I really hope I have this kind of interaction today. I need one victory at least, bro.
I planned to go to a ramen bar to socialize in Japanese tonight. Less intimidating than a club, more social potential than a café or restaurant.
I even wrote the note above to myself as a little pep talk to do it.
I’d been watching Midnight Diner with my mom — a Japanese show about a late-night diner where strangers sit around the counter, share stories, and form unexpected connections. That was the vision.
I was going to go alone. If I went with my mom, I knew I’d hesitate to open up as much.. Worse, I’d probably end up relying on her to keep the conversation going instead of struggling through it on my own. She’d get more practice than I would. Good for her, but tonight was about my goals. This first attempt at socializing in Japanese had to be solo.
Nighttime seemed like a good time for this since people are usually in a hurry during the day — rushing between work, errands, responsibilities. At night, the atmosphere is more relaxed, more open to lingering conversations.
Or at least, that’s the excuse I told myself.
The truth is, I postponed it to the night because I wanted more time to mentally prepare. More time to psych myself up for it. More time to tell myself I’d actually do it.
And yet, it didn’t happen.
The day had already been packed. As usual, there was a lot of Genki to cover, and instead of staying in Kawasaki, we took a train in the opposite direction to go to a nice-looking library in Kamata.
McDonald’s, our usual study spot, as you can imagine, is quite noisy. On our first day in Kawasaki I’d also picked out a library in the area. It had taken quite a while to find in the first place, and once we’d arrived we saw a sign it was closed that day.
Today marked yet another failed attempt at finding an open library, because the one we traveled to Kamata for was supposedly closed for construction for quite a while. Google Maps just wasn’t up-to-date. We wandered around trying to find a place to sit. There was another library in the area but with no WiFi and only stools to sit on. We still attempted studying there for a while, but it got tiring and inefficient very soon.
We were already a good couple of hours behind schedule at this point, but Google Maps gave me hope when I saw a seemingly massive Lawson not too far away. (Google Maps lets me down every time but I keep going back to it, it’s like a toxic relationship at this point.)
You can probably guess that something went wrong. You’d be right if you did.
The building it was supposed to be inside was a huge company office. Mom and I already felt out of place walking into it and scouring the ground floor (that’s where Maps said it was (?!)).
The pictures were really tempting though (it’s weird to say that about a grocery store, I know, but there was so much study space and we could actually sit there for hours and eat healthy food and study in relative quiet, all much better prospects than our usual McDonald’s), and so we kept looking.
Eventually, in the neighbouring building which was a mall, we found it. It lived up to everything. We spent a long few hours studying there.
We did eventually get out to stretch our legs, but since it was a new area, we were tempted to explore and ended up wandering for about an hour. By then, we were quite far from the Lawson we’d worked at, and there was a McDonald’s (duh) right in front of us when we decided to get back to work.
We’d only started when the sleep started hitting. I must’ve yawned a dozen times in five minutes. I’d woken up at 6am somehow, even though my alarm was set for 7, and by now I was exhausted. Mom was the same.
I knew then that there was no way I was going to a ramen bar tonight. I didn’t even have the energy to socialize in English, let alone Japanese.
Looking back, maybe I knew this would happen. Maybe that’s why I scheduled it for nighttime in the first place. I told myself it was because the atmosphere would be better, but deep down, I think I only wanted to avoid facing the discomfort of actually putting myself out there for as long as I could. Exhaustion just gave me an excuse to ditch it altogether.
Someone stronger-willed and more disciplined would have sucked it up and gone anyway. That person was not me.
The issue isn’t just today, though. This is a pattern.
I do this a lot — convince myself that I need to get chhutput kaam (small, nagging tasks) out of the way first so that I can focus on the ‘main’ thing with full concentration. But chhutput kaam never actually get done. Or by the time they do, I’m so drained that I push the real goal even further.
Like going to the ramen bar tonight. It even happened when studying for the JLPT.
Before I started preparing. I spent days working on Fluenci, the language app I built, not because it absolutely had to be finished before I started studying, but because I wanted to get it to a place where I could leave it alone for a while. I could’ve multitasked, but I didn’t. The same thing happened right after Mama’s side of the family left to go back to India. That was high time to start studying properly, but I kept putting off the deep dive.
Writing takes up a fair chunk of my days too, but unlike other tasks, it’s something I can’t keep pushing indefinitely. If I procrastinate studying, the material is still there waiting for me. If I procrastinate writing, I risk forgetting the details — the thoughts, the way I felt in the moment, the little things that made the day worth documenting in the first place. And if I skip even one day, the whole bigger project is at stake.
At the same time, writing drains a lot of mental energy, and I don’t work well at night. When I’m tired, I can’t study properly, and I can’t write properly either, and both things end up fighting over the best hours of my morning. I usually feel like I should get writing out of the way first so I can fully focus on studying afterward. But by the time I’m done, I’ve already used up a fair amount of brainpower, and studying suffers. Not enough to derail me completely, but enough that by the end of the day, I’m barely any good for anything that requires real focus. And socializing in Japanese definitely falls in that category.
It’s not even just about prioritization. I consistently underestimate how long things will take. Maybe it’s a universal thing, but I for one am often wrongly overconfident in my own productivity and it messes up my schedule a lot.
I still need the ramen bar experience. Badly.
I’m not making the same mistake tomorrow — we’re traveling, and I already know that’s going to be exhausting, so if I move the plan to tomorrow I may as well cancel it already. But the day after that? It’s happening.
It doesn’t have to be a bar, but some kind of social interaction has to happen, no excuses.
Or… maybe I shouldn’t plan it out so rigidly? Maybe the key is to stop setting up expectations and just take whatever opportunity comes my way. Less buildup, less overthinking. Just a simple 1, 2, 3—deep breath—and go.
I don’t know what’ll be more effective. Anyone else would’ve gone and gotten it done with in the time I took to write this up. Well, welcome to an overthinker’s diary. Hope you’re enjoying the show.
It’ll be way funnier when — when, not if —I finally write about the actual experience. Just you wait.
Right now, it feels like a huge thing, because it’s the first time. But that’s how beginning to study Japanese felt too, and now it’s what I spend my time doing by default. Oh just to imagine having conversations in Japanese being the default. But I remember how much inertia there was in getting into the habit of studying, and how difficult it was just to get into the zone at first.
But here’s the thing: rolling friction is always less than static friction. (Ask me. With all the luggage I’ve been dragging around, I’d know.) Once you get something moving, it’s easier to keep it going. The hardest part is starting.
That’s what’s happening right now. Once I do it a couple of times, socializing will become second nature.
Every day I hesitate is a cumulative loss — not just a one-time missed opportunity, but an extra day of not being in the habit. So, the sooner I take the first step, the better.
I’m not saying this from a pedestal. I have to do it too. But my more sensible, third-person, out-of-body, director-of-life self knows it’s the right thing to do.
And I’ll be better off for it the second I do.