Passport Goes Through the Washing Machine

So there I was: sitting on the couch watching movies, when Shoko says, “Oh, yeah, there was something that happened earlier to day that I forgot to tell you about,” and she holds up my soaking wet passport.

“You left it in the side pocket of your pants,” she continued. “I checked the front and back pockets, but somehow I missed the side. So it went through the washing machine.”

“That’s awful,” I said. Shoko was laughing quite hard at this point. I was examining my soaked passport, and trying to determine if it was all right, when I became very upset at her laughing.

I didn’t yell at her. I didn’t need to. There are times when a quiet voice can convey anger better than a yell. “Shoko, this isn’t funny,” I said.

Seeing that I was upset, she tried to cheer me up. “Don’t worry. I’ll call the Hita town hall tomorrow and ask them if the passport is alright.”

“They won’t know.”

“Sure they will. They deal with all sorts of government documents there.”

“No they won’t. The Hita town hall won’t know anything about an American passport. I’ll have to go to the American embassy and show them. And then if the passport is no good, that means I’ll have to re-apply for my visa. And that means I have to get documentation papers from my job to prove I’m working in Japan. And it means I’ll have to get a re-entry permit again as well.”

I listed off all of these with bitterness to try and impress on Shoko that I didn’t think this was something to laugh about. She became a lot more somber.

Two days later we were at a party with a bunch of friends, and Shoko was re-telling the story. “Joel was so mad at me when I accidentally washed his passport. I mean he was so-o-o mad. But it was his own fault really. He should have checked his pockets himself before giving me the pants. And if he was really concerned about it, he should have been laundering his own clothes. How was I supposed to know there was a passport in his pocket?”

That wasn’t why I had gotten upset. I did understand that I was to blame for not checking my own pockets and not doing my own laundry. What had upset me was that she had been laughing. I tried to make this correction, but Shoko already had a large audience for this story, and no one really listened to my statements. Whenever we get together with mutual friends, Shoko always enjoys telling “Joel stories” about all the funny things I do. There always seems to be a large audience for these stories, and they are always much more interested in Shoko’s stories than in my little corrections.

I’ve decided, however, that Shoko’s laughing is just her reaction to stress, and that I shouldn’t take it personally. For instance when I dropped the watermelon in the parking lot and it split open, her first reaction was to laugh at the situation. Or when I accidentally stepped on her charcoal candle in the doorway, and then decided that, rather than clean it up, I would just not tell anyone about it, and later stepped on it again and tracked charcoal all through her apartment, her first reaction was to laugh at that too.

I suppose if your first instinct is to laugh at bad situations, maybe that’s not all that bad of a characteristic. There are certainly a lot worse ways of reacting.