After lunch we were given one very special form. Whatever you do, the retired guy said in Japanese, don’t make a mistake on this form. Then to me in English, “Do you understand?” I was like, Yeah, I understand you’re a dick. I took the form and started to write with a vengeance.
I got two kanji in and effed it up. I completely omitted the left half of one character. Maybe I can sandwich it in there, I thought, but when I tried all the lines bled together, so I started retracing the strokes to make it clearer. Thirty seconds later the whole thing was a dark blob. Everyone else was already finished. I wanted to die.
The retired guy made me sit in the back of the class, then went out and got a new form and this very ancient Japanese lady who was probably his mother to sit beside me. “Write the first character,” she said. “Very good. Now write the second one. Oh, very nice. Okay, let’s do another one. Oh, jyooozu.” I was like, Jeezus, grandma, I made a freaking mistake, okay? I’ve already written my address a hundred times today! How do you think I even got to this point? But of course, it was my own fault for screwing up, so I didn’t actually say anything.