(Tokyo, June, 2014) I am obsessing. Make meaning when there doesn’t seem to be any. I am puttering away, feeling like a little choo-choo train without any breaks. I want to go home.

What a strange year. I am immensely grateful, but I am lost for words. I read a mundane blog post about five things you wish you wouldn’t have done when you are ten years older. One of the points said to not micromanage. It did not say how not to do it. I am wondering if I am hard wired to get my shit perfected down to the very tiny, nitty-gritty details. You do too much, please too many and fail miserably and disappoint your surroundings and yourself.

I spend too much time on the Marunouchi-line. I don’t have any pictures of it because it is so crammed I can not even lift my iPhone to snap a picture. Also, my iPhone is the Japanese model, meaning it is impossible to shut off the shutter sound when I take pictures.

Blame the chikan, those pervs, taking so many up skirt pictures of Japanese school girls that an entire nation of people are condemned to mandatory shutter sounds.

A lot of the things I used to find odd about this county I no longer think about. I have stopped taking pictures of the fancy toilet seats with a ton of options to clean both your front and your behind while taking a dump, excuse my language. I no longer raise my head to gaze at the crazy Harajuku-girls with their multi-colored hair and over the top dresses. And I didn’t even raise an eyebrow when a man, nicely dressed in a fairly fancy suit sat across from me on the Fukutoshin-line, shirt covered in blood and holding his hand over the left part of scalp to stop the extensive bleeding. Neither did anyone else. This city makes you passive, it is hard to explain, but “none of my business” have taken on a life of its own here.