This weekend was supposed to be great; me myself and I, relaxing no people just time to write and talk online, cook a little, maybe bake a little, post some letters and potter with my plants…so much for that. I should’ve known on Friday that this weekend was just destined to be shitty. On Friday I started sneezing completely randomly…sneeze humour is universal by the way: my sneezes are amusing from the Americas, across Europe right the way to Asia!
In any case, Friday morning I started the cold…and it is only a headcold with the dizziness and snottiness that that involves (yuk!) and then got embroiled in the staffroom in the closest thing to an argument I’ve come across so far in Japan. Of course as the (ill!) emotional foreigner I did not fare so well. And the headache and sneezes only served to emphasise the fact that I really argue from a position of gut instinct especially in cases where I only know the bare bones and not the details…I hate this, I hate argueing (and you couldn’t really call it an argument) from a position of lack of knowledge and yet I do it a lot.
But what are you supposed to do when you hear a thing that you know is bigotry from a point of view of ignorance? I don’t think that argueing that it is bigotry would help and I don’t think that holding forth from another position of slightly less ignorance helps either; the latter is what I did. I am a Wiccan, not a Christian, Muslim or Jew and I am not really in a position to defend any faith other than my own, which at least I understand. In any case I felt thoroughly crap when I got home and overly emotional (I’m blaming the cold) so instead of pottering I`ve been in bed; under the kotatsu (LOVELY!) and hanging around the internet, my home is filled with little piles of tissues and the washing up is mounting in the sink.
So much for a good weekend, this one has been really really shitty. And I still have a headache and a slightly sickened feeling about some of my colleagues who I have to smile at on Monday.