On Appliances

Gomen (sorry)! I haven't written in a very long time, but I have a good excuse! I'm lazy!

I never said you'd like my excuse...


Since it's currently late for me, I'm just going to post on my current woe. I'll post more perhaps tomorrow, but this whole laziness habit is a hard thing to kick. I'll have to work on that. But I think that can wait for another day.

ON APPLIANCES
They say bad things come in 3's. I won't go into details, but both of my sisters just had...interesting and unexpected things happen in their lives. Silly me, I thought, "Man, that sucks for them. I guess I'm just lucky. Hahaha hahaha hahaoh crap." See, whenever I think things like, "Gee, I'm glad that didn't happen" or "Oh, aren't I lucky that such and such" I invarialby end up, hours later, crying and saying, "WHY DID I HAVE TO SAY THAT?!?" As an example, I hated it when I first came to Japan. I didn't actually cry at first, but I just wasn't happy the first few days. Then one day, I tried to make myself more positive. "Well, everything may smell funny, I may not be able to understand anything even when it's said in English, I may be forced to talk to more people in 2 days than I've talked to in the past 2 years, and Iu may hate to think that my shower would only work for midgets, BUT at least I've got my healthohcrap." And yes, true to the curse, I woke up with a cold the next morning.

So after what I thought the other day, I really, really shouldn't have been surprised this morning when I found out that my refrigerator is no longer in the land of the living.

To fully appreciate the wonder of God's timing as it relates to my household appliances, let's travel back to last night. I was relaxing in my living room, watching some tv and enjoying my day off (this is Golden Week in Japan, a week where we get 3 days off for no apparent reason. Yea for random holidays!!!). The prevoius day, I had gone out and shopped, figuring that if I were to fully enjoy my days off, I'd need to stockpile food and clean clothes like it was Y2K so that I wouldn't have to leave my apartment for any reason except the Second Coming. My fridge and freezer, for once, were full of fresh, non-decaying, non-leftover food. Oh, the joy! I could open my fridge at anytime and find fresh food and beverages! But sadly, this joy was not destined to last. For in order to make the food, I had to have clean dishes. I have the terrible habit of making food choices based on what pans I have clean. Used the pancake pan yesterday? Good, I'll make eggs today. Used the soup pot last night? Good, I'll make spaghetti. Used all my dishes in the past week? Good, I'll eat toast on a paper towel. Eventually, though, toast gets old (both literally and figuratively), so I did get off my lazy butt (although I was, in my defense, not being lazy - I was killing hoardes of heartless beings bent on destroying the heart of all worlds, though I'm not entirely certain why they're bent on that - maybe it's Golden Week for them, too, so they have nothing else to do?) and washed dishes, a feat which took over 2 hours due to my small sink and even smaller draining board.

So back to me relaxing in the living room watching tv. I was enjoying the quiet of the night and scent of clean dishes, when I suddenly heard a large, terrifying grunking noise coming from my kitchen. I paused my dvd, froze for a second, and listened in horror to the grunking noise, wondering what the heck Pete was doing in my kitchen. I realized the noise was coming from my refrigerator at the same time I realized that no amount of money on this earth was going to make me walk out into the kitchen to see who was doing what to whom and with what. The noise stopped after a few seconds, and my thoughts on the subject were brief, yet decisive. "Fire? Nope, no fire. Explosion? Nope, no explosion. Water spurting all over? Nope, no water. Smoke billowing out of anything mechanical? Nope, no smoke billowing. And we're good. Nothing whatsoever to worry about... Yeah... Yeah, I bet Japanese fridges all make horrible grunking noises every once in a while just to say hello... Yeah, maybe if I understood more Japanese, I would have been able to understand what it just said to me... Yeah, well then, nothing to worry about. I'll continue watching my dvd and pretend nothing has happened... Yeah. NOTHING HAS HAPPENED, DARNIT!" Yeah, it wasn't convincing to me, either, but little lies can sometimes help us keep our sanity.

