Looking back on my last post, I notice a definite choppiness to the narrative which I, ever attuned to my own spastic ways, decode as nervousness. The internet connection I am “borrowing” from my neighbor is very tenuous – or at least it was yesterday – and with each keystroke, I feared being disconnected … or being confronted by an angry seventeen year-old boy. Today the internet doesn’t work at all – in fact, the connection died yesterday just as I finished typing “seventeen year-old boy” – so now I am at an internet cafe to bring you more choppy, nervous sentences.
Surrounded by clacking keys and the soft shuffling of manga pages, I am reminded of my first 2 months in Japan, when I was waiting desperately to get internet in my Abeno apartment. I went once a day, sometimes twice if I had a freelance work deadline, and always returned to my apartment-tini reeking of smoke and manga-juiced teenager vibes. This time around, I was able to open my new internet account on my own and my new landlord has handled the dreaded faceless, keigo-rich phone calls to the company to arrange a set up date which will take place next Monday. I know that my internet cafe days will be short here in the new hood, which is why I happily fork over my 480 yen an hour. My time is short, too – I have already spent most of my hour responding to emails and catching up on my blogs. It has been raining nonstop since yesterday and on my rain-sprinkled walk home, I will remember the many colorful images of my new apartment and neighborhood that have been flooding into my brain for the past couple of days which I was too nervous to type down when I had the chance.
One thing I can mention, though, in the interest of making this post at least slightly different from the previous one, is that a post I wrote back in May (“Someone’s Knocking on the Door”) has been featured in this month’s Blog Matsuri, hosted this September on Tae Kim‘s blog. The Blog Matsuri is a monthly compilation of topical posts from blogs written about Japan; September’s topic was “The Language of Japan.”
And with one minute to go until I get charged extra … no, that’s it.