March 21

I woke up around 1 from exhaustion and went downstairs to find okaasan reading the paper. I said konnichiwa, and she told me that only ohayou is used in a household and that saying konnichiwa (or konbanwa, which I say to Otousan when I come to dinner and find him sitting at the table) makes me seem like a stranger. Then, she gave me (a well-deserved) talk about how I handled myself yesterday in informing her about my early arrival. She had stayed up to wait for me (which in retrospect, I clearly should have told her I’d be fine if she didn’t) and I had made ryoushin worry quite a bit about my return and whether I would catch my last train or need to be picked up, especially since otousan had his weekend sake and okaasan’s vision isn’t good for night driving. Okaasan said she wanted to make my bed for me, but since I keep so neat and organized, she interpreted it as being particular and was afraid to go in my room to do it because I might be troubled by her changing something. I ended up crying, mostly because I felt so bad for causing all this trouble but also partially because all of the emotion from the last week that was restrained by the necessity of good judgement under stress seemed to hit me finally. I was also feeling horrible because I hadn’t thought much about the inconvenience of my host family when I changed my plans to come home a day early, so I felt really selfish and like a bad host student. It really showed me a lot about myself. It makes me think that I probably would be better off living in a dorm because I feel like I can get most things done myself, my plans are very last-minute, and I’m just making it harder for the people who are responsible for me by trying to do everything as a unit of one.

Of course, the talk had a lot to do with me needing to do more communicating (from this experience, obviously, that’s turned into a big problem), and I resolved to call much more often. The talk ended with okaasan telling me to eat breakfast, but I really couldn’t because I was even more emotional than I was letting okaasan see (which was pretty extreme for me anyway) and I could have just had an emotional catharsis on the spot if I wasn’t afraid of letting okaasan see, not to mention how inappropriate it would be to make her worry any more.

I spent the afternoon sorting through my 900-ish pictures and sleeping. I tried to stay off my knees (which I told okaasan about and subsequently got a medicated bandage of sorts for) in hopes that they would get bette faster. I did my finances too, and was distraught to find I seemed to have lost 600en somehow. D: I hope I find my error soon (and that the error was not actually losing it).

After I did laundry, I tried to help okaasan with dinner, but she thought I was not a very strong person and since I was tired from my travels, told me it was okay if I didn’t. I did what I could though since I feel so horrible about being useless. At dinner, I talked a bit with otousan about my travels and we watched a documentary (with very Japanese-drama-esque dramatizations) on three ancient Egyptian women. It went on for two or three hours, but we only watched a bit during dinner, obviously. After dinner, (but before otousan left as usual) I brought my omiyage to ryoushin. Okaasan was surprised by how many (3) I brought. I would have only brought the momiji from Hiroshima and the triangular mochi from Kyoto, but since Okaasan can’t eat a lot of sweets (and ended up giving me about a third of the Tokyo Bananas I brought last time), I thought it would be impolite to buy only things she had a restriction for. So, I bought her a kind of fancy, Japanese-print hankerchief, which I had seen in the shops used to wrap boxes and tied to be used as bags. I didn’t want to get her something she couldn’t use. She seemed to like it a lot, so I was happy.

After dinner, okaasan made candied grapefruit peels. She made them from Japanese grapefruits, which are drier than American ones, which makes them even better for eating like an orange (which I prefer to the complex method). After this, I watched the Egyptian show with okaasan and that was about all the excitement for the day.