Things are getting serious

I feel oddly decent tonight despite the growing ball of anxiety stamped “Japan” that is casually forming in the prefrontal cortex like a tiny gumdrop left under the fridge and swarmed by ants and kitchen shit. Perhaps it’s cause it’s a Thursday and that means the weekend’s coming, my last in this city. We’re having a shindig in my honor on Saturday evening, an event I’ve “invited” something like thirty people to on Facebook. In actuality I don’t really want all of them to go out of their way to have a drink with me here, now. I anticipate our regular crew + 2,3,4? It is as amorphous now as ever, having originally coalesced from the aether: myself, wayward to the city, my randomly-met roommate who was a potential roommate of another randomly-met roommate of mine (she was interviewing random roommates from Craigslist). My roommate’s randomly-met co-worker from his randomly-gotten job, and the co-worker’s girlfriend and brother. From there where did it go? In and out of people who come and go rapidly or leisurely.

So this will be it, like so many other things, but more strangely, since I’ll have been here for three years: longer than I’ve spent at any one place since high school. And it’s going to be hard, you know, to have to leave.

I try to balance it out, in my moments of weakness and strength, by saying look. This is what you want, what you’ve always wanted! What’s Pittsburgh anyway?

The problem is that after a couple years it ceased to be a stopover on the way to greater things and sort of somehow became my home. I’ve already resolved to tell my new Japanese students and friends that I’m from here, just to eliminate confusion.

Perhaps that will remain the legacy of this time in my life, the post-collegiate step I took confident I’d missed out on whatever college had to offer me and just wanted to finish up here painlessly. Instead along with the dirty kitchen and the slanted apartment and the rotting shower and the stink of summer I’ve got all these people and all these emotions and all this reality. I came here drinking Miller Lite, now I drink that hoppy shit that people can’t stand. I came here with boxes of shit I realized I never needed to begin with. The four gadgets on this desk I didn’t own when I moved here.

You can’t ever really quantify or qualify into any satisfying terms what you’ve done or how you’ve changed as a person over some period of time. The best I can do now is look back and wonder not even if I got the “most” out of this whole experience but ask myself if I got anything out of it. That it’s such an obvious question’s answer enough for now as I stuff everything I own into boxes to store and take what’s left with me 6813 miles away so I can try to tell kids just like I was about where I’m from and why I’m here.

For now, it’s 76 degrees (will be in Celcius in 3 weeks), 8:37 PM (will be 20:37 in 3 weeks), and in an hour and a half I’ll be leaving work for home (different). Apparently I’m going to 80s night in some neighborhood I don’t go to at a bar I’ve never been to with some people I probably don’t know. http://www.feelsgoodman.com