06/13 - Up all night, but unlucky

Friday the thirteenth,

as good a day as any

to expel demons


This morning I got up at 5 AM to watch the opener of the World Cup, Brazil against Croatia. There's a twelve hour time difference meaning that many games are on in the middle of night here. It was nice to get up for the first game, but I can tell the World Cup is going to wreak havoc on my sleep cycles. After falling asleep for a short while at the end of the game, I got up and got ready for work.

Today was Friday the 13th, the unluckiest of days. However, the concept of Friday the 13th is a western superstition, so most students had no idea that the date implied anything special. Normally I would say superstitions are all in your head, but I am a fairly superstitious nonetheless. Friday the 13th has never bothered me, but today definitely had some eery occurrences. First, on the way to the station in the morning, Aykut and I passed an old men who stopped in the street to cough. It was about the loudest, longest cough possible and he had his mouth open astonishingly wide. It was as though instead of covering his mouth to prevent the spread of germs, he was trying to project the germs as far as possible. I couldn't help but laugh at how ridiculous it was and veer to take a wider course around him. It looked like he was trying to expel a demon from his body.

Next, in the morning there was a suicide on the Yamanote train line. The Yamanote is a circle line in the heart of Tokyo that stops at all the busiest stations. Which means it stops at several of the busiest stations in the world. The suicide caused a delay not only for the Yamanote line but many other lines as a result.

Then, in the middle of the day at work, almost on the stroke of noon, there was a huge thunderstorm. It has been raining a ton but I had only heard thunder a couple of times and nothing like this. It sounded like the thunder was right overhead and it seemed to shake the whole room. Fortunately, it was all blue skies and sunshine on both sides of the lunch hour.

Finally, in the afternoon there was a bicycle accident right in front of our building on the university campus. An old man was cycling through the one lane alley/road that leads to our door and crashed somehow. When I saw the scene he was already on a stretcher with many paramedics surrounding him. He was covered in blood and wearing a neck brace and there was still blood pooled on the curb next to him. It was a bit gruesome but he looked like he'd be ok. Sadly, there were a bunch of schoolchildren walking by on their way home from school who witnessed the man in distress and had to see all that blood.

I still can't say I believe in Friday the 13th having any special influence on events, but it is pretty crazy that all those stereotypically unlucky or spooky things happened in one day. Although, I might not have even connected them all had I not known it was Friday the 13th.

On the train on the way home I witnessed something, not spooky, just incredibly cool. A middle-aged man was standing up and drawing on the train, drawing and reading comic books are not simply time killers for the young here. When I first noticed him he was drawing a very realistic samurai face, maintaining a steady hand and drawing incredibly clean lines even as the train car and his body bounced and shifted around. He then began to draw a woman that was sitting near him. I managed to snap a picture with both her and the drawing in it, but it really doesn't do him justice. In almost no time he sketched her face with incredible accuracy and precision, while other people had to hold onto things just to keep their feet.