people for their Pentecost potluck thing they had.

I think the Grief Small Group was good for me, even if it added to the reasons I felt like I had barely had time at home, and my introvert battery was running on a half-charge from jump this week.

At the meeting, I spoke a little about why I had come there, and I immediately burst into tears. They were really sympathetic, and I got some support but also managed not to make everything about myself.

The thing is, I miss my mom, but my grief for her is more about the fact that even though I know I still love her and she loved me very much and even though I know there are other people who love me, there is very little tangible evidence anymore that anyone loves me back in the whole world. Like, I feel like I show up for people and grant grace and patience, but I don't have anyone to just... hide in anymore. No one who would come after me because I'm crying anymore. No one who will tolerate my being selfish for even a moment without it earning me silence.

Anyway.

As of this week, I've started catching the 7:04 bus again instead of the 6:44 bus. It's only a difference of 20 minutes, but it seems to add a significant amount to my true sleep time at night. Whatever was causing the serious delays in the mornings last year seems to have become less common. They're building some type of pedestrian overpass walkway thing right before one reaches the bridge into Tokyo, and I don't really know why this impacted morning traffic, but I wondered if it was involved somehow. They seem to be reaching a different stage of the project now, where it is much more obvious what they're doing.

My Death Note fic is getting steady engagement on AO3! Which is great and all I can hope for as a fan writer. However, I find that posting after I have written most of the fic makes the success and such feel a little bit more distant and surreal since the emotional investment of writing the thing was months ago.

Now, I'm getting to the point where I have to finish writing the very end of it, so maybe that will bring the immediacy back, but I just wish that there were a reliable way to post a finished WIP as an adult without prewriting most or all of the fic, because sometimes the back-and-forth is the magic. I dunno.

Anyway, I didn't even update the fic until just after midnight on Sunday-becoming-Monday, which is the latest update I've done. I've just been doing "one chapter per weekend" unless I feel like something different.

So I got through work yesterday still feeling totally drained and dead. I did hop on Genshin and manage to grind enough to just BARELY roll for Durin when I realized he was available when I did co-op with my best friend on Saturday.

This coming Saturday, I have to work, so I was pretty sure I was going to either randomly call in a day this week or leave early one day. The thing is, I take my work very seriously. I want to do a good job by the students, even if there's a lot of fluff I think is bullshit.

I have on-the-day called out once in the entire time I've worked there. And I feel like that's actually pretty unusual and remarkable given the fact that I feel called in to sub for people all the time. I was actually incredulous and amazed when there was a post in the substituting Slack channel that didn't tag me on Monday, which feels like a very strange mix of both "they notice how hard I'm working" and cynicism.

Anyway, turns out, I didn't have to fight with the mixture of "but I'll miss a class" guilt, because they decided to close the school tomorrow. It sounds like a lot of area schools are closing but being all like "but other schools won't close, we're being so overly cautious and kind!!!"

They're doing it as a "home study" day so it still counts as an instructional day, so we were allowed to not come in, but we had to use PTO / Flex Time Hours to actually do so. Luckily, tomorrow is my new-fangled half-day so I was able to use fewer hours than I would have otherwise.

I have never well-prepared for disaster here in Tokyo. I know most people have a go-bag and stuff, but I honestly think if it got that bad I would either have to find a random stranger to follow around or just hunker down and do my best. I don't really have anyone I would call on to drag myself to anymore, and I don't know how to even find out where to evacuate to.

But I think this situation is just going to be some nasty weather in the middle of the night and likely transit delays tomorrow that would've made having a normal school day a pain in the butt.

I talked to a couple of kids today in passing, and one told me about how he really wants to ride his bike through the puddles tomorrow after the rain is gone.

I went and got a big bottle of water and figure if I get the motivation I might fill some of my need-to-be-rinsed-and-stripped 16 oz bottles with water. I have a few soyjoy bars and such. Ready to microwave rice that could be eaten cold if things were dire. I don't think I would die if it were just a matter of waiting for power for a few days.

I really hope it doesn't come to that.

There's a sad, evil little part of my heart that doesn't even want to fight that hard if some disaster happened. I don't want to die, like at all. I just... get really tired of trying to survive (in a metaphorical way) when I feel like apart from my utility as a teacher, I wouldn't really be noticed-missing or whatever.

I tried to catch up on my Reading page a bit. I need to get a better attention span, just like everyone else. I did pop in on a few people's personal posts.

I have creative energy but not enough real energy to do anything.

Thankfully, tomorrow I finally get a rest day during which I have no particular reason to convince myself to go out of the house to do errands, chores, church, or anything else.

Pictures from Friday night under the cut.

