I am, in fact, alive

Sorry I went radio silent

After what I said at the end of my last post about being more casual about writing for this website, I up and vanished for over a month. Haha, oops? I assure you I haven't been just sitting around this month, though. I did quite a bit of reading, from the entirety of Fate/Zero to a handful of other LNs. I also rewatched all of Hunter x Hunter, and I'm in the middle of watching Yugioh in Japanese for the first time. You might think, gee, that's a real weird use of a hundred gigabytes on your hard drive, but don't worry. I downloaded the dub too, as well as GX for good measure. As I have said before, I am not a smart man.

At any rate, today I think I'll write a bit about my personal life. Granted, most of the people liable to read this are people who have visited me here and thus know basically all of this already, but fuck it. I kinda have to force myself to do this to keep myself from writing about stuff I probably shouldn't be putting online for any random person to see.

I actually kinda lucked out with this apartment

Before I moved to Tokyo, I was a JET in the middle of Buttfuck Nowhere. The town's population hovered around 2500, and you could walk halfway across it in like ten minutes. I don't like the countryside, and my experience teaching at the local elementary school and kindergarten taught me that I'm really no good with little kids. Besides, my dream was to translate, not to teach. So after a year there, I chose not to re-sign my contract, instead resolving to find a new job.

And let me tell you, that was rough. Job hunting was so stressful and soul-sucking that I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Out of the hundreds of applications I sent in, I only got a handful of interviews, and only one offer. Lonesome was there when I got the call from my agent, and he can attest to the immense elation and relief I felt in the moment.

Anyway, shortly afterward, I visited Tokyo for a weekend to go apartment hunting. None of the places I found on Suumo ahead of time were actually available, of course, but I still managed to get my hands on an apartment that met my requirements. It wasn't easy, I tell you; it's perfectly legal and very widespread for landlords to discriminate against foreigners. It was either this apartment, or another one on the other side of Tokyo. I only had two choices.

This one is only barely inside Tokyo; I'm a five-minute walk from the border with Chiba. However, I'm one train ride away from Akihabara and Shinjuku, and two from Shibuya, so I think I've lucked out. People seem surprised when I tell them the ride to Shinjuku is thirty minutes, but it's a perfectly doable distance if you feel like going. After all, unlike when you're driving a car, you can multitask on the train. I often use that time to knock out tasks in my gacha games or get a little reading in.

But even if I don't travel, I have a lot of decent stuff at and around my apartment. There's a 7-Eleven within two minutes by foot, and down by the station (which is just shy of ten minutes by foot), there's Lawson, Family Mart, McDonald's, Anytime Fitness, Sukiya, Saizeriya, Cocoichi, various clinics, and even a neat little bakery that makes some really good bread. If I go the other direction, into Chiba, I can even find a Denny's and a Yoshinoya. There's also some shitty Chinese food places sprinkled about, but, well, they're shitty. Why is it that only Hidakaya manages to get it right?

Speaking of my station, it kinda sucks. It's a long-ass escalator ride down to just the ticket gates, and cutting through it is the shortest way to cross Kannana-doori and get to like half the stuff I mentioned in that last paragraph.

So what the hell do I do with my time?

Well, my company's office is in Nagoya. This might come as a shock, but I don't make a six-hour and 25k yen round trip every day to do my job. I went there once for orientation, but I work entirely from home on the computer they provided me. I must say, it's quite convenient. I can get up and pace, lean back in my chair, lie down for a second, just do whatever helps me think, and nobody has to be bothered. It also makes it easy to stay in contact with my team, since I can voice chat with them without annoying anybody around me.

Most people at my company work 10 to 7, but our "core hours" are 10 to 4, and you can freely adjust your work time so long as you're there during core hours and you meet your average of 8 hours a day. As such, I work 8 to 5, since I like having lots of time in the evening to myself. Sometimes, when I'm not being a lazy fuck, I use that time to go to the gym. Other times, when I know I've got nothing I want to do, I stay clocked in and work for a bit longer so I can clock out earlier on days when I do have plans.

But no matter what, I always clock out at 5 on the dot on Fridays, since that's the day I go to Shinjuku to have fun. I get dinner as soon as I arrive, and while I used to vary what I get, I've lately taken a liking to the C&C Curry just around the corner from the ticket gates when I arrive. There's no beating Cocoichi when it comes to spiciness, but in terms of overall flavor, C&C is quite nice.

After I get dinner, I make it a point to go to my favorite bar. I stumbled upon the place about this time last year, and I just love how chill the atmosphere and employees are. The thing is, though, alcohol in Japan is ridiculously weak by foreigner standards (apparently; I've only ever drank in Japan), so before I go, I get a bottle of Korean alcohol from 7-Eleven for a little pre-gaming. It's strawberry-flavored and something like 13%. That's enough to put basically any girl under the table, supposedly, but I can down the thing in three minutes and hardly feel anything. It's convenience store alcohol, so it's not great, but it's at least drinkable and gets the job done.

By the time I get to that bar, it's about 6:30, and I'm usually the only customer. Because I come every single Friday, the employees immediately recognize me, and have often said that since days just kind of blend together in their line of work, I'm how they know it's Friday. They also know exactly what I get: Kahlua milk. It's the only thing I ever drink there, and I'm apparently the reason they stock two cartons of milk instead of one. Because, uh, I drink a lot of it. Back when they still had an all-you-can-drink system, you better believe I took advantage of it. I mean, hey, you can't taste the alcohol, so it's actually drinkable, and it takes something like a dozen of the things before I actually start feeling drunk.

That's not to say I go there for the purpose of getting drunk. I go there to have fun talking to people. If I were capable of making that sort of conversation without alcohol, you better believe I wouldn't be spending way too much yen per glass on that stuff. I usually talk to the employees since there tends to be maybe one or two customers besides me at most, but sometimes someone interesting will sit near me. I used to only stay for an hour and then go do other stuff in Shinjuku, but lately, I'm having so much fun that I'll just stay at that bar for several hours before heading home.

On Saturdays, I often go to Akihabara to check up on the latest LN and manga releases, and I've been making more trips to Shibuya as of late, too. I like to just walk around aimlessly and let myself get lost in the crowds. Though can I just say? Y'all foreign tourists make me wanna throttle you. You have no idea how to walk down a busy sidewalk. And for some reason, though crowds weren't too bad during Golden Week, we've gotten a lot of tourists in the time since. What's up with that?

On Sundays, I usually stay home and chill. Reading, watching anime, that fun stuff. When the temperature is pleasant, sometimes I'll go sit on a bench outside my station to do my reading. I do go out on Sundays sometimes, but I've been trying to cut back on that lately in the interest of saving money. I don't exactly make a lot of it. After all, capitalism isn't exactly known for paying people what they're worth.

At any rate, you may have noticed that my life isn't terribly exciting. I don't have friends I can hang out with casually, much less a girlfriend. I tend to get pretty lonely during the week, which is part of why I look forward to my Friday nights so much, as well as why so much of what I write about has to do with the content I consoom. I'm trying to work on that, but hey, it's tough.

So where am I going with this post?

Absolutely nowhere! There isn't a point I'm trying to make or anything. However, the act of typing all this out has fed my narcissism enough to stop me from writing about more personal stuff, so mission accomplished. I don't know what I'll write about next, though. Stay tuned, I guess.