#tanda talks

I was going through immigration at Haneda after making it through security. I kept failing my passport/face scan. I thought maybe it was because I took the picture with makeup and I'm currently bare faced. The employee at the counter sent me to a different lane. This employee checked through several different forms and kept clicking through the computer system before finally picking up a phone and calling a third immigration officer to come over. This man led me to a third counter where he explained that despite my passport clearly having the entry stamp, they have no record of me ever entering the country. As far as their system was concerned, I shouldn't be here. I was an undocumented tourist.

Here in Japan, they kindly told me they assume there had been a system error on their end and if I could basically backdate an arrival form I'd be okay. There was a lot of information on it I didn't have handy (airbnb address and phone, for example). They just hand-waved it and let me submit the form as-is, then allowed me to pass through to my gate. I was so tense from the moment I heard I was missing in their system, so I felt a lot of relief passing through that gate.

The guy behind us in the lifted truck was drowsy when he plowed into us going over 60mph. He said he totaled his other car last month and looking at the scrunched mess that was left of his rig, he expressed annoyance that he was now without a vehicle.

Our livelihood was in that van. Our small business. We were headed to the biggest show in the region with most of our stock. Tens of thousands of dollars, now damaged.

That van was the workhorse of our business. It served as our lodging when we had to travel, often for one of our jobs. I don't know what we will do now. I'm glad we are okay, other than a concussion, bruising, and whiplash. But I just don't know.

Then our nation lost its mind and I felt true despair for the first time in a long time. My alarm went off, I checked the results, and I felt my stomach drop. I spent the day oscillating between numbness and rage. But that wasn't the end of that day. Not even close!

On the Wednesday I woke up to a changed nation, I was also told at work that half of my employees are getting a raise and half are not. As a manager who gives a lot of fucks about their employees, how is that information supposed to make me feel other than angry and jaded? I was told to tell my employees that we still value them all equally. Instead I told the ones not getting a raise I'd help them with their resumes.

Because this was the Wednesday from hell, it didn't stop there. I got a phone call from my best employee (who is not in the raise category) who hadn't come in to work. She told me she had been going to a bunch of appointments trying to to get results on what was causing her chest pains, and she had just been diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. I'm terrified for her.

I went home and opened my phone to receive a gloating message from one of my oldest friends about Trump's win. I've now cut him out of my life but it hurts. He's been like a big brother for nearly a decade. He reported the man who sexually harassed me when I was a new employee. That creep lost his job for what he did, and it was all thanks to this brother figure looking out for the young new girl. Now it's come to this.

A few hours later, one of my best friends confessed she had just been released from the hospital following a traumatic miscarriage that required an emergency abortion. She lost over a liter of blood. She almost died.

And look! My stress and anxiety reached a peak and bam! I'm super sick, and this came on Thursday.

Which is how today, on June 28th 2024, I found two technical books checked out from the library in 1990 and 1996 in a bookshelf in a cubicle in my office. Bemused, I brought them back to the library. The librarian at the counter brightly said, "Hello! Are you returning some books?"

And I could only reply, "I guess? I think?" as I handed the pair over. He noticed the lack of barcodes, frowned, then flipped open the first book to the inside cover to reveal the inner pocket with the card tucked away, the dates stamped and initialed.

1) the shaking jelly stage

2) the "please kill me" stage