so off and on during this year, i was dating/hanging out with/casually screwing or whatever you want to call it with medical school student. smart, charming (a little too charming at times) good English… and with all intentions of doing his residency in Nagoya and then practicing in the US someday. well, i have no intentions of leaving Japan, so if we became Legitimately Boyfriend and Girlfriend, we’d just be killing time. he, being 3 years younger than me, is alright with killing time, but that bores me. i want to find one i can kill time with indefinitely. so, i was alright with only meeting up maybe once a month for a little, ahem, “fun.”

or so i thought… because i bumped into him a few nights ago at the bar, the drunken flirtation started again, he made some comment in Japanese about how hot i looked in the skirt i was wearing, and we paid our bar tab and started walking home together…

and then he tells me he has a girlfriend.

BANG ZING ZOWIE

suddenly, in my drunken state, he became a betraying scumbag who only wanted to play around with the foreign chick before finding a nice, proper japanese girl he can take home to mom and dad, and i was the foreign slut trash who no one wants as a girlfriend, even of the “killing time” variety. i kinda went off on a teary tirade and ran off, leaving him to watch me go.

i felt like an absolute worthless piece of crap. i don’t know if anyone else can relate to my particular situation, but as a foreign woman in Japan, sometimes i just feel like the girl they want to play around with before settling down. everything else here is fine; i have good friends and i’m starting a graduate school program that will help me achieve my dream of becoming a lecturer/language teacher in a Japanese university. but the love thing… everything seems to be against me. all i want is for someone to think i’m good enough to want to take me to dinner at their parents’ house, have the balls to say “well yes Grandma, she is from that country that vaporized your uncle in the war, but i love her and she makes me happy.”

that’s all i want. and every rejection i get, even from someone i KNOW isn’t really worth it, feels like further confirmation that i’m just not worth the damn trouble. sure, intellectually i know that’s not true, that i’m being both sexist and racist, but… i just can’t stop thinking this way. i want to, but i don’t know how… even in my own country, i’ve never felt like i really have anything to offer a relationship besides the superficial stuff (decent looks, brains, good musical taste, good in bed) and nothing that will keep them around. now i have an excuse to feel alienated.

it’s funny, all through high school i felt like i didn’t even have the superficial stuff to attract guys, and now that i have all that, i’m finding that, despite the 2 master’s degrees, 3 languages and 12 years, i’m still the same fucked-up neurotic head case i was at 15.