I'm in trouble...

Leave aside the fact that I've got about 50 hours until I'm supposed to have all my stuff packed up, all but 30 kilograms of it shipped and my apartment cleared out so I can get on a plane. I'm going to have to try and shake 52 months of being able to do and say almost anything I wanted to in public. Generally, most folks here didn't have high enough listening skills to follow my speaking speed and enough vocabulary to follow the content. Especially when I got off on rants about miscegenation being one of the only acceptable options for introducing non-Yamato protagonists into domestic graphic narratives (alluding to the tendency for foreign-type characters in Japanese comics and games to be given some Japanese ancestry as a way of making them more palatable for local audiences.) But apart from obtuseness of topic, I could usually talk about whatever the hell I felt like most of the time; even if people understood, I wasn't expected to follow those arbitrary rules of society that make it okay to talk in a cafe about the societal problems of bulimia, but not to talk about vomiting all over a valet parking sign in Las Vegas.


But I'm going to have to give up that sort of freedom, since people will no longer just dismiss my antics as those of "just another abnormal foreigner." Once I'm back in America I'm going to have to try and re-learn how to live in a society that could need a guide for How to Laugh Naturally on Cue.

Really, are you people serious? Some western people, probably Americans, put this together, and now you expect me to live in a place where there's a need for instructions like this?

3. Pay attention to your surroundings so you can judge when it is appropriate to laugh. When people are jovial and smiling, it's probably a good time to laugh. But when people are being serious or somber, it's not a good idea. If you see everyone else laughing, join the party and start laughing yourself! Even if you don't know exactly why you're laughing, you can call on whatever you thought of in Step 1 and feel like part of the crowd.

This ain't going to be easy...