japanese girls and tamagotchis.
I’ve already written about how I thought college was going to be different. I was going to be social, be surrounded by lots of girls, et cetera. I won’t rehash it.
The last entry was about how, from the onset, my social encounters with girls were kind of strange. Actually, I remembered something even worse last night.
Fall of 2004. The weekend before school started, before it was time to begin my first semester at university. Again, it was a time filled with promise. But it was also a hectic time, for me it would be my first real experience living on my own. It was the Thursday or Friday before the semester began—whatever day it was that on-campus housing was officially available for check-in.
My mom had taken the day off to help me move my stuff, and I remember we were catching a flight around midday. We were already running late, which really sucks for someone like me who is paranoid about always being on time. It was a lot of luggage, I remember we just paid the skycap to take our bags and check us in. I had been chosen for secondary screening, but since I was a Hawaii resident, somehow the skycap was able to get me past it. Thanks, guy.
Anyway, so we got into the security line at the Lihue airport, which was already pretty long. Lihue typically isn’t so bad, but we were behind a large Japanese tourist group that apparently was going home.
So, as we stood in line, I tended to my Tamagotchi. Yeah, my Tamagotchi. I was such a dork, I actually had a virtual pet. I remember they had been re-released in Japan a few months before we graduated from high school, and Tyler was able to score us a couple of them. Actually, I don’t care what you think, Tamagotchis are still cool and I’d take care of one now if you gave me the chance.
There I was, about to enter university, dreaming of being a player, and yet I was tending to something that most children lost interest in around fifth grade or so.
But hey, it wasn’t so bad, because actually the two Japanese girls who were right ahead of me in line saw it, and were apparently interested in it. Hey, Japanese girls. Interested in me. Sorta. Things were going well.
I’d studied Japanese for three years at that point, so I figured why not try and impress them a bit? So, I said in really basic Japanese, “It’s good, isn’t it?” pointing to the Tamagotchi. They laughed, I guess because I tried to speak Japanese to them, and also probably because I sounded dumb as fuck. They just said back, in Japanese, “It’s good!”
And that was it. I was on some high, thinking, again, that this was an omen of things to come. I’d probably be rolling in Japanese chicks in university, once I got there. I was getting ready to live the dream, as opposed to realizing just how fucking pathetic of a situation it was.
Maybe I should have kept the Tamagotchi around. I remember eventually it died and then my friend Iris reset it and took care of it, I think she even made me “babysit” it once while she went somewhere one weekend. So it was kind of a girl magnet. Kind of.
Where’s my Tamagotchi?
