Endings are everything. It doesn’t matter how much something sucks, if the ending is good generally people feel satisfied and happy. This is true of things like movies and dates. A movie can be really lame for 2 hours but have a kick ass ending in which case you’ll like it. On the other hand, the movie can be great for 2 hours and have a dumb ending which will make it suck. Same with a date. You could be on the worse date in history but if you end it right you’re likely to get a second one. You could also be having a wonderful time only to say something really ignorant at the end putting a sour taste in the girl’s mouth. And so today, was one of those days that sucked from the time I woke up but had a pretty good ending, kind of.

This morning, I was out of the house earlier than usual and wanted to get to the office to get some work done. I get to the station to find 10 times the usual number of people standing on the platform. Uh oh. The announcement says that the trains have been delayed because someone ran onto the tracks. The delayed trains get more and more crowded. As a result, some people got crushed and had to be taken to the hospital. This caused further delays. In Tokyo rush hour, if the train is delayed even a few minutes it throws the universe out of whack and total chaos ensues. Well, sometimes anyway. So the train came and I decided to wait for the next one. But that was too crowded too so I waited for the one after that. That was even more crowded but I didn’t want to wait anymore, it was already 40 minutes late, so I pushed my way in. My chest was crushed for 4 stops as the train crawled slowly. It’s been a while since I got on a truly crowded train.

Finally get to work later than usual, so didn’t have time to get any breakfast. I’ve got a lot of work to do and am happily in the zone doing it when suddenly out blue a whole bunch of urgent emails (the kind with the exclamation marks) and telephone calls and other miscellaneous stuff needing my attention come at me. When sh*t happens it happens and broadsides you when you least expect it. I won’t go into the details but basically I need to be more prepared for emergency situations. After that a serious of other unfortunate incidents occured which I’ll just group together as one big pile off “CTRL+A and DELETE from my memory”

As I am multitasking this stuff, I’m also trying to get some people to do some things over the phone but something is wrong with the communication. It seems that all my instructions are being misinterpreted and no one is doing anything I want them to do the way I want them to do it. Not that I blame them. This happens all the time but it just seems like a years worth of this it is piling up in one single day. TODAY!!!

Then finally it dies don’t a bit and I get the worse news of all in the form of a keitai email alert. It’s from the weather news. “Rainy Season has official begun.” I almost cried. Tomorrow I’ll be getting my nice little convertible but we’ll be having a month of continuous rain. Well, of course I was expecting this but the email was just not what I needed at that moment. The nail in the coffin.

Anyway, I make it through the day and decide to head to Autobacs in Daikanyama to buy some stuff for the garage. The shop is completely empty and that tire and gasoline smell makes me relaxed. It’s my kind of aroma therapy. I spend a leisurely time looking at all kinds of car accessories I don’t need and end up buying a HotInaZma Pocket (see photos) It’s this fob thing that you stick into the cigarette lighter. It raises your torque output, increases HP, improves fuel economy, makes your stereo sound better, your headlight shine brighter, removes bad smells, has a blue LED light and relaxes you by sending out minus ions. It’s like MAGIC. And as you can see it won the eco car goods award in 2006.

The girl at the register was really cute and flirted with me a bit. I still got it! Things were looking up. Since it was pissing rain outside, I flagged down a taxi along kyu-yamate-dori. The taxi driver was this old guy from Okinawa and we had a great time talking about roadsters and girls from Okinawa and pork fat. In my experiences riding in taxis in Tokyo I’ve found that most taxi drivers are very nice and fun to talk to. You can learn a lot from taxi drivers in Japan, although don’t take stock tips from them. An ex co-worker of mine says that most taxi drivers in Japan are failed daytraders who lost their fortunes margin trading. Anyway, that’s another story. When I got out of the taxi, the driver gave me a discount for no particular reason. How nice of him!

I opened the door of my house and dumped all my junk at the genkan. My house has this strange smell that you notice when you enter. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for a year now without success. But tonight I found the odor relaxing and smelling alot like home.