Annoyator
Firstly lets clear something up.
Its that time of year again when current JETs are getting ready to return to their home countries and soon-to-be JETs are getting ready to throw themselves into this cacophonous melting pot of retardation we call Japan, and some readers may be wondering where the hell I fit into all of this.
The answer to that is - I don’t. The more brain-celled amongst you may have realised from the fact that I’m not writing about how little time I have left on this rock or ending paragraphs with phrases such as “and that’s why I’m going to miss tentacle porn” might have come to the conclusion that at some point around the start of the year, I recontracted to do another year on JET. And you would be correct. So there you have it, I have for a 3rd and final year of JET. The reasons for not writing anything about this previously were, amongst others:
a) I was too busy. Or something. Shut up I’m eating yoghurt balls.
b) I was still tentative as to whether I made the right decision and didn’t want to cement anything by writing it in my blog. Because you know, writing it on my blog legally binds my decision so much more than all the pieces of paper I signed and forms I stamped with my personal seal.
c) I wasn’t even sure if I really recontracted or whether this is still all some horrible nightmare and I’m just waiting for the bit where I make David Bowie transform into an owl so I can wake up.
So why did I recontract? Well, it was a pretty tough decision, more difficult than the situation I’m sure many of you might have imagined, that being me saying “Recontract? RECONTRACT?? HAHAHAH!!!!!” and ripping up the official documents into millions of tiny pieces, pulling the pin on a grenade and running out of the door. Ultimately though, I decided a year is a short time and I would rather spend that one year doing a final year in Japan, than say, going home and wondering what it would have been like if I stayed, consequently being miserable forev444r whilst washing lettuce at McDonalds and spending my lunch breaks talking to the token equal-opportunities senior citizen member of staff about how I used to live in Japan in between his bouts of panicked disorientation:
Me: Yeah I could write your name in kanji if you like Him: What? Who the frick are you?! What year is this?! Who is the president?! Do you work for Izon?! What the frick is this?!? Me: That’s a McNugget Him: Mahoo! Me: Quite. Well anyway I have to be getting back to scraping dung off buns now
After weighing the pros and cons for a long time, I decided that in the end, I enjoy my job here, I have some goals (JLPT, create army of doom, smash world record for “most pointless world record”), I like my life in this quiet village - in fact everything is pretty great apart from the distinct lack of some kind of breakdancing sex robot - so why not stay for the final year. I have the whole rest of my life to, you know, get on with the rest of my life.
ANYYYWAY, this entry wasn’t meant to be about all that - it was meant to be about THIS:
As a terminal fault-finder, I keep a kind of mental log of all the things in my life that irritate me or I find stupid. Perhaps some of this stems from the possibility that one day I might aspire to have my own observational comedy stand up act and until then I must store away material titbits like some kind of weird metaphorical squirrel-magpie with flamethrowers for eyes but I think for now it mostly has to do with the fact that I’m a cunt.
I think this website quite successfully documents most of the things in my life that I find irritating or worthy of note for being so retarded or a-brained. But lately, I have found that all my hate, all my evil, my dark, my doom can be personified by one thing, well, person. Well, thing.
The Fidgety Chick Who Sits Next To Me
There are three main reasons as to why Fidgety Chick Who Sits Next To Me in the staffroom at one of my schools, annoys the living shit out of me so much I want to throw vampire bats at her face.
Number one: she won’t stop moaning. As in literally, moaning. Not saying “this pen is rubbish” or “aww there is saliva all over this book” - I mean actually making a moaning “oooooohhhhhmphhff” sound at regular intervals within the course of the 8 hours a day I have to sit next to her, mostly spent trying to control my foot from launching itself deep into her spine. The sound is as bizarre as it is annoying - falling somewhere between sounding sexually appeased and slightly tired. Every time she does it my head pops up and my eyes dart desperately around the room to see if anyone ANYONE else reacted even a tiny bit to this repetitive, whimper-groan but they don’t - which leads me to the conclusion that she has actually figured out how to create noise at a specific frequency at which only I am able to hear. I am the dog and she is the stupid fat kid frustratedly blowing the dog whistle again and again not understanding why no humanly audible noise is coming out whilst I go absolutely batshit crazy.
Number two: she bangs my chair every time she walks behind me, in a space that is at least 3 feet wide from the back of my chair to the wall. This would be understandable IF
a) I was fat, and thus my chair was continually jutting out.
b) SHE was fat, and thus her arse was continually jutting out.
c) She had no concept of spatial reality due to her eyes and brain being made out of ripped up pieces of old Chinese newspapers.
But none of those things apply in this case. So I have to conclude that she is either doing this accidentally or she is deliberately trying to piss me off. And as much as I try to give her the THUNK benefit of the doubt THUNK I find it is hard to do that THUNK when she is tripping over me several times a day THUNK (”ah! gomen ne!”), especially considering you could take the world’s most powerful electron microscope and prove that I am atom-for-atom in EXACTLY the same place as I was the last fifteen times she walked straight into the back of my fricking chair.
Number three: as the name I have given her suggests, she is extremely fidgety. Its like she has a special kind of A.D.D. that only affects her propensity to continually open and close desk drawers. Whilst everyone else in the office is basically a shell of a real human kept from the brink of coma by occasionally having to click a mouse thus advancing ever so slightly in the epic game of Solitaire they have been playing since humans were FISH, Fidgety Chick Who Sits Next To Me is a downright INTRUSIVE flurry of movement, slamming things shut, rustling paper, making her little moany sighs, pausing to stare blankly at people, pausing to stare at my computer screen, violently rubbing things out with an eraser causing her desk to wobble which in turn causes mine to wobble which in turn makes me want to set her on fire and generally disrupting the wa, or I guess more importantly, MY wa. LEAVE MY WA* ALONE YOU WRETCHED FILTHY WHORE. I feel much better now.
*”Wa” loosely translates as “harmony” or harmony in the Japanese sense which is more like “don’t rock the boat, get back in your box”.
