Today I started to go Christmas shopping, but the the Japanese train system wouldn’t let me. Then a couple eye rolls from a teenaged girl made me reconsider Christmas all together.

I think that’s called karma.

My plan was to leave the house at 9:30 and go shopping for the bigger ticket items and then sneak them back in the house. However, our oldest was feeling under the weather (thanks to a headache) and it was decided she should stay at home to rest. (Not decided by me, I should add.) Despite this, my trip to Tokyo was cleared because although She Who Must Be Obeyed would be out in the morning, she’d be back by lunch.

I ended up leaving the house around 10 and heading to the station. As soon as I reached the station street, I knew there was a problem as lines of people were gathered in front of the station. A sign in front of the ticket gates explained there’d been an accident involving a person (suicide) and that the trains had stopped just 11 minutes before.

Having been through this before, I knew nothing would happen for at least an hour and a half. (After a suicide and/or accident, the police stop the trains until they can conclude an initial investigation and clean up some of the mess.)

I went home and thought about going out later and then decided that tomorrow would be better as everyone would be back in school and sneaking things in would be easier.

Then, during the evening, our oldest decided to have several “Teenager Moments” involving selective hearing, selective memory, stubbornness, denial attitude and eye rolls. As a result, her Christmas present may simply be the return of her Nintendo 3DS. As I like to point out to her, usually after an eye roll, if she thinks I’m annoying now, she has no concept of how annoying I can actually be when I want to. I even make sport out of it. Just ask my students.

If you’re keeping score: My leaving late caused me to delay departure which caused me to miss the last moving trains which caused me to delay the shopping trip which led eye rolls and attitude which is making me double check the naughty list and rethink the shopping trip altogether. That’s definitely karma.

Bah humbug.