Until You Get Home, It's Still a Field Trip

Simply put, July wasn’t great for me. At least my mood wasn’t.

First off, I spent way too much money this month on a bunch of stuff, mostly accessories. On the other hand, I burned too much time messing with accessories and work, so I didn’t really have much time left over. I played three eroge and every single one was a landmine. I also lost my Mojo, and when I sold my GPD Win on eBay the buyer tried to haggle me down after receiving it, so I had to get into a fight with them while already in a bad mood. Oh, and no omiai this month either.

Well, not that there weren’t any—someone did introduce me to one. A doctor at a hospital. I added her, and holy shit, her Moments feed was straight-up blocked to me. I tried chatting with her that evening and got zero response. So I got bored and went to play Honor of Kings, and what do you know—the doctor was online…

She was playing ranked! Her skill was decent! And her rank was higher than mine!

The next morning she replied, cold as ice: “Sorry, I fell asleep last night, only saw it this morning.”

Asleep my ass. You were grinding ranked until at least past midnight, you were still online when I went to bed.

And because this doctor rarely replies—or rather, she just doesn’t reply at all, she just plays games all day, won’t let me see her Moments, and there’s nothing to strike up a conversation about—I just let it go.

Then the voice of a certain matchmaker who’s always introducing me to girls came through, saying a lot of them think I’m “immature.”

That’s when I lost it.

I didn’t do a single proper thing this month. No progress on studying, no progress on the romance front. My knee swelled up with fluid again from overexertion. Even on weekends I slept until my back hurt. Occasionally my libido would explode and I’d jerk off like crazy, and other times I’d feel empty and bored, not knowing what the future holds. My whole rhythm was off, my body was a wreck, and I had no idea what to do.

Fortunately, the Blu-ray of Kimi no Na wa. that I’d pre-ordered ages ago finally arrived.

What really pisses me off is that customs opened it this time. I’ve bought CDs that never got opened, so I guess DHL declares proactively.

After they opened it, the whole disc packaging was incomplete. Fortunately it was just the outer paper layer.

In the end I still want to complain that this story is just the “draw a cute girl first, then bullshit a story around her” routine.

And what I bought is just the standard regular edition. Compared to a true fan like “Mad Cow Hermit Princess Takeda,” this is nothing. I know the Princess will definitely buy multiple copies—after all, she’s a true Mitsuha fan.

On the last lazy day of July, I remembered a Japanese phrase I’d learned a few days earlier:

お家に帰るまでが遠足です Until you get home, it’s all still a field trip.

Maybe it’s because my birthday is next month. After that I’ll really be old, but I don’t want to admit I’m getting old. I still feel like a kid, which is probably why people call me “immature.”

But is being mature really all that great? I think keeping a sense of curiosity about the world is one of the most important virtues. Getting stuck on what’s already known and never pushing further—is that maturity, or degeneration? Or just another way of getting old?

Life is a long trip, and it’s all about living it vividly. If we casually choose to go home and give up the road ahead, then maybe when the journey ends, that person dies too.

Time to adjust my mood. I’ll keep at it next month.

Speaking of which, this month I really wanted to buy a Nintendo Switch and a Nintendo 2DS LL, because there was Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart on Switch I wanted to play. But I spent too much this month, so I’ll save it for September and buy it as a birthday present to myself. After all, aside from my parents and myself, no one’s going to celebrate my birthday anyway.