That was just a shitty day

Random Observation/Comment #82: This day was so shitty that I didn’t even take any pictures for the first half of it (that’s almost blasphemy).  I guess every good vacation needs one of these days to keep the planets in orbit and the tides from devouring the lands.  Good thing I guiltlessly spent a lot of money that night to cheer myself up.

We were hung over and cranky.  It took us 30 minutes to dress, and we hadn’t said a word to each other.  Conversation starters jumped into my mind, but I simply didn’t care enough to say them aloud.  Colors seemed too bright and my motions were slow and completely uncoordinated.  I paced around our small room like it was a mansion and I kept wondering why I was at each spot.  Every thought was immediately interrupted with, “wow, this sucks.  I’m going back to bed.”  I needed my fingers to keep my eyelids open and a bucket of cold water to get my day started.

This was supposed to be the Mt. Fuji climbing day, but the weather reports kept giving mixed signals (those weather people never get anything right).  We walked around Shinjuku (where the main bus departs) for four hours just waiting for people to call and things to happen.  We wanted to use this time to buy stuff for ourselves and friends back home, but everything was overly expensive.  Even when we tried to buy stuff that would help us with the Mt. Fuji hike, we wound up not finding the simplest thing.  All I wanted was a hat to keep my head warm, and there was nothing.  I wasn’t even being picky – there was just nothing.

When we finally got a phone call from our climbing mate we met at the hostel, we were greeted with bad news.  The bus tickets were all sold out and we would need to take a much later bus, which left barely enough time to climb to the top of the mountain to see the sunrise (I’ll discuss the details of the climb in the following entry).  We weighed our options and realized that we were too tired being frustrated all day to deal with the climb.  As we found our way to the ticket booth, we tried calling back to inform her of our decision, but we couldn’t complete the call.  It took an hour before she called us back, and by then Chris had already decided to skip the climb, and I had bought the bus ticket for the next day.  I really wanted to climb with her, but I guess our fates just weren’t aligned.

After walking around for another hour, we called Nobby to cheer us up.  We went to Shibuya and sat around some more, only to get a call from her saying that she would be late.  Great, more waiting on people – my camera was getting hungry, and so was my stomach.  It was so frustrating that I don’t even remember what we had for dinner.  All I know is that we needed a solution to our problems and we needed one quickly.

The only thing I could think of doing was “investing” money to make this all better.  And, yes – it worked like a charm.

~See Lemons Feel Shitty