I used to be a people-person

On my first day of kindergarten, my grandma stayed outside the classroom and peeped in from the louvres of the windows while lessons went on, worried that I would turn from boisterous to meek in a room-full of strangers and burst into tears once the doors closed. But she worried needlessly - I ended up tearing through the classroom like a mini blizzard, making friends and feeling right at home, totally un-self conscious.

Today, I went down to the office, where I'd be posted in less than a month. My colleague and namesake, who entered the company a few months earlier than I under the same scheme, brought me around to say hello to the people I'd be working with in the very near future. I was awed by how bubbly and chummy she was with everyone - peers, uncles, aunties and superiors alike. I thought to myself: I couldn't do that.

What happened between kindergarten and 2006?

Actually, I think the transformation truly engendered sometime between JC, my ex (I'm kidding. I think.) and Uni. Those were my angstiest years and I think they have truly made their mark. But that's not the point. The thing is I've been briefed that there'll be a lot more networking and relationship-building in the days to come. As I was told that, I felt a discernable "sinking feeling" in my tummy. Ugh. Am I up to it?

It's not that I don't like people. It's just that, over the years, I've turned increasingly inwards, clamming up instead of reaching out to people. (Some people term it "self-centredness". Others call it "social reticence". How it happened is the real mystery.) The thing is, I like myself the way I am! I don't want to be made to feel bad for who I am, but on the other hand, I know some amount of socialising has to be done to survive in the corporate world. Once again, it's not that I don't like people. I just am, well, for lack of a better term, selectively sociable - and I think many of us are too. The two-fold factor here is also that I just don't like to be told, hey, you need to hob-nob. Whatever happened to doing things because you liked them? Oh yeah, I forgot, that got thrown out of the window once childhood swung past the corner.

Ohhh, all this existential angst.

My Errant Neighbour AKA Stupid Bitch

For years, my mum and I have been contending with our twelveth floor neighbour (we live three floors down). She, and her mum, love to leave their wet, dripping laundry out to dry at the worst possible time - while everyone else eleven floor below are also having theirs out in the sun.

In the beginning, my mum and I separately went upstairs to implore them to take their clothes in, not knowing the other was doing it too. I for my part thought that these occasions were one-off, or rare - but one day the dreaded dripping started when we were both in the kitchen together.

"Mum!" I yelled. "Look what our neighbour is doing!"

"Yah, I know," she replied with unexpected zen. "They always do this."

"We should go up and tell them to stop!"

"No use la, I went many times already, still liddat. The daughter, especially, loves to wash many many bras at one time and let them just drip outside her window."

I never saw those bras though. Never, til today, that is.

I had just woken, and stumbled into the kitchen to wash up, when - plip! plop! ploop! - I thought it had started raining. Turning my attention to what was going on outside the window, I then realised: the stupid bitch had hung her soaking, wet laundry again, taking advantage of the good sun (like everyone else, eleven floors below hers).

Putting down my toothbrush and cursing under my breath, I took in the clothes that were in the firing range of her pelts. I looked up, and there they were - all ten bras and three panties.

Who the hell keeps one and a half weeks' worth of bras to wash at one go? Boy, besides being obnoxiously inconsiderate, my neighbour must be disgustingly unhygienic as well!

Tokyo, baby!

The longer I stay away from blogging, the less I feel I have to offer. With n new blogs being set up each day, and many having a unique view of the world, one wonders who would be interested to read one's shit. Indeed, I've found myself holding back many times from divulging some personal nugget, worried that it'll either

1) bore the shit out of you; or
2) give you goosebumps

both leading to the same consequence - that you shall never return to this domain again.

But, once in a while, I come by something that has so much to offer, that I can't help but want to share. In this case, this thing is actually a place. And it is for this reason (and also because I am madly tired) that I am going to deviate from my normal method of blogging, ie diarrhoea-style, and cover what I did in this weird and wonderful city as much as I can, for as long as I am interested.

No prizes for guessing where, duh.

Japan is such a land of contradictions, to say the least. How can someplace so conservative in so many ways, be so completely cuckoo in so many others? People bow and smile when they talk to you. But then there is the obasan manning the roadside ramen and tempura stall dictatorially, unceremoniously, lifting her arm in the universal "get lost" fashion when she finds out your companion isn't having a bowl. This is the place you can find the salariman, hentai, and heck, salariman reading hentai on the public rail system.

Speaking of the rail system, it is a labyrinthine tangle of subway, railway, underground, overground, the old and the new that criss-crosses all over in a way that even the station warden posted at a station had to whip out a whopper of a book comparable to a small Yellow Pages guide just to tell me how to get to a station that was merely one stop away from the particular line I was on. One stop.

At 5 a.m., mercifully empty.

And 12 hours later, on another rail line... well, you can see for yourself.

And thus concludes Part 1 of my story.