Cranky pants

As exciting as it is to be living in a whole other country, not every day is peachy. Sometimes it just blows my mind that we aren't living in the US right now- that we're actually on the other side of the world. In my everyday life its easy to forget that theres actually a whole wide world out there, and its full of very different places with very different people who have different lives with different priorities end experiences. Since living here we've been able to see the ways that life here are both similar and different from life in the US. Sometimes it can be easy to forget where we are. Yet, other times we are mystified by the smallest things. Like this:

But back to the point of this post-
Even as amazing as life can be, bad days still happen. And we have easily had more than our share of bad days here, no doubt. Adjusting to a new job, a new home, a new language, and everything else can easily make your head spin on the best of days. But this post isnt even about bad days. This post is about... cranky days. Days that really arent so bad, but just seem worse than they are because you're in a bad mood.

Today I had a cranky day. I was a total cranky pants from top to bottom. I honestly had the urge to scream and cry and throw a fit like a child. And, like a child, it was caused by me just being too tired. This morning I woke up around 4:30AM and just could not get back to sleep. Infact I just got more and more awake with each passing minute, probably because I was freaking out about getting back to sleep. By the time my alarm went off at 5:45AM I was exhausted, cranky, and just plain mad. I've been very tired this week so I went to bed early last night, and here I squandered that by being awake and ended up being tired again.

Anyways, I began my day fully aware that my crankiness would cause me to have a worse day than was necessary, but I just couldnt shake it. I forgot my hand towel at home- which means I had nothing to dry my hands on all day. Yeah, theres no paper towels or hand drier in school bathrooms so everyone carries around a small personal hand towel. And mine was at home. Other small things happened too, and I took them way too hard. See, they are so insignificant that I cant even remember what they are, but by the time lunch came around I was in a crappy mood.

But lunch would save everything! I had been looking forward to lunch all day- I knew it would cheer me up. Today I had curry and a croquette for lunch, so awesome! But... then... I opened my lunch and found only the curry with rice and... ramen meat. The thin slices of meat that we put in our ramen. No croquette. Nothing fried and delicious to go with my curry, which now seemed pointless. Well that was just about the last straw.

Distraught, I sent Kris a message telling him about my day and finally things started to go right. Leave it to Kris to turn my day around. How you ask? Well first he told me he went grocery shopping- he got lunch and dinner for tomorrow sorted out. Then he told me had already had dinner for tonight. And what was the dinner he promised that turned my day around?

True, Dominos is not normally the kind of cuisine that can turn your grey skies blue, but like many things from the US in Japan, the quality has been much improved with translation. The Dominos website has incredible ingredients crab gratin bouillabaisse and char-grilled beef. Tonight Kris ordered simply for us so we could taste the foundation of this grandiose pie. Kris got sausage and pepperoni, and I had garlic and green pepper on a stuffed crust pizza.

It was heaven. Small heaven. A medium here is a small if not a large personal pizza by US standards, and at about $10 each it wasn't exactly cheap. But man, I needed it.

Since dinner and since writing this I feel much better. I'm going to try to get in bed early again. Its frustrating being to tired during the week to actually do anything I want to. I have a bunch of art I want to finish. My commute is a little over an hour this week which really cuts into my time and energy during the week. It sucks but life goes on, I'm a weekend warrior now.

K+K