![]() We had a client event planned for my first night in the city. He and I started setting up my desk, and within two minutes of our hug, he said, "Yeah, my girlfriend and I broke up." I said I was sorry to hear that and that breakups are tough. It felt like seeing someone I had gone on a date with again. He gave me a hug, and I was a little nervous. When I arrived at the Chicago office, I got off the elevator and walked into Justin's office. Before I left, my roommate said, "You know you can't hook up with him." And I responded with, "Duh! I know that!" Though we didn't text on the weekends or even follow each other on social media, our relationship was instantly friendly.Ībout a month after I'd started my job, the company sent me to Chicago for a week to help Justin entertain our Midwest clients at various dinners and happy hours it was going to be a lot of socializing and drinking. And then I remembered that he had girlfriend.ĭuring my first weeks on the job, Justin and I talked via instant message and on the phone about his brother getting married, my sister moving to New York, and other details I wouldn't normally discuss with just any old coworker. Maybe it was the wine or the personal conversation, but I could feel a connection between us. When I got home that night, I told my roommates that I felt like I had just had a great first date-with my boss. I think if there were a larger age gap between the two of us, it would have felt weird to be drinking so much and getting so personal-but since he's only four years older than me, the line between boss and friend became blurry very quickly. Then he casually mentioned that he had a girlfriend, and I thought, "Of course he has a girlfriend." Right after we ordered the next bottle, he got up to go to the bathroom, and I realized that I was pretty tipsy.Īs we worked on the second bottle, we started talking about what dating is like in a big city, and I told him that I had recently broken up with my boyfriend. Even though two bottles of wine at a work meeting seemed aggressive to me, I agreed because I didn't want to turn down my boss, and I was really enjoying the first intimate conversation I'd had with a guy since breaking up with my boyfriend. Shortly afterward, Justin said, "So, uh, should we order a second bottle?" He seemed to know he was suggesting something a little taboo because he said it quietly out of the side of his mouth. "Wouldn't that suck not to have sex?" I was taken aback, so I changed the subject. He said, "Yeah, some of my friends got married so they could have sex," Justin said. We started chatting about our industry and my new job, and then, toward the end of the bottle, we got onto the subject of how our friends from the small towns we grew up in got married at a young age-and how neither of us saw our lives going that way. But if you don’t have a furry feline of your own, don’t despair there are plenty of sorry cat cell phone straps and headphone jack charms available so you too can join in this cutely apologetic craze.Granted, in sales, there's a lot of social drinking at work functions, so I didn't think too much of it. Japanese cat owners love sharing their sorry cat photos on the net, with or without the cute “gomen ne” tag. Using the character 寝 for “sleep” in the reading is handy for playing up the total indifference involved in a sleeping apology. ![]() So when you put them together, keeping one “ne” in the middle, it becomes: ごめんね ごめん寝 ごめん寝コ, which gives you “gomen neko” literally “sorry cat”. It combines the phrase “sorry”: ごめんね (“gomen ne”), with the word for sleep: 寝る (“neru”) and the word for cat: ネコ (“neko”). The Japanese love a good play on words and they use a witty one to describe this cat pose. Bowing on the ground, hands-out-nose-on-the-floor-style, conveys apology so well that it has its own emoticon – m(_ _)m – which pops up frequently in Japanese emails and texts.īut the cute stuff doesn’t stop there. The sleeping pose is extra cute because it looks like kitty’s apologising, Asian-style, with a deep, sincere bow. Although we’re not sure what job has overworked poor little kitty… Generally accepted as a side-effect of hard work, exhausted Japanese seem to have the superhuman ability to sleep anywhere. Businessmen do it, students in class do it, there are even sleep cafes where you can get away from work to do it. And in Japan, sleeping is a cultural ( and very public) phenomenon. So why is this a big deal? Well, for one: it’s sleeping. Instead, they’re showing off two of Japan’s most special talents: sleeping and apologizing. Only here they’re not playing keyboards or watching you from the ceiling. So what about the cats in Japan? Well it turns out that cat memes are pretty prolific here too. Memes, Facebook profiles, Monopoly game pieces – there seems to be no end to kitty domination. It’s a well-known fact that cats have been dominating the world lately.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |