re: fuck my life

18 days and two near anxiety attacks later, the ball is finally starting to roll again after having been stalled for weeks because of Japan’s love of Red Tape™. now that it’s finally rolling again, gravity has it rapidly gaining speed down a sharp incline of 15 days until i officially move out, with smaller finish lines in the form of various deadlines along the way. sigh!

i ran to Tokyo before work on Monday (yesterday) to pickup my work contract. i have to fill out 6 different (Japanese) forms and gather 10 different documents together to submit with the hanko’d contract by the 24th (ie. two weeks from receiving the contract). the fine print on the contract itself is such fine, dense Japanese it’s ridiculous, especially given that no translation whatsoever has been provided for anything, just brief verbal explanation. good thing i can Japanese Or Something.

one interesting thing about the contract is how they’ve handled the name thing that i talked about previously in a video (that i still haven’t captioned because Busy, gah). “Vesper” has replaced my given middle name, so the name on the contract is [given first name] + Vesper + [last name]. given that the name that i put on my resumes, etc was [given first name] + (Vesper) + [given middle name] + [last name], their decision to replace my given middle name with Vesper is an interesting one, i think. when they showed me the contract and asked if my details were correct i said nothing about the name because i was rather speechless that Vesper was on it at all and didn’t want to fuck that up.

upon doing further research into the school that i’ll be working for and the company (conglomerate!) behind it, i can’t help but wonder if perhaps there’s a (slim) chance that the company might have a “trans policy” given how big it is? maybe a trans / non-binary / gender non-conforming person has rocked the company’s boat enough at some point in time enough to have instigated the creation of such a policy?? then again, this is Japan. even if someone set the company’s boat on fire, there might not be a policy. also, if there is one, it’s highly likely that it will be a shitty one and my direct superiors are likely to not even be aware of the existence of such a policy to begin with.

anyway.

Saturday i’m catching a train to Yokohama immediately after finishing work to meet with my real estate agent and (finally) sign the lease for my apartment. 18 days ago i wrote the OP optimistically expecting to sign the lease within a week. obviously that did not happen. i don’t even know why i’m optimistic ever, tbh, but whatever. over 2 hellish weeks of anxiety and stress later, it’s finally happening now and i’m just thankful for that. i couldn’t have lucked out more and had a more awesome real estate agent who puts up with my ridiculous, American, first-time-leasing-on-my-own-in-Japan ass.

dropped 100,000yen / USD $900~ on appliances for the new apartment last weekend. oh, how naive it was of me to talk about spending only ~$1k in the OP. ha! going to IKEA on Sunday, probably going to end up dropping around another 100,000yen just on basic furnishings like a bed frame, mattress, bedding, curtains, lighting, etc. then there’s the actual cost of moving, initial costs to setup utilities, cost of going back and forth to Yokohama / Tokyo several times a week, etc etc etc… as much as i hate it, thank Cat God for credit.

but god, i had plans for all that money that’s now being spent so quickly……..

the 29th & 30th are my official moving days. from now until well beyond those dates i have a lot of other miscellaneous legal foot & paper work to do that comes with moving in Japan. April 1st, a Saturday, will be my first day at my new job. April 2nd there’s a trans / non-binary meetup going on in Yokohama that i’d like to check out if i can…

when am i possibly going to find the time to do all the other shit that i’d like to get done before moving, like editing that self-care video that i’ve been working on for months now? would really like to post that before leaving Ibaraki as a kind of adieu to my life here…. sigh.

fuck my previous shortsighted, naive optimism. what was a 40km marathon is more like a 100km triathlon. hopefully i can continue to fend off anxiety attacks along the way.