Judgement

Here I sit, on a Monday morning, at my desk in my office. This weekend was beyond hectic, stressful and tiring.

It all started on Saturday morning when I woke up around 6:00am to start moving. My friends helped me and we busted @ss until about 12:15. We took a 10 minute lunch break and we worked until 4:00. Thankfully, we got all the major stuff moved. The only thing left to do with moving is to finish unpacking (which is mostly done now) and clean up the old jail cell.

The real test came yesterday, Sunday, when I had to meet Ayu's parents. Under normal circumstances, this would be stressful, but I had the luxury of knowing that I was less than ideal for Ayu in her parents' eyes. We took a dreadful 2 hour train ride up to what is almost the northern part of Ishikawa called Noto. As the train kept pushing northwards, my stress kept rising. About 15 minutes before our stop, I remember the sheer terror that was running through my mind: I did not want to do this, but I knew I had to. After that terror subsided, a war started brewing in me: "don't do it!, but get it done with quickly!"

After we got off the train, I had the luxury of walking to her parents' house for 15 minutes. At this point, I was nearly in panic. I was terrified of what would happen if they didn't like me, if they made an objection to me right in front of Ayu and me. I honestly didn't know how this would turn out and what the proper reaction would be to anything they threw at us. In the 28 years I've been alive, I have never been so nervous.

We arrived at her parents' house and I faced my firing squad.

Ayu said "tadaima" which means "I'm home". Her family came to the door and...

I have never been so wrong in my life. At first it started off rather awkward seeing as we didn't really know each other. After a while though, the gears started to get lubed up and things started to flow more naturally. Ayu showed me her house and her mother asked us if we were hungry. I think I amazed them at how much Japanese food I could eat and they sent us back with about 20 pounds of vegetables from her grandparents' garden (these people are amazing and will have their own post sometime in the near future).

I looked at Ayu and said we should probably get going since it would be another 2 hours taking the train back to Nishi Izumi, so if we left at 8:30 we would get back around 10:30. Her parents immediately told Ayu that we were NOT taking the train and they would happily drive us back. They were amazingly kind and very wonderful people.

Her parents came in and saw our apartment, they loved it (despite the moving bomb that was detonated the day before), and offered to help us with some stuff they insisted we needed (like a new washing machine, vacuum cleaner and curtains).

Looking back, I'm not sure how things went so well, but I'm not going to argue with it. It's a nice change for me (for those who know of my usual, incredibly "good" luck, you know right away what I mean) and it feels nice to be able to relax, physically and emotionally...something I haven't dont for a long time.