Hey, You!

A Snack Box from October, 2020

I always half-jokingly tell people that the reason why I am able to do many things on my own is not that I am independent, it is just that I do not have friends. I am only half-joking because I really do not have as many friends as others do, at least when I make the comparisons from my perspective. However, for the few people whom I have encountered so far and consider the dearest, they are truly amazing people to a point that I am sometimes afraid that they will one day find out that I am not as good as a person as they are. In this post, I want to write specifically about one of them. I will not put his name. You would understand if you have watched the show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. We are so close that I think I have pretty much mentioned him to everyone who kind of knows me: he is a friend who needs no introduction.

We met when I was living in a share-house in Tokyo. Another guy living in the house introduced us to each other. I learnt that he was also a software engineer. He is from the Philippines and got transferred to Japan to work for some Japanese clients. He mostly worked from home. Despite of that, we had not really communicated much if at all for a few months since the first introduction because I still had to go to the office five days a week. I was also quite occupied outside of work so I did not bother much to make new connections in the share-house honestly. It all started to change when my team's policy changed to allow remote-work once a week. Our own rooms were not big but we had a very spacious shared living room. I would basically hang out all day in the living room and work from there when it was a remote-work day. It was during those days that we had the chance to get to know each other more. However, he worked from his room mostly (because apparently he was just slacking off, watching YouTube videos and sleeping most of the time!) We talked every now and then during lunchtime or when he dropped by the living room. A fun fact that I found out much later was that he actually got super excited when I told him that I was going to do remote-work once a week. He was just too shy to show up too often to talk to me. One time, he actually planned to share his sushi lunch with me but because he did not want to seem too obvious, he purposely bought a one-person portion. He was pretty stubborn at offering me his tiny little sushi box which I also stubbornly refused because the lunch box looked too pathetic to be shared between two people. I still make fun of him about that incident. What the hell, right!?

I think the tipping point of our friendship really changed when one day after office work, I felt like just hanging out. I did not want to ask people from work because that meant that I would need to stay in Shibuya until late, which I was too tired for. Then, out of the blue, I decided to message him and ask if he would like to grab dinner and drank the bottle of Japanese sake I got as a birthday present. I was quite ready for a rejection but to my surprise, he accepted the ad-hoc invitation very casually. At that point, I was like "I like this guy." We had a chill night together. Since then, we had become closer. He definitely became less shy at approaching me. I really liked his vibe because he came off as a very simple, genuine and honest guy with a touch of you-don't-see-it-coming sense of humor