I found out the next morning that instead of "grunk GRUNK grunk", what my fridge had ACTUALLY been trying to say was, "Help..me...I'm dying...erp...gurgle...gurgle...sclup....." As I was getting ready to talk to one of my sisters this morning, I went to my newly stockpiled fridge to get something to eat. I opened my freezer for ice and noticed that the inside seemed a little drippier than normal. Curious, I looked at a box of popsicles that was decidedly soggier than it had been yesterday. I pulled out a popsicle and noticed that it was no longer a popsicle; rather, it had become a popsuckle (that word sounds odd, but it's late so I can't think of anything else. Humor rating for this post = -1.). It was liquid. Totally. I could have drank it for breakfast. Yum. "Well," I thought, "That's not normal popsicle behavior. For you see, the normal state of a popsicle is a 'solid', and I see that my popsicle has metamorphosed into what is commonly known as a 'liquid'." (Okay, so I actually didn't think that last part, but come on, I had to learn those scientific terms in 5th grade and like WHEN are they EVER going to be used in my real life unless I force them to fit somewhere?) For some vague, stupidly optimistic reason, I thought, "Well, maybe it's because this popsicle was closest to the door and that somehow...made it...no, that doesn't work, does it?" Still, I looked at a few more of the popsicles in the box, and alas, they were all as sadly puddled as the firs tone had been. I also noticed a certain balminess that I know is not a part of my freezer's natural ecosystem. Drat.

When I opened my fridge, I noticed the temperature was slightly warmer than normal, but the light still went on. This gave me hope for a second, but I realzed that the light was on, but nobody was home (humor rating = -2). Though I guess if you give it a few days, I'll have some nice sentient mold growing on some of my foodstuff, so maybe somebody will be home given enough time...

So now my fridge is dead. Does anyone know what to do with a deceased refrigerator in Japan? I'm not certain what I should do. I have absolutely no idea how to call a fridge fixer (I was going to say mechanic, but I'm fairly certain that's not the word I'm looking for). See, one of the fundamental problems here is that when confronted with anything vaguely mechanical, electric, or electronic, my brain gets immediately overheated and I go into what is known as "Damsel-in-Distress (DID) Mode". I can't figure out how these things work, and for all I know, pictures really are taken using magic and planes fly because there are hundreds of indentured fairies flying inside the wings of 747s. That's just how my brain works. Or doesn't work, as the case may be. I have NO IDEA how electronic things function. Still, I optimistically looked at my fridge and tried to figure out what might be the problem and how to fix it.

I hit it once or twice, because they always do that in movies, but it didn't seem to do anything other than hurt my hand, which I'm sure wasn't helping anyone. I then unplugged and replugged all the appliances near the fridge. I then opened and shut the doors to the fridge and freezer, adjusted the temperature control, did a rain dance, sacrificed a piece of toast to the carbon gods, and then hit other appliances in my kitchen out of principle. Surprisingly, none of these sure-fire methods for fixing appliances seemed to work. And as luck would have it, my one Japanese friend and mentor is out of the country for the week. Great timing (Before she left, I said something like, "Man, I hope everything is okay while she's gone. I'd hate for something to break down. But that hasn't happened so far, so what are the chances that in the week she's gone..." ... yeah). Well then.

Still intent on maybe being able to fix this myself ("I've got a college degree, I should be able to do this, right?"), I got out a flashlight and small mirror so I could peer behind my fridge. It indeed confirmed everything I know about refrigerators in one go: "yup, there's pipes and tubes and stuff. Some of them go into the fridge. They probably work together to, as we say in the science world, 'make things cold'." Yup. Sure am glad I looked back there. Otherwise, I might have missed something important. Like maybe there could have been a toaster back there. Yeah. I mean, what if it was as simple as that? I could have looked and said, "Oh, oh! I see the problem now! It appears someone has changed my fridge pipes and made them into a toaster oven! Haha! Your normal human would have overlooked that, but not I!" Though realistically speaking, it could actually be a toaster oven back there, and I still wouldn't know the difference. And I still couldn't have fixed it. All pipes, wires, and cords look the same to me.

So now I sit in my apartment with a fridge and freezer full of quickly decaying food. Normally, I would kick myself over something like last night, when I totally ignored the danger warning signs. But realistically, what could I have done to fix it last night that I haven't thought of this morning? It's not like some insomniac mechanic fairy would have happened to be wandering by and bestowed upon me some kind of magical appliance powers that would have allowed me to fix any appliance simply by laying hands on it. So for now, I must sit here and worry about cleaning my apartment, for I know that once I inform my BOE of this, I will have people descending on my house. I'm slightly worried that we'll find half a dead cockraoch in one of the pipes. Maybe this is some kind of cockroach revenge for me sucking up Pete's girlfriend in my whirling vortex of doom? Ah, well. As they say in Japan, shogunai (it can't be helped). But you know, I can't help but think, "I'm lucky my fridge hasn't done anything weird like start to work suddenly in the middle of the night so I don't have to buy a new one. Oh, and that world peace hasn't been achieved yet. And that I don't have a wonderful, handsome, intelligent man proposing to me. Man, I'm lucky none of those things are real...Hahaha hahaha haha...."

(Just in case - it should work better than before, that means no hate crimes, and he has to be over 5'10" tall.)