Today is my birthday. And I am angry. I am sure there is some connection, but today I am just… I am simply angry, angry at people. And a little bit at my wife too. Those morning commutes on an overly surrealistically crowded train, where young people sit on priority seats, sleeping, playing games, ignoring my wife’s maternity badge, ignoring the old man standing next to her, tightly holding on to the straps, leaning, looking very tired.
Since my wife almost fainted in the train one morning some time ago, I now go with her to the office every morning and meet her at her office every night. I do not want her to be alone in this jar of inconsideration. Every morning like this. And my wife feels too uncomfortable to let me say with a big voice that there is a pregnant lady here. So instead we are standing there today, me angry struggling to find options to get a seat, my wife just struggling. And the old man hanging on to the straps.
Earlier this week there was a lady standing next to my wife, in front of the priority seats where young people seemingly without any mayor problems were sitting, a lady who suddenly no longer stood up. I saw it as in slow motion, the hand holding the strap suddenly getting soft, sliding down and the lady ending up on the floor motionless. My wife helped her and the people sitting jumped up and offered their seats.
It feels really terrible that it sometimes seems like you need to faint (or being accompanied by an apparently rude husband) in order to get a priority seat on a train in Tokyo, so I am angry. It is my birthday, so I allow myself to be angry today. To be overly generalizing. Of course sometimes my wife is being offered a seat, of course there are very caring people who pay attention to others, but most of the time it takes me looking at them, meeting their eyes, before they do anything of that sort. Often my wife has to stand up. And I cannot imagine that all those young people sitting on the priority seats have hidden reasons that require them to sit there – in that case I think nobody would have a reason not to sit there. So I am angry.
It is my birthday today. And I am angry. So I wrote a letter to the train company suggesting improvements. I thought that maybe that was one of those shufu-things that I could do to the benefit of working people. And also to the benefit of my baby – I do not wish that life for you when you grow up, being too tired, too shut off from the world to not care about a pregnant woman or an old man standing in front of you.
So today I am angry.
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