Disclosure

If you take one bunch of gaijin who work together and place them in a bar and add shochu and water and lemon and ice and the freedom that comes with not being at home and mix well after a hard week of child-taming, you create an atmosphere conducive to a rather indecent exposure of their past, present and future. It's happened twice now, so it's no fluke - it's the kind of bonding that was meant to happen on school camps; you know, you come back laughing and red and muddy and full of Shared Experiences and then the next Monday you hate the jocks again. Anyway, it's a purer form here because we's a-got no homes to go to and we got real bosses to bitch about, not class sluts and studs. So when the kindie workers get together, it's explosive disclosure, as if we can't even wait to get drunk to spill our guts to people who were strangers but a short time ago.

On Thursday night, we went to our local local bar (as in, it's near work, and it's very, very, much a local bar) and we drank a large amount of alcohol and offended many old salarymen and this is what came out.

So! From T came confessions of feeling shaky and shitty if he went a day without a drink and having this become a round-table discussion on the merits of alcoholism and we settled on the trusty fallback position of if it doesn't affect your everyday life than it's ok and T said yes I know but it used to affect me, back when my friend and drinking partner and general bad influence got me drunk and high on coke most nights and then coming down the next day we would duck off to the toilets at the kindergarten and snort more coke off H's keys and bring on the upswing and thrill through the rest of the day and we were shocked, honestly shocked - a kindergarten! a bastion of innocence! - and then the demand for candour increased and Jeremy started a new thread of conversation which quickly took the table over and he mused on the difficulties of Japanese condoms, in particular the fact that they were, well, much too tight and I thought this time he's gone too far, because one of us worked in the office, ethnic-Japanese who lived in England and was trying to navigate both cultures and this was probably a Bit Much and the boys gasped and wondered whether we had offended our fellow co-workers who were, you know, girls, and apparently sweet girls at that but then she blinked and said nothing and the sweet-as-sugar G counterpunched with a dubious sexual pun about her new Jamaican boyfriend (or her hot dose of manmeat, as she has dubbed him) and floored us all. Later, drunk on the train, someone confessed to losing their virginity just last week, late night in a karaoke booth and this feat was impossible, impossible to top.

My god.