The Best Day

But it didn't start off that way. I awoke at 7:30--a good two hours earlier than my unemployed self has lately become accustomed to--feeling groggy. I was up late the night before, turning my room upside down in search of a manila envelope that contained the important personal documents I would need to have on hand for my job interview this morning. I lost a good hour and a half of sleep and was ready to call off the search before the obvious place finally occurred to me. All that for a tiny little piece of paper with my social security number written on it? I went to bed in a foul mood.

This morning, I was assembling my usual breakfast of yogurt, granola, and raisins, when Lindsay, running out the door on her way to work, explained apologetically that the dog had "puked his guts out" all over the living room and, though she'd tried to clean it up a little, she didn't have time to finish the job. I looked at the clock: I was intending to head to my interview in half an hour, but I still needed to eat, get dressed, blow dry my hair, and write down directions. "Okay," I told her, "I'll do my best to clean it, if I have time."

I cleaned up the dog's vomit (which resembled, much to the misfortune of my gag reflex, the granola I'd just eaten), slipped into a half-ironed shirt, skipped the blow dry, jotted down what turns to take after the freeway exit, and dashed out the door about fifteen minutes later than I'd intended. I made it to the interview location exactly on time.

Fortunately, it was a group interview and the group was large, so nobody took much notice of my lack of punctuality. It was mostly an information session for a seasonal position with UPS, which, as it turns out, I may or may not qualify for on account of the area where I live. We'll see.

Gloriously, however, the interview location was in Kearny Mesa, a part of San Diego that is a veritable heaven to a recently repatriated former English teacher in Japan (like me). Immediately west of California 163, off Balboa Avenue, is a more than satisfying conglomeration of Japanese shops and restaurants, including a discount variety store and a used book shop that also had locations in Moka, Japan! Immediately after leaving the UPS warehouse, I headed down to Daiso, where I simply basked for about an hour in the familiar foreignness of it all, reading labels in Japanese and listening to small children speaking to their mothers in a language that I am remorsefully rapidly forgetting.

I left Daiso without purchasing anything and headed next door, to a Japanese market. After perusing the aisles, my mouth literally watering the entire time, I concluded decisively that tonight is definitely going to be a nabe night. I bought the soup base, tofu and vegetables I would need--including five kinds of mushrooms--and went across the street to lunch on fresh authentic hot udon noodles at Kayaba in the Mitsuwa Marketplace. As I headed back to my car, I couldn't help but dance a little through the parking lot from the utter joy that this noontime excursion had brought me. True, it's not the same as a trip to Japan, but, for a fraction of the cost, it comes delightfully close.