http://outpostnine.com/editorials/teacher79.html
...if you don't, the rest of this won't make much sense.
All done? Great.
In late 2004 I met, via a Christian singles' web site (http://www.singlec.com), a nice Japanese woman. I'll call her "S". She and I started an e-mail exchange which lasted about 10 months.
In August of 2005 she told me she was going to stop writing to me. I asked why but I got no real explanation, just that she needed time to think. I figured, okay, WTF-ever, it's not like we were going out or anything; we were just corresponding. It was, up until the last month or so, heading in a definite direction...but that was over. WTF-ever. You gotta do what you gotta do.
That was the last I heard from her until January of this year, when she wrote me a note explaining that she had decided she was going to go back to her European ex-boyfriend, the one she'd met while doing volunteer work in his country, and who she'd broken up with because he wouldn't find a job and lived on the dole. (Got to love that European socialism. "We pay you not to work!") He had kept writing to her, and she had been unable to stop thinking about him, so she'd gone to his country to see him.
Well, it wasn't hard to read between those lines, so I sent a terse reply congratulating her, and that was the last of it. Again, WTF-ever.
So, fast-forward to my birthday of this year...when she sent me a birthday present.
Did she send the BD present with a note explaining WTF was going on? Oh no, of course not--just a post-it with the words "BD present" on it. (It was a CD, a soundtrack CD for Rumik Theater and Mermaid Forest TV. Cool! MSRP is around $31 and shipping was $13, so it's not exactly cheap.) So I wrote her an e-mail thanking her for it and asking WTF was going on (those weren't my exact words).
Then she explained that she had bought the thing last year, intending to send it to me as a gift; and since it was just laying around unused she'd decided to send it to me anyway.
Of course I was a bit disappointed. I was (and still am) confident that S' ex-and-now-fiancee would eventually show his true colors and behave exactly the same way he did that made her break up with him in the first place. I had thought perhaps I'd misread her e-mail from January. Or maybe something else had happened. I figured that all that was probably utterly wrong, and that there was a prosaic reason for her sending me a BD present when we hadn't exchanged so much as a single byte of e-mail in 5 months. Well, it just goes to show that if you expect the least, you won't be disappointed.
Except I was, a little.
Anyway, instead of saving me that, by including a little note, she included no explanation and forced me to write her to find out WTF was up...and so, here I am.
I think it was a pretty nasty thing to do. If you give someone the hidey-ho, you don't send birthday presents. My first girlfriend did something like that to me, once; after she had broken up with me, she called me about something or other--and as she was ringing off, she said, "I love you". I was (justifiably!) irate about that. "You broke up with me! How can you say that?" I demanded.
I think it would have been better for everyone if S had just taken that CD to a used CD store and sold it. I appreciate the gift; what I do not appreciate is the side-order of knife-twisting, however unintentional it may have been.
We all muddle through life as best we can; and we all make mistakes. But even acknowledging that, I have to agree with "Ms. Americanized 2":
Fucking Japanese girls, they really suck.
I just realized I sent her my blog address with that e-mail. Oh well. If she reads this, it serves her right. I'm a nice guy, but even I have my limits.