True lies

Okay. I'm going to be honest. I didn't go to the ITO party today. The truth is that I didn't want to. When I rsvp-ed I thought "Well, at least I'll get a meal out of it," but when it came down to it, that just wasn't enough to make me want to go. I was nervous about participating in a speech and discussion (in Japanese), and worse, I was nervous about just... dealing with them. We have this really tense relationship (or at least, I'm really tense about it these days) in which I constantly worry about stepping on toes and being rude and saying something wrong and completely misreading people and misunderstanding (and not being filled in on) the etiquette. That's a lot of stuff to worry about all at once, and to make matters worse, I'm not Japanese, which means I can't necessarily read them correctly when they say something to me. Is this a suggestion? Was that an insult? The passive-aggressiveness is driving me batty, and I've just... had enough. For a little while. And I didn't want to deal with it today. No one wants to have a nervous breakdown in front of their scholarship grantor after all.

Unfortunately I couldn't tell them these things outright (and hopefully they don't read my blog), so I lied in my apology email. I really hate lying. It just makes me feel so dirty, no matter to whom I'm lying. So I'm trying to rationalize this one right now by saying that, it's true, if I had gone, I would have felt much worse afterward, and who wants to start a new term that way?