HOOOOOO BOY this is jigoku not gonna lie.
I did today’s reading in advance since I was gonna be out and my stuff mailed, so it proved hilariously prescient.
I’m always wary of the Three of HEarts because I don’t like even the mere idea of scuffles with people I love, but “heartbreak” can take many forms and in today’s case the form turned out to be “yeah you should consider what you went through today next time you think about grabbing a ferry”.
So let’s talk about that.
For starters I slept like hell. Despite making myself more comfortable than I was on the way out and not waking up every half a minute, I woke up poorly rested and sore, not to mention motion sick.
The sea is being a bitch and I was suffering the consequences.
I tried to continue sleeping but at 8AM the lights go on and apparently they also lift the curtain in the bunk bed so it was like BAM GET UP BITCH.
This bitch does indeed get up and not in a very good state.
It’s really hard for me to get motion sickness… well, related to motion specifically. I tend to get sick fast in some cars if the air from the AC doesn’t reach me or the window is closed, but in terms of motion specifically it takes very abrupt motion to kick my ass.
And my ass was destroyed.
Come breakfast time I sit but while trying to shove things into my mouth I reach my limit and rush to the bathroom. Of course with an empty stomach like I had I was just heaving a bunch of nothing until my stomach managed to gather enough bile to satisfy my body’s “everything spin, must be poisoned, throw everything out to be safe” routine.
I forced some food down my sore throat and then laid on one of the couches of the cecond floor. It’s not like the upper floors were more immune to the rocking but they definitely felt like less and the couch was more cushioned than the bed.
An interesting quirk of mine is that when I’m feeling bad like that I can’t dissociate because then that leave more space for my brain to focus on the bad feelings. Instead I need to think about Literally Anything to push the feelings of sickness.
I’ve talked in the past about trying to write/make smut content as much from how much I consume thus feeling that sense of “I wanna contribute to this” as because it feels like a mental wall that I don’t appreciate the existence of.
This is relevant because when I feel bad and my brain wants comfort, it tends to seek those corners, and while seeking the corner out something clicked. Something equally as obvious as silly.
The real obstacle is that I’m not really tapping into what gets me going. To which I thought “who would wanna see that?”. To which I replied to myself “And do you think any of the artists you really like made their illustrations for you specifically?”.
The funny thing is that it’s not even really a new thought, it just came back at the right time to click proper.
But yeah back to today’s reading, the whole experience feels like it’s telling me “if you’re gonna get a Ferry next time, add this to your considerations”. The whole “the boat will be rocked” problem and whatnot.
Anyway, after passing out for like an hour I felt better. Kinda groggy, but the motion sickness was gone.
I sorted my backpack a little bit, caught up with family and friends, and before I knew it lunch rolled around and my curious ass couldn’t resist trying some squid rice bowl they were offering.
The squid was cut in thin noodle-like strips, and between it and the rice there was a bed of egg white’s foam.
If this were any other day and I was any other person it wouldn’t been amazin, but alas…
For one I completely forgot that I cannot stand the texture of squid specifically. It’s this combination of extra chewy but also kinda buttery. On top of that the foam just added to the slippery texture on everything and with my stomach as it was I needed the opposite of slippery in me.
I ate most of the rice still, but I felt bad about it. Especially because honestly the flavor was great, it was the textures that were murder on me.
I had SOMETHING in my stomach at least.
I then started catching up with journaling but with all the sickness my attention span wasn’t as strong as last time.
I explored some facility in the ferry that baffled me last time. I’m assuming it’s meant to be like “hey if you come here you can chill while looking at the ferry’s trajectory, but it was all shut for whatever reason so no luck there”.
Dinner time came eventually and I ordered something more normal, just some plain tonkatsu… problem being that as you might expect, with everything that has transpired my stomach isn’t exactly in the best place. It’s in the opposite of a good place, even. I did eat more than in the last two meals, though.
I spent the last stretch of the trip going through some videos, I found a channel while I was in my KH binge at the start of the trip and they have some nice retrospectives on other games. I came across their Chrono Trigger one and man.
The video is fine, but I swear to God Chrono Trigger doesn’t have normal fans. The problem is that the air around it is noxious because it suffers from being many people’s First RPG.
Chrono Trigger is a good game, make no mistake, you will never catch me saying it’s a bad one, I respect it as a work even if it’s not my all-time favorite… a statement I can apply to Undertale who is also many people’s first RPG and one I admittedly enjoy less on every level than Chrono Trigger.
So you get a camp that grew up with the game and hey, they grow up and realize it holds up so they put it in a pedestal, then comes a second camp that didn’t grow up with it and instead has played things that came ever since. So here comes the eternal push and pull of “overrated” “underrated” “always good” “never good”, and case in point the video itself was very neutral on the whole but the comments (which I don’t read as a habit but the way the mobile UI works means I can’t avoid glimpsing them at the very least) showed a fervor that goes beyond respect and into unpleasantness.
But you know what? They made sure to tie Chrono Trigger into Chrono Cross with a sledgehammer (AKA the DS port) so we all lose, really.
I don’t even hate Chrono Cross but I don’t wish the Trigger into Cross fate to anyone. That’s like wishing a Xenosaga 2 on someone, you get Zero Time Dilemma when you do that.
Ramblings aside, I make it to land and conveniently they had a bus that went all the way to Kobe Sannomiya, which means that if it makes it in time I could catch a train home instead of paying a cab. At the very least the bus leaves me out of the boonies all the way up north making the hypothetical cab cheaper.
Time flew by because I saw the supercut of Bobby Broccoli’s Cold Fusion videos and oh joy I made it in time for the last super duper express of the train with even a bathroom stop right before.
Here’s where the last bit of “fun” in the day happened.
So as I’m waiting for the train I check my phone and it has a warning that’s like “hey, I detected an air tag near you, there’s a non zero chance someone’s tracking you”. I make it so the supposed tag sounds but nothing, I run the scan and there’s nothing, I check the timeline and it was detected when I got into the bus and while on the bus so I’m assuming it was the airtag on someone else’s luggage and I rubbed too close to it or something.
But the seed of paranoia is settled in.
I get into the train and after I sit, two guys sit basically surrounding me. This would be bad enough in my current mental state in any other train, but this particular express isn’t like the usual train cars where there’s a singular bench across the length of it, it’s more like a shinkansen car in how there’s a bunch of smaller rows across the length. So basically right after I sit, with the idea that someone was tracking me rationally wrong but seeded in my mind, here come two dudes, one sitting in front of me and one to my left.
I think they caught my face because the one to my left moved without me saying anything, but I moved seats nonetheless more for my own relative peace of mind.
The rest of the road was thankfully uneventful, and I made it home with no extra surprises.
It was cold because the heating was off for like a week, but it is home so it’ll warm up in due time.