I am so very tired.
Yesterday was my birthday and things went well. I didn't do anything big but I did meet up on Thursday with some friends in Sendai for cake at a new place that I thought would have nice cakes. They did. We had fun.
I got spoiled with gifts even though people did not have to do so. Even my daughter gave me a little letter saying the Japanese version of Happy Birthday, love Julia, which she wrote herself (no doubt at the behest/coaching of my mother-in-law). It was kind of magical.
My husband managed to freak out a bunch on the one day off he had before my birthday, going back and forth about what we should do and where we should go until it was too late to do anything but go to Sendai and check out the Pokemon store, which we did. He did later figure his stuff out and get me an electric blanket (my first ever) so that I can stay cozy and warm while writing, which I will admit was a thoughtful gift.
NaNoWriMo is going well. Not as well as years past, most of which I won before this point in the month where today I am limping along at 41,700, not sure where that extra 9 thousand is going to come from but determined to put it into the current story somewhere.
Other than that I have small whining that should not be necessary yet kind of is. The morning of my birthday included classes at the kindergarten where I teach a few weeks a year. It is seriously like 9 lessons a year or something similar. Not a lot. There is a Japanese teacher who picks me up and drives me there. Then we go in and use whatever materials she brought. We differ on a few points but usually get along well enough. After the last class before this (2 weeks ago), she told me that we were getting there too early and should meet at 10:10 instead of 10:00. I agreed and set my scheduled alarms accordingly. This week a wander around an extra five minutes before going out to meet her right around 10:07. She gets us there, saying that we will get there just barely on time, but when we get there, she still sits in the car and chats with me instead of charging into the school, so I am completely confused. I don't really know what she wants and Japan does not lend itself well to being understood in this way, so I am just going to show up at 10:00 from now on. We only have a few classes left for the year anyway.
I also was annoyed about trying to have a meetup with my fellow NaNoWriMo writers in this area. I wasn't going to do anything because I've tried a few times over the years (before Julia) to hold write-ins and I can honestly say that I have had 2 that went moderately well. My last one had a group of 4ish people as I recall at a Starbucks in Sendai. The last successful one before that was when one preacher-guy showed up at a different Starbucks in Sendai a year or two before. That said, I have held a couple of "events" where literally no one showed up and it bothers me a lot to put time and energy into trying to see people who aren't going to be there anyway. So I don't just post on the NaNo forums that I will have an event, because I cannot personally handle the stress of waiting in a public space with my daughter for hours on people who will never arrive. I need assurance that people are genuinely interested and willing to come to the event.
Apparently, all the people doing this in major urban areas just make events and hope for the best, so when I posted to see if anyone could do anything on the last 2 Sundays of the month, the mod for the area posts that I need to put my event in the proper format, indicating factors she thinks are key so she can share them easily. She doesn't know me, or that I've done this before, or that I have been doing this in this area for 7 years, or that I have just enough social anxiety that even posting the suggestion that a meetup might be possible feels like a taxing commitment. All she knows is that she needs facts and figures, which I deliver to her when two other people say they will come and we have a time and date nailed down.
And she shortens the meeting time and location, which probably wouldn't suck in other metropolitan areas, but means something to me. Saying to meet at Shibuya station-- everyone knows you mean to meet at Hachiko, the dog statue. If that is Shibuya? Like I would know. I do not live near Tokyo and never have, but if you're meeting at the station with the dog statue, that's where you meet people.
If you're in Nagoya, you meet at the big golden clock, but if you have only been living in the central Japanese countryside for a year and don't usually meet people in Nagoya, how would you know?
You wouldn't. And this woman is taking for granted that of course everyone in the surrounding area totally knows where to meet in Sendai, which is a smaller station, but not so small that you are likely to know all of the foreigners in the station at any given time. So instead of "Meet at the stained glass windows in Sendai Station and move to the AER building" we get "Sendai Station and AER" which basically means "Good luck, idiots in Tohoku. You don't matter enough. Other cities can have half a sentence for their locations. More than a sentence sometimes. They deserve it. They're in 'real' Japan. You're not."
And the day after I got all of that as sorted as it would go on Monday, my husband freaked out on Tuesday over having Sunday off, so I canceled all the plans including that on Wednesday, only for his Sunday off to be canceled that evening upon his return.
So here we are. I could go to the thing tomorrow, but I will not go to the thing. It is not worth my energy at this point. It would not be bad to meet other writers in the area, but they aren't really in the area. They both have to drive or ride in from other towns, not too close to Sendai. Further from Sendai than I am. Maybe I would like them, and we would get along and be friends, or maybe they would see me for the slightly off-kilter weirdo that I am and reject me outright. Or maybe they would latch on and get clingy and scare me half to death.
I don't care. I mean, obviously I do care or I wouldn't be whining about it, and I feel bad about letting them down in a way, but I cannot do this thing now. And I am unlikely to bother attempting to host another one again.
Oh, also, this is likely the most homesick I have felt on Thanksgiving. I bought frozen ground turkey meat on Amazon and made a meat loaf. It was alright. We had it Friday as on Thursday we had retained an extra pizza from the night before.
So that's most of what's happening with me.
Now back to writing my increasingly wacky science history fan fiction adventure!
