Like hammering bamboo splinters under your nails and playing the piano

So people have been asking me about Japan, everyone's happy expectant faces like puppy noses pressed to the glass as they wait for the expected "Japan was great!".

No. Sorry. I hate Japan. Ergo, I did not like this trip. Stop asking me how Japan was because I hate watching your expression crumble like a cookie in the rain when I snarl that it was like getting a gynecological exam from a 200-lb Neo-Nazi lesbian dyke who bites her nails, okay? It was uncomfortable, occasionally downright painful, and seemed to last forever.

For a girl like me, who believes that your IQ is, past a certain point, indirectly proportional to the amount of makeup on your face, Japan had me in a constant state of burning irritation. All the girls looked identical, skin bleached fishbelly white and more kohl around the eyes than the whole of India. They don't start that strange phosphorescent white, I know, I've seen young specimens. What happens? Do they bleed their fucking melanin along with their uterine lining when they first hit puberty to become pale shades of themselves? And do their feet end in stumps? I think they must, because there is no other way to wear four-inch stiletto boots for prolonged periods without serious pain. And they must be in pain, because the unmistakable hobbling was evident. So why do it at all? And do they all have to speak in that annoying high-pitched whine? God. Past a certain point I felt like maiming them. I mean, it's not like they could run after me to exact veagence in those shoes anyway.

I saw a chef cut off a crab's leg while it was alive, slice off the shell and proffer the just-living meat to some idiotic kawaii girl who ate with great enthusiasm as she batted her bambi lashes. This did not endear me to the country either. I do no doubt that there is a very special hell for those people, where the crabs are gigantic. And they have knives.

And they eat whales in the name of scientific research.

AND they imprisoned my grandfather during World War II, and more than 50 years later, still deny any wrongdoing.

Japan. Bah.

Given a choice, I would never go to Japan. But for duty, I went. And god, it hurt.

Family vacations for any given family are fraught enough at the best of times. But when you constantly feel like you are the buffer zone between North and South Korea, it just ups the ouch factor by that much. You try and act like the sounding board between two people who talk at you because they won't talk to each other. You know the problem with balancing acts? After a while, you have to fall.

You know how long it took before I realized this was going to be an extremely painful experience? 15 minutes after we landed, when we hadn't even left the airport. When my craving for Djarum hit a massive, all-time high.

I need my space. I get cranky without it. And being around my family 24/7, much as I love them, drove me absolutely stark flaming crazy. I cannot have people constantly telling me to eat, even if I'm not hungry ("Why do I have to eat if I'm not hungry?" "Because you'll get sick." "But I'm already sick!" "See?" Like, wtf). I was sick for most of the trip, completely unconscious for the first day and barely conscious for the next two. Of course, it rained practically every day.

I hate being dragged out of bed at 6 a.m. to look at shrines, it is a travesty to wake up at the crack of dawn when you are technically on a holiday. I can only bear listening to arguments about whether or not to ask the station master as to whether the subway route which we were given was correct for up to five minutes at a time, beyond which I feel like I might go into convulsions. And the particular politics of my family made me want to stick a flaming poker into an eye. At one point I seriously contemplated standing in the rain on sub-10 nights to induce sickness to a degree where I would have to be shipped back home, or at least left in the hotel so I could get some fucking space.

Why do I sound so fucking grouchy? Well, let's see. This trip made it damn near impossible to get a job before I left, and looks equally impossible after because I have the Maldives coming up later. I am constantly worried about money, so much so that when my younger sister insisted that I had to cough up an extra $20 on top of the $100 I can ill-afford to pay for my dad's Christmas present this year, I literally had to drop my head between my knees and breathe deep to stop myself from throwing up as a stress reaction. I still have to pay for Tesh's vet bill this week, and my plane ticket back. In the meantime, God appears to have divine plan which requires that I remain eminently unemployable either here or back in Oz because I am either ridiculously overqualified, underqualified, or leaving every few months. If it weren't for The Boy and my dog, I would just stay there during the hols and just work, especially since it’s near fucking impossible meeting up with people because while my life stops dead in it's tracks when I come back, theirs go on with their attendant demands. I never understood the sense of not belonging anywhere until I first came back. Now I get it. Oh, and why the FUCK are people still hacking in my fucking blog when it's too fucking clear that I want only some people reading it, since it's fucking passwordfuckingprotected?

Bah.