But it’s not quite yet time for me to go back home to Sweden. However, the return date has been moved forward a few months — I am now planning on going back in the end of December, instead of the end of March. So suddenly I am at the “only a couple of months (4) left” milestone. Feels weird. Up until now I’ve felt like I had all the time in the world. Since I probably flunked the JLPT back in July, it also means I’m going to have to put some effort into my studies now. Oh well.

So I got a job at a big multinational company. It’s just a part time job and it’s only until September (at the latest), but it pays and it’s not just once a week like my other job as an English teacher.

It was interesting seeing how big of a pain in the ass the Japanese employment process is. I figured as much, but you had to see it to believe it. Though my case was a little different, since I was actually being employed through a recruitment agency, which means I actually get paid from the RA, and the RA gets paid by the company based on my hours. So I had two separate interviews, and I was told that I had to wear a suit to them. So I bought a suit.

Thank $deity for mama-san. I have no fucking clue what a suit is supposed to look like and she took the time to go with me and the girlfriend to the store to pick stuff out for me. To not make this story more long-winded than it has to, I had to learn how to tie a necktie, and I had to do it on the day of the interview. It “looked” okay to me. And noone snickered at me behind my back, so I suppose I managed to get it right. The actual interview(s) took several hours each.

The first one was like a test day where I got a bunch of quizzes (like, this piece of paper… with symbols on it… and I had to say how many of a specific symbol were on each line… that paper could have come from space, it looked so stinking weird). I also got a kanji quiz, math quiz, and I can’t remember what else. The second interview was mostly consisting of me being told, for hours, the various rules I had to follow, and reminders of the various laws in place to support said rules. I applied several weeks ago in fact, but it took them over 2 weeks to figure out whether they actually wanted me or not. They had someone else from some other RA for awhile there, they claimed, but ultimately they must have seen the glory of my answers in that weird-symbol-quiz-sheet.

When I joined last Monday, I was actually doing full time because I still had summer vacation but as of today, I only work 3.5 hour in the mornings. So anyway, they have rules about clothing. A shirt with a collar and “not jeans”, which translates to pants you could wear with a suit without having eyebrows raised at you. So I went out on a shopping spree again and got two more pairs of pants, and five (yes five, as in MonTueWedThurFri-five) shirts with collars. I actually kind of like the style, at least when it’s not too formal. “With collar” as the only requirement gives you a good bit of freedom after all. I also bought shoes. Shoes that you could wear with said pants, which you could, as stated earlier, wear with a suit without being eyebrow-raised-at. Conclusively, I do look rather formal when I walk out that door. And noone would be surprised if I said I was going to work.

Which I am, actually.

But yes. Something’s been bugging me every day that I’ve walked out that door. This sudden jolt in my chest and the sudden, quite obscure sentence in my head “WAIT! WHERE’S MY HAT!?”.

… the fuck? Why do I need a hat? So I look down at my collared shirt and my would-fit-a-suit-pants and my would-fit-said-pants-shoes and I think “hm. No. I don’t need a hat with these clothes.”

Initially I thought maybe I mixed them up with my girlfriend’s uniform that she wears at her café (they have this uber-silly hat. Luckily she’s still cute even when she wears it), and maybe that somehow nestled its way into my brain. But then it struck me.

The last time I wore “clothes based on a rule” on an everyday basis was when I did military service back in 2001. And it so happens that the cap is a very important part that gets all the newbies yelled at frequently by the officers. Don’t wear it indoors. Don’t not wear it outdoors. That about sums it up but for people unused to wearing things on the head, it is a hassle. Or was for me and my group anyway.

So yeah. I’m being haunted by in-the-bones instincts to wear my cap cause I’m outdoors 8 years after I did military service, simply because I’m wearing clothes with a rule on them. The brain’s a wonderfully buggy thing isn’t it…?

For those of you interested in that sort of thing (read: any of my Japanese speaking friends), I’ve now set up a blog in Japanese here. I understand the folly of my ways, but I feel that there’s so much I want to write in Japanese that I can’t likely write here, without afflicting the question-mark explosion of Doom upon those of my friends who don’t have Japanese language settings on their computers. And a majority of those that do probably don’t care for the squigglies too much either.

In any case, check if out if you’re curious. I’ll continue writing here as well, obviously, so there’s no need to take a crash course in Japanese in order to continue enjoying my deep, philosophical enlightenment. I wrote that with a straight face, by the way.

Those of you who do understand Japanese, I’ll gladly take any comments you have on errors in the language, but please don’t get too nitpicky on me. I’ll lose my will to write if I get 15-page essays about everything I did wrong every time I post a new entry if you do.

… I miraculously managed to fall asleep around 3am, and miraculously managed to wake up at 8.30 am, and then miraculously managed to go to bed around 1 am that day, and even more miraculously managed to get up at 7 am the day after. Well, that would be today. And now I’m definitely ready for bed and it’s 10.30 pm.

This ought to be the shortest blog post I’ve done in years.

Last year around September, Rico, one of my best friends among my Swedish-friends-in-Japan group went back home to Sweden after 6 months here. About a month ago, he came back to Japan to visit, but he went to Nagoya instead of Kyoto, so we couldn’t really hang like we did “back in the days”, but he visited Kyoto occasionally so we did hang a few times. Yesterday, he went to Osaka where Kim, another good friend of mine, is now living, and I decided to go meet them up and hang.

Rico was going back to Nagoya early this morning (the bus left at 7.30 am) so he had decided to simply be up all night partying and then sleep on the bus home. Me and Kim decided that we’d simply tag along until we got too tired, and in the end, we simply ended up staying up until Rico left for the bus.

It started out with us going to Kim’s place together with his girlfriend, where we had dinner and played Wii Sports with punishment game (the loser out of the 4 of us downs whiskey/coke) for awhile until Kim’s girlfriend had to go home. After that we went to Namba and walked around looking for places to hang at, went into some bar here and some other place there, met two guys from Texas of all places. The Texans proclaimed “we know a good place down the road”, so in blind faith we followed them around for about an hour or so before we realized they had no idea what they were doing, so I said “you guys go into this bar. we’ll be there later tonight”, and moved on. We walked around for some more, then went into McD’s and grabbed food, before we moved on to a karaoke place where we spent the remanining 2 hours.

I was originally intending on staying at Kim’s place over the night, but at this point it was 5.20 am, and the trains to Kyoto were in traffic at that point, so I got on the train home instead. For the record, trying to stay awake for a near 1 hour train ride when you woke up 21 hours earlier is tricky business, but I managed to get off at my stop. So I got back home around 7 am, went to bed and woke up at 4 pm. Usually I get up at 7 am every morning, holidays included, summer vacations included, so this was very unusual, and frankly, I’ve felt like the world is kind of glitched throughout the day. I used to do this all the time, but now that I haven’t in a long while, it really does affect me in ways it didn’t use to. Could be that I’m too old for this kind of stuff now, I don’t know. Walking outside and seeing the darkness really shocked me. I woke up 4 hours ago! And it’s dark?

How long will it take before I get my sleeping pattern straightened out again I wonder….