New month, new things await.
From most superficial thoughts to deepest: A relief that a solved sonflict will lead to emotions being able to flow, a fear of isolating myself too hard, and on the deepest level a fear that something changing will force me to push out of the confines of my brain.
As far as the month goes: The start is marked by a concern that despite solving matters I don’t feel any less on my own, the middle of the month will lead to breaking out of my shell and entering a new phase, and at the end of the month I’ll have to face the fact that I’m tired of the perennial loneliness.
On the whole it shows that there’s gonna be a lot of emotional effort and I can’t afford to retreat into myself.
The last few start-of-month reads were precise bordering to being On The Nose, and this one hits scarily close to home considering that the “middle point” of the read aligns in theory with a friend visiting.
We’ll see how things go.
Woke up to an email where I was told that for some things related to my company benefits Hello Work wants to make a visit to my office to make sure it’s an actual operating company.
My brain immediately started sizzling and I hadn’t been awake for even one hour.
The problem isn’t even the part where they wanna visit the office and said office has been messy for a while, it’s the fact that I always resent needing to be interrogated, that requires me coordintaing with someone that can fluently speak Japanese, AND I haven’t been out of the woods with the bank stuff for even a week.
Having replied that I’ll answer next week with an available date in two weeks, I decided to go out. It’s been a long while since I went to Loft and I wanted to check some stuff.
Loft is basically a Japanese chain of… I don’t know what to call it? Something like “everyday commodities”. They sell stationery, cosmetics, wallets, and so on.
The one in Umeda used to be literally right in front of where I take my Japanese lessons, but that building is being taken down or whatever so they moved it to the Hanshin building.
So here’s one bit that makes navigating Umeda confusing: There’s the Hanshin Building, the Hankyu Building, and the JR Station building.
Hankyu and Hanshin already sound a lot alike, but if something’s in the JR building your brain might mix up one train company with the other and go to the Hanshin one.
They’re all connected by a single bridge, which doesn’t help retention in the brain but certainly helps when you (and by “you” I mean “I”) eventually mix them up.
So I’ll save you the running around I did before remembering Hankyu and Hanshin are different things.
Loft Umeda used to be a whole building… a very narrow building but a building nonetheless, but now things are spread over a singular, very wide floor. I was looking for the journals section because it’s that time of the year where I feel like getting back into journaling.
“Then what is this whole page?” You might ask, but journaling in paper serves a different purpose. This page is me pushing myself to write things in a format that isn’t social media microblogging and make sure I have something to say about every single day no matter how small, but it’s still something I’m doing in The Pain Box. The idea of journaling is basically disconnecting and doing something specific for a while.
There’s plenty of things one can do while disconnecting from everything else, but “write about your day” is a very structured thing with a tangible beginning and end. I might take 5 minutes or 45 minutes but it’s done the moment I have nothing else to write, compared to say… drawing, where I might not know how long a drawing will take or what counts as it being done.
I picked some other things on the way but made it to the Hobonichi section.
So Hobonichi is a brand of journals, their name literally means “almost daily”. It was started by Shigesato Itoi (yes, the Mother guy) as a journal and despite the name being there to give himself some leeway it has, in fact, remained daily since launch. But more importantly it has spawned a line of journals that’s arguably the biggest one in Japan.
Notably on top of it is that Hobonichi as a brand uses a paper called “Tomoe River paper”, it’s kinda thin but shockingly resilient and it feels AMAZING to write with ink on it, like, you know that thing where sometimes the pen stops writing so you gotta scribble on a different piece of paper? That never ever happens with Tomoe River paper, EVER.
And if you’re a freak that uses a fountain pen? OH BABY you’re gonna have the best experience of your life.
The paper is so good that they sell notebooks that aren’t even journals but are made in that paper, and that’s what I was looking for today but I figured I can grab one of their 2026 journals and try again.
Quick tangent: Shigesato Itoi is such a fascinating man and one thing that annoys me to no end is how all the usual types that like Mother and idolize him get all the wrong lessons on what makes him so interesting. Like the fact they build their whole identity around the game when Itoi making games is effectively just part of a bigger list of things he does, like being the President of the Japan Monopoly Association.
Monopoly like the table game Monopoly, he likes playing it that much.
Grievances about Basic Bitch White Boys aside, I broke one of the notebooks open to start keeping tabs on the daily readings.
I won’t make a habit of sharing these because I don’t wanna inflict my godawful handwriting or Spanish onto all of you (also the readings might get too personal) but you get the idea. I tend to forget what the reading was after I’ve put everything out after taking the header photos, so this also doubles as a way for me to not spend 20 extra minutes remembering what the reading was when I’m writing these.
Dunno if I’d call it a new year resolution given that we’re in October, but setting myself aside and putting those stickers and whatnot was so pleasant that I definitely wanna give myself those “total 5 minute breaks” more often.