The Belt

This is going to drive my linear readers crazy, but I've gotta go back in time a bit.  You see, there was an epilogue for the belt story.  Some of you are probably like "an epilogue?  The belt thing didn't warrant a story in the first place" while others of you are like "wait, did he write something about a belt?  Or is that a metaphor?"

Nonetheless.

After twenty two hours traveling with my family, there were a few things I really wanted; a beer, a bed, and a belt.  So, after fulfilling the first two objectives, I forced Tessa to accompany me on a belt purchase under the guise of exploring Tokyo.  We found a five floor mall and after what seemed like twenty two hours, we found an H&M store.  In Japan, H&M stores are exactly like H&M stores in the US, except everything is written in Japanese.  I nevertheless managed to meander my way around the store with Tessa in tow until stumbling upon the belt rack.  And there I found this beaut.

I approached checkout with a great deal of trepidation.  There were four lanes and a long line of people waiting, which gave me a lot of time to practice what I was going to say.  But the cashier threw me off my game.  As I approached the counter, she blurted a stream of Japanese at a terrifying rate of speed.  In that moment, I realized that our language app had to have been playing at quarter speed, because as far as I could tell she said one very long word to me.  She looked at me expectantly and I'm sad to say I panicked.  'Hai!' I said while grinning and shaking my head.

"Dad," Tessa whispered, "You just said yes while shaking your head."

Thinking back to my hours of work on the language app,  I realized she was right.  That didn't make much sense.  What was the word for no?  I drew a blank.  So I improvised.  Nodding with what I hoped was an appropriate level of intensity, I said "Wa!"

Loosely translated, Wa means 'the.'  

At this point, the clerk decided her best bet was to make the rest of the decisions about the transaction herself, including whether I wanted a bag, whether I wanted a rewards card, and whether I wanted to sign up for the Tokyo H&M Rewards Credit Card.  The answer to all questions was apparently Hai.

I can't say that I'm proud of what happened next, but I know Tessa wasn't.  I shifted into the purely pragmatic mindset that has served me so well as a forensic psychologist.  Identify the facts and act accordingly.  Two facts were clear: a) I had been in sore need of a belt for twenty two hours, and b) I had just acquired a belt.  So, rather than carrying the belt back to the hotel in a bag (which seemed kind of insane), I took the belt out of the bag and started ripping the tags off.  To Tessa's dawning horror, this occurred in the middle of the hallway just outside the store.  

She turned paper white and said 'dad, what are you doing?'  

Although it seemed pretty obvious to me, I said 'I'm going to put my belt on.'  

She said 'I'm out,' and immediately walked into the nearest store.

As I threaded the belt through the loops, it occurred to me that this was probably what philosophers might call an inflection point and astrophysicists might call an event horizon.  That moment when you have passed through to the other side and decided not to be embarrassed by events that would cause an aneurysm in the teenage set.  Although it's not a cool place to be, I've gotta say that it's pretty comfortable.  I'm seeing a tracksuit and Brooks running shoes in my immediate future.

I've included a reenactment of the interaction below.  Tessa covering her face perfectly captures her embarrassment both at the mall and in our apartment as she said "Dad, who does a reenactment of putting on their belt?"

This guy.

Why wouldn't I put my belt on in a hallway?