Sunny Dark Day

First off, my excuse for taking so long to write still hasn't changed. I'm still extremely busy, and with Notoyosakoi, the great dancing event and our first big performance this year coming nearer and nearer it seems things are only getting worse.

And to top it all off, on Saturday I had my first really bad spell of homesickness.

I'm not really sure what set it off,

I think it already somehow started last evening when I found a big spider in the kitchen sink and for the first time realized, looking up, that the whole freakin' kitchen is full of spider webs. Seriously full of them. So in fact it's not only the black 3cm spider that I have already evolved a love-hate relationship with since it tends to appear at the bottom of the stairs whenever I practice a piece of yosakoi choreography at night downstairs. No, especially the kitchen seems to be pretty much besieged by the eight-legged ones.

In my naivety I was sure that someone was coming regularly to clean Senshinen, since sometimes my shoes are standing differently when I come home and the stone floor is wiped, but it seems that cleaning is really only limited to that alone. So, the spider in the sink had me jump and it also made me angry because, really, there shouldn't be anything to be scared of. Still for some reason, for all my life I have never liked spiders.

So, after kind of accidentally killing the one in the sink (though if that plate hadn't been falling on it I probably would have killed it on purpose in any case) I made myself food and then, carrying it upstairs to eat in a spider-free environment, I tripped on the stairs, sending half of my soup flying. Giving a nice impersonation of a Finnish person when it comes to cursing, I tried to clean the mess up, but with carpeted floor you can imagine how well that went. Consequently, the stairs now smell a bit like miso-soup.

Then that night I didn't get proper sleep because my urushi allergy started itching again sometime around 4 o'clock. Oh, didn't I mention? I have the allergy again. It's returned since a bit over a week now, this time on both arms and travelling upwards. The fingers of my right hand are pretty much covered and it's appearing on my left hand as well, and when I finally woke at 7:15 on Saturday morning I noticed that one of my eyes was slightly swollen and my lips felt strange... It's arrived on my face! ARGH.

God thanks the swelling went down with a bit of cooling and there weren't really much outward signs of it on my face. That didn't stop it from itching though.

And to really give it all the rest, I went out of the door to be hit right in the face by a wall of heat. I nice and cozy 30°C with a smooth 52% humidity. God thanks there was a little wind blowing, but still, 3 and a half hours of training in the direct sunlight really didn't do much to lighten my mood. I also felt I was doing everything wrong and was understanding the Japanese worse than ever and that nobody cared about me. Yes, buhuuu, it was that bad. Talk about a bad spell of dark mood...

But it passed. In the afternoon we started to sew our costumes for Notoyosakoi, and it went well enough for me to not anymore want to take the next train to Nagoya and fly home. Another thing that eventually helped a lot was that I changed my plans for next morning. Originally I should have gotten up at 8, gone into the city by bike and buy several supplies for school, then hurry back for 13:00 to have to more hours of sew before calling home in Skype. Instead of doing that, I decided to take a much needed break of all this running around. I woke at 9, stayed in bed until half to 11 and then ate a calm breakfast and immediately the day felt much better. Also, it had been raining the night and still was in the morning and when I finally went out it was an amazingly wonderful 17 degrees.

And here I am, sunday night, after having had long talks on skype with my flatmates and my mum and altogether having a much more relaxed view on everything. The allergy still sucks, but I have the feeling that everytime it moves to a new patch of skin, it actually needs less and less time to abade. It always itches worst in the evenings, which probably has to do with hormones or body temperature or whatever. Over the day though it's mostly alright and sometimes I even forget about it. It'll pass some day and hopefully afterwards I'm again a little bit more immune to it than before.

The spiders in the kitchen still annoy me, but I will try to request a vacuum cleaner or something next week, so I can start getting rid at least of their webs.

And Notoyosakoi... Well, it's hard and stressfull and scares me to no end to think that in a little less than 2 weeks we will perform. But it's also still absolutely and awesomely amazing. The choreography is just so cool, and I can feel a few of those difficult parts or sections of fast movements and turns to be just at my grasp. Just a little more, a little last push and I know I will be able to do it.

And then when we do it, all together, joined in music and movement, thrumming with excitement, it will be fantastic.