Bicycles and pillars in the middle of the road.

So last Tuesday I somehow managed to forget I had work in the evening. To be honest, it’s not odd, really, because up until now I’ve always gone directly from school to work with no pause in between, since school was in the evening. Now, school has switched for me to mornings, and on top of that, I had spring break so I had no school. On top of the top of that, I was frantically looking for a photograph I’d taken a few weeks earlier because I needed one. For an insurance that I was going to create later that day (my previous insurance was Swedish and was simply put a pain in the ass to use — admittedly, it’s better than the Japanese insurances, but I can at least use theirs by simply throwing them on the counter when I go to a hospital or whatnot — and it expires on the 14th of April and being without insurance is unhealthy for your wallet, and your luck!).

Anyway, it’s suddenly 5.10 pm (I still hadn’t found those photos by the way) and work starts at 6, and this is the point where I go “holy shit I have work today!”, so I rush out the door, jump on my trusty, shiningly red bicycle, and start pedaling away. Shortly thereafter, I managed to run over a bump and the back tire goes “boom”. Which usually means flat tire, but this bike just has a habit of going boom occasionally. I guess it likes fireworks.

In any case, I checked the tire, and there was barely any air left. Well, I happened to know about an air pump thingie just a few blocks away so I carefully pedaled thataway to fill the tire up again. “If I’m lucky, it just got a little scared and went “pooh!” but there’s no real hole,” I surmised, and pedaled the uneventful way there, filled the tire up, and all is well.

Well. Except for the fact I now am in even more of a hurry getting to work. So I hurry.

This is Kyoto. Kyoto is a place that is coincidentally adored by the sun. And I mean Adored. I am wearing sunglasses but the road happens to be going straight west, and the sun happens to be in a position right square in front of me beaming lovingly at me and everything else. Me, I love the sun, coming from a country where the sun is like a chaste virgin going for the first time to a motorcycle gang prom — if motorcycle gangs do have proms — that is, kind of a tentative cautious tip-toedness in general. But here I was facing a problem, because with the sun where it was, and — oh my, my sunglasses sure are dirty — I came to the conclusion that, well, I don’t actually see very much of what’s in front of me. Is that a pillar on the ground in front of me? I better turn. Hm, why am I spinning in the air. Hm. why am I lying on the ground. My iPod.

My iPod is singing away in my ears. How the hell did those little ear thingies NOT fall out during my Olympic Acrobatics Award Winning move just now? In any case, I found myself lying front down with both my hands pushed against the ground as if I’m about to start either break dancing or doing push-ups. As I get up I realize I’ve crashed into like 10 bikes that were parked on the side of where I decided to spontaneously become airborne.

The insurance. That’s honestly the first thing that struck my mind. See, I was pretty sure my Swedish insurance was still valid, but I wasn’t 100% sure. There was this 0.1% chance that the insurance applied to April 5 2008 – April 5 2009, since April 5 is the date of my arriving in Japan (if you think about it, though, they have no idea of the dates so it’s obvious that it would be based on the day the school started, but I didn’t think that far at the time) … in which case I might now need medical care, and I’m without insurance. Lovely.

I hurt my hands pretty bad. Sprained both of them, in fact. But I didn’t realize that until later, so I got on my bike (which was, miraculously, okay) and went to work. At the very least after all this trouble (and .. pain) I was not going to miss work. I got there 15 minutes before work started. And the damn students were late that day! Grr.

Later on, my girlfriend’s mom suggested I stay at their place for a couple of days so my hands would get a chance to heal up. So I took her up on the offer and crashed there until just now. Hence I’ve been quite gone, in case you wondered (but then again, my online presence these days is sort of like an old man in a wheelchair’s presence at the folk dance hall … it might happen, on a rare occasion, but nothing seems to come of it).

Oh, and in case you wondered, yes, typing this long blog entry hurt there at the end, but I wanted to get it out of my system. Read pain between the lines.