( Read more... )

And here's a link to a video of a neat, musical light thing they had that I got a great angle to film despite there being people everywhere.

Saw this on my reading page and thought it looked cute and basic enough. No idea if I will just forget about it, but we'll try our best.

Bingo Card for whatif_au

High/Low Fantasy	Reversals	Espionage
Natural Disaster	WILD CARD	Fairy Tale
Dystopia	Movie/TV Fusions	Time Travel

"Deadline": July 31, 2026

When I was off for Golden Week, I was pretty bored and lonely. I have been trying to keep up with or catch up with my various interests that I share with my best friend(s), but it seems like every time I have significant time off that my friends are often really busy. Best friend was out of town for work and occupied during daytime hours without any phone breaks, so I had most of both my days and nights in sort of lonely peace and quiet. Other closest friend has also been really busy, because he recently moved within the same apartment building but to a two-bedroom unit in order to live with his friend and now-roommate who required a disability-accessible apartment. I think just the chaos of reorganizing his apartment and life plus adjusting to living with a roommate has made it so he doesn't have as much freedom or energy to talk as much. Time he would've spent socializing remotely with us is now spent socializing with his friend who's there in person.

I keep thinking about how society is built for in-person partnerships or families and how it just presumes heterosexual marriage for anyone to function in a way that isn't completely isolated. I have done what I can to combat this, but I also wish I could at least live with a friend someday. Don't know if that will ever happen, though, as I'm mostly at the mercy of various immigration laws.

Anyway, while I was off I made this post on a whim about how I am pretty new to being interested in Resident Evil after stepping so far out onto the thin ice of Leon Kennedy thirst memes that I got interested in at least consuming the media he was a part of...

I met someone through the shot in the dark RP ad, and for once, it seems to be going well. I haven't met an RP partner that lasted since my best friend, which was sixteenish years ago...

I also spent like $11 to buy this weird little miniseries that should've been a movie called "Resident Evil: Infinite Darkness". It's campy and done in an animation style very similar to the remake games with the new VAs for Leon and Claire in their roles.

When I started being invested just for Leon's sake, I really didn't know who to ship Leon with. I still feel like I can multiship, but I have accidentally fallen down the rabbit hole of shipping Claire and Leon.

Wow, a wild m/f pairing appears!

I am not entirely sure why I am so into it, but it has something to do with the fact that they are so connected on this very baseline human level that is primal but not (at the moment or inherently) sexual.

I feel like Leon keeps hitting on random people he meets because he's lonely and lost after getting black-bagged by the government, but then each and every time Leon and Claire see each other, they have this reaction like "Oh, it's you!" and it's so sweet.

The miniseries gave me a fan-service moment of Leon helping rescue Claire from acid and breaking metal and what-not where they grabbed hands, he pulled her back, and she fell on top of him. They make eye contact, he asks if she's okay, and then immediately gets distracted by the stuff going on in the room. And it's satisfying but in a way that actually frustrates my heart.

I took some quick and dirty screengrabs that I can do better than later:











My babies. Why am I like this?

But yeah, I dunno. Just something about the fact that they see each other as just people and that that in itself is a good thing because during the events of Resident Evil 2 that mattered so much.

And just passing ships in the night until it finally works.

At the end of the little series, Claire was angry with Leon because he refused to help her whiste-blow about some stuff for #reasons. And it stings, but I am also entranced.

The writing of this silly RE show was at least as good as, like, network attempts at prestige TV. Which is fucking weird. Like why?

I love it.

I updated my profile page, my fandom masterlist, and shipping masterlist. It had been a long time, and I wonder if I have missed something. I wonder if my pinned post also needs cleaning, but I think the last time I tried to make it less time-sensitive.

I keep thinking about how I would like to have more whimsical and fandom-specific things like... blog layouts, phone and computer wallpaper, but I feel like I have lost my sense of visual inspiration and I'm less willing to just steal stuff I find online.

Plus, I like stuff but I just feel like I have less brain space to store granular detail.

Hmm.

Work has been a little frustrating because being over in the more isolated building, I feel like my colleagues and I are being forgotten and left out of the loop and then treated as being at fault. It doesn't help that one coworker damn near refuses to put anything in writing. The whole "come find me" visit in the absence of being willing to accommodate that I have about a third again more steps to traverse in a day because of my situation.

But this year we're getting a half day "work from home" as well. Mine is on Wednesday morning starting tomorrow. It's kinda exciting in possibility but I'm too anxious to make full use of the evening. I guess I'll have a better sense of it next week. I'm most excited about it because I won't have to spend as much paid leave on my bi or tri monthly doctor's visits.

First few days back to work are always a slog of meetings mostly in Japanese. They've been doing a better job about projecting real time machine translation in addition to our few brave bilinguals trying to translate in a Google doc.

Today, Saturday, was for some fucking reason scheduled as a mandatory work day for which were getting a comp day next Monday, so even though nothing was scheduled we had to use PTO to take today off. After a little reluctance, I did.

I'll get granted my new bank of PTO days for the year soon.

Monday will also hopefully be just a peaceful admin work day. I hope.

I've still been having weird mood shifts that I can't quite identify the reason for. Transition and change are hard even when their content is neutral.

Haven't had as much luck being creative for the past few weeks. Felt an inkling of drive today but after some voice call socialization with my couple closest friends, I just feel like it's nap time. Tomorrow is Easter, and I would like to go to church. Wish I had a cute outfit but that would be too much effort unless I discover that something I have is cute.

I always get sick around Easter, and these past couple weeks I keep getting a phlegmy cough. Maybe this explains some of my mood issues too: fatigue from minor illness? I don't have official allergies.

Right now I feel pretty okay but wish I felt like making progress on games or creativity. I also just enjoy the quiet and peace to listen to documentaries or nothing at all and wrap up in blankets since I don't get actual human touch.

Written on mobile so not proofread. I can read what I'm writing, but these are letters for ants.

Cross-posted from vampiremonday.

So, I never watched Death Note in 2007. I saw, like, scattered clips with no context, and I wrote it off based on a very incomplete impression and somehow managed to live an entire life with 0 context about it. Like... to the point of big gaps in my understanding of certain cultural cues, both in nerdy US circles and here in Japan. (Example: a few months ago I found a weird Ryuk with an apple charm on the floor at the school where I work and asked, 'Is this anyone's... ugly... little guy?' and asked a Japanese adult coworker when the kids didn't know who said, 'Death Note???')

Anyway, I started watching it at a friend's suggestion and mild insistence.

In a way, I feel like it's good that I didn't watch it when it was new and I was still a teenager. It feels like it strikes a chord in me that is very... aesthetically coherent with who I am as a person in a way that I did not realize at the time that it was popular and new.

It is so resonant with me, here as a 35 year old watching it for the first time, that it is actually making me think about how it might have affected my interests, desires, and choices, had I chosen to watch it when it was making its first rounds in America. I know that sounds silly, but I almost do feel that it would've been a butterfly wing in me making different life choices somehow, even if I have absolutely no idea how it would've panned out.

I'm to a point now where I love the people I still have in my life enough that I wouldn't want to risk not knowing and loving them, even though there are a handful of moments in my mid teens and early 20s that I sometimes wish I could test-run to see how things went if I had done things differently, but it's just a fun and eerie little feeling to experience.

Sure, a lot of my fandoms seem to sort of... click into place like "oh, I am glad I found you," but this one feels... weird. Like a chunk of missing time.

Anyway, I am watching Death Note and really into it and I know I'm 19 years late, but I might write these creatures in some situations later.

2025 was a rough year for me in terms of public fandom participation and output. I usually do something at least several times a year and feel more of a sense of connection to it than I have this year. I've still done a few things, but nothing seems to have "stuck" in the way that I would like it to.

However, toward the end of the year, I started to feel more actively connected to my fandoms. Started to have a little more internal continuity, which I've complained about the lack of throughout the year.

This year has been a lot of adjustment and change, even though most of it has been good for me.

Anyway, I just went through fandomcalendar and picked out any and everything that's current that I even might be interested or equipped to do. There are a few things I skipped either because of parameters, dates, or fandoms I'm not in, but here's what I found:

• Mood Theme in a Year at moodthemeinayear. I'm not as visual as I am interested in writing and sound, but sometimes I take a notion, and this requires less independent creativity from me, so I might give it a shot if I take a notion.
  
  
• Be a Goldfish - A Multifandom Multimedia Microbang at beagoldfish.
  
  
  
  
• Comment Bingo Round 8 at comment_bingo. This round is open until the end of March. Challenging oneself to go around leaving comments on others' works. I could use some guidance with how to go about participating in fandom in the reader direction as well. I comment on almost everything I read, but I get choice paralysis or am bad at searching and don't read as much as I could.
  
  
• candyheartsex - Candy Hearts Exchange - "Candy Hearts is a multifandom gift exchange with a low minimum and a focus on relationships, both platonic and romantic/sexual." - Nominations are still open for a couple of days, which is one thing that draws me to this!
  
  
• Info on how to Sign up for a 'Fannish 50 in 50' loose blogging challenge.
  
  
• Traumatic Experiences Exchange at traumaticexperiences is a 1k minimum exchange focused on characters' traumatic experiences. All fandoms allowed except RPF. Nominations starting on the 30th.

The kids at work had their closing ceremony/Christmas Mass on Saturday, and I had to go to it. It was fine, and I got to leave work at 1:00, which is the usual Saturday quitting time, but I'm not usually a Saturday worker.

Friday, I got my nails done.

This morning, I went to get some hair tinsel in my hair for the first time. I've wanted to do that since I first saw a girl at a middle school get them when I taught her.

Afterward, I went to church. I am glad I went and didn't flake, because the message from the woman pastor was really good, and I'm getting over my internalized weirdness about hearing a female minister.

It's kind of amazing how unfamiliar I find most Christmas traditions that aren't very secular and commercial. My early childhood was in my dad's most iconoclastic days; he'd gone from having grown up with very standard southern Baptist (not necessarily Southern Baptist) ideas and then got more into reformation theology/church history. He still is, but especially when I was little, he was really obsessed with the "regulative principle of worship" (the idea that unless the Bible specifically indicates that you should do it as part of worship that you shouldn't do it as part of worship) to the point that it kind of alienated a lot of people.

In a lot of ways, I am still kind of cynical along the same lines but maybe for different reasons? It's something I'm still working through.

In any case, my dad was Goin Through It about things that may have been originally syncretistic or whatever, so when I was very small, we didn't have Christmas trees and stuff. Later, it softened a little, but when I was like 3-6 or 7, it was a bit of a family drama at times that my parents were "depriving me of being normal" by insisting that I not hear lies about Santa Claus from them and not have a Christmas tree at home.

I was a little rule-follower and kind of superstitious (as many little kids are) in addition to what my parents are telling me, so when my grandmother had a light-up "angel" on top of her Christmas tree, I hid my eyes from it and everyone thought I was a freak because I thought it was a bad "idol". My parents didn't tell me to do this, but it was my toddler brain trying to follow through on what I had been taught to understand.

Anyway, as a result of the particular religious flavor I grew up with, Christmas is a weird time for me. Doubly so because I am working at a Catholic school and just kind of feeling my way through what it is I believe. I still very much identify as a Christian, but I guess I'm about the age my dad was when I was born and going through the process of untangling some of my long-held assumptions as well.

All of this to say that I feel a little dumb and culturally stunted by the fact that I do not know religious Christmas hymns and carols and whatever as well as other people do. Like I know SOME of the words but most of the hymns I grew up singing were like early protestant stuff, which I still like honestly, but as the closing hymn at Tokyo Union today, we sang:



We did so at a somewhat lower tempo and with the organ (or maybe just a deep-voiced piano, I don't know), so there was something about it that was even more moving and kind of Cool in a way I find hard to describe.

I just find that some of the music that I've been exposed to attending this church and, rarely, a PCUSA church back in Chattanooga, talks a lot more about justice and the social obligations of a Christian in the real world and not just spiritually bypassing and looking forward to heaven or the end of time or whatever.

I don't think there's anything wrong with looking forward to eternity in some way, but I am deeply bothered by the whole "well, the world is going to end soon anyway" excuses of the casual American Christian nationalist death cult thing that bleeds through so much of American Christianity. But sometimes I just feel kind of lost and confused by the fact that I deeply hold my religious values and beliefs but also feel like a stranger to broader Christianity? Plus the fact that I am progressive and LGBT affirming. However, I feel like I am slowly experiencing some growth and introspection, which is nice.

Outside of my spiritual thoughts, one of my recent frustrations has been that I struggle with introspection more than I used to. I feel like so much of my mind and time is spent entangled with my professional duties as a teacher that I sort of lost even my continuity-of-self at times in it. I think about how I used to have this very vivid inner world of daydreams, but I lost it for a long time (maybe since I've been back in Japan basically but sometimes before that, too).

In some ways, my current job is a lot better than any job I've had before in terms of giving me time during work hours to do all of my duties, but then sometimes the hours are extended anyway, and while I love and adore functional public infrastructure and transportation, relying on public transportation means that even though I am not actively mentally involved in vehicle obligation that I spend even more time in vehicles than I did back home when I was so frustrated by always being stuck in a car.

That said, I'm very grateful that I am occasionally feeling some kind of improvement in terms of my sense of self-continuity, and I would appreciate if any older adults have ideas for how to keep going with that. I miss myself and my daydreams and my Fanfic Idea Generation, lol.

I'm also very grateful for just how much utterly better my life is than it was this time one year ago.

2 days and I am flying to Canada to see best friend for a little over a week.