That's the way this wheel keeps turning now

So I had a funny day today. One of those questions that seriously stumps you when someone asks you "How was your day?"
You have the urge to laugh in the face of such irony...you had a pretty sucky day.
But then at the same time you're still happy despite all of it. It was kind of fun.

Me and Steve were hired a week or so ago by a guy who needs to sell some gadget for kids that teaches English. Apparently it has a bunch of nifty functions, but whatever.
So the thing is, he's this arrogant, self-absorbed guy with a puerile sense of humor and thinks all his ideas are great. He has like, NO past experience, and wants to pay us, like NO money. Keeps asking us to do more and more. First he wants us to learn a Japanese pop song, play it on the guitar, and then come up with a bunch of clever ideas for skits for his little marketing seminar. So we graciously come up with a few really good ideas for him, but he, thinking he's the best and everything, waves off all our ideas saying "that's too extreme", "that's not funny". So Steve and I resign ourselves to just another one of those "let's endure this" projects.
So we have to indulge him with all these toilet humor skits that NO ONE laughed at in the end. So he puts in these absolutely DUMB skits with punchlines that would be embarassing to AD LIB much less perform along with sound effects and a running translation to make it obvious it's all preplanned. Steve and I are thinking we could be funnier just sitting up there making faces. Steve's like, "My God, I felt like such an idiot." And I consoled him by saying, "Yeah well, we knew we would."

The day before, he comes over to go over his script with us, and he gives me the once over and says, "Florence, please wear make-up."
I whip out my charm and laugh it off. "Haha, of course. Sure."
And he looks me up and down and says. "Yeah, and wear some nice clothes. Some nice feminine clothes. And yeah. Definitely wear make-up."
Me: "Uh, huh...ha ha ha...gotcha."
Him: "Yeaaaaah...so just don't come in rags or anything. Try to look clean. Yeah, Steve, could you make sure your sister wears makeup?"
Steve: "Um, yeah. Okay. Ha ha."

So we...
Sigh this is getting long.
We go to the place and Screwed-up Suzuki (that's Auntie Faith's name for him) tells us whilst he's giggling to himself that he wants us to pretend like we can't speak any Japanese just cause he wants to see his employers try to speak English to us so that he can have a secret laugh at how he's much better than them. So Steve and I try, via some very suggestive, "What is it exactly you want us to do? Lie?" Questions that go way over his stupid head. So we're like, fine. Whatever. So then he asks us to lie about our age. "Steve you're 23 and Florence you're 20." Once again, "Um, so if anybody actually asks us, you really actually want us to say that?"
Him: Snort, giggle, yeah it'll be funny!!!
Grrrreat.

So we get there and just when Steve and Suzuki go downstairs to bring up a box, a man comes down and sees me and says in Japanese, "Oh I'm sorry, it's this way."
So I have to pretend like I don't understand what he's saying. And via handmotions I make him understand that there are people downstairs bringing stuff upstairs as we speak. He finally gets it, he's very helpful, but I feel like a total INFIDEL. A total slimy sneak.

So we do the stupid little thing, and halfway through Suzuki decides to deviate from the plan and takes half an hour off (whilst about 20 or more kids are sitting there) and feed the minus 10 or so parents a bunch of intellectual stuff about English and how it's so important to learn it properly. He even draws diagrams of the brain and what part of the brain must be activated in order to properly absorb English, etc. I'm watching these ladies' smiles getting bigger and bigger; they're fascinated by how he can be SO boring and so OBLIVIOUS to it.
We get up to do some stupid skits. Just to put things in perspective for you, I have to shove Steve's head in a toilet, and I have to act like some kind of dinosaur and pounce on Steve, and I also have to get killed by an assasinating Mr. Suzuki (somehow accomplishing this with the utmost stealth, by poking a pen into my neck.)
Just when I'm feeling sick and tired of contorting my face into evil expressions, the show ends. Thank God.

Steve and I spend about half an hour talking on the stairs waiting for him. And then we move to a tiny room with boxes piled to the ceiling on all four walls, pungent with cigarette smoke. So I stress about getting lung cancer for a bit and then we talk for another while, and then we go back downstairs and get in the car and come home. Hurray. We're both wiped. Not cause we did anything strenuous or anything, just cause...

I get into thinking about the sort of people that have to do this stuff everyday: work for a boss who thinks he's the best, who doesn't know half as much about how to do your job as you do, who makes you wait around or do extra work for him above what he's paying you, where you have to work in an office piled up with boxes and heavy with cigarette smoke, drive to and from work, on the same road...
every day...
every day...

Steve said, when we were in the tiny room: "People ask you why you stay in the Family, and you have a bit of a hard time answering. Like, 'Well, to save people from sadness. To preach the Gospel.' and it goes way over their heads. But if they asked you, 'Why don't you want to be in the System?'...I think we wouldn't even have to open our mouths before they found the answer just inside their own heads."

I guess some people would find some personal satisfaction in snickering at Steve and I for this story. They can call us ignorant, sheltered Christian kids who have never known a life in the real world--a life of hardship, getting ground into the floor, surviving whilst everyone is stepping over you, stepping on you, or just stepping past you with their eyes on the ground.
I don't think I need to feel that. I have felt it, if only for a few brief moments here and there. I have felt like nothing in a big world of a thousand people. I do know what it feels like to walk down to the 7 eleven whilst holed up in an apartment in the middle of Tokyo, to get breakfast. I do know what it's like to have people mad at you for messing up--to putting effort into something that seems so futile in the big scheme of things--to toiling away all of one day, and then waking up the next morning realizing that, even if you spent a lifetime doing what you were doing...you wouldn't get anywhere. I am blessed to have these realizations that only last one moment, because they make me so thankful that there's another option. That I don't have to settle for a life where I say "from dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return" every night before I go to bed.
I'm so blessed. And days like these make me want to share this blessing with everyone else.

(Okay, Steve, so you were the one that kept urging me to post this on my blog. I don't think you intended me to wax sentimental about it. Sorry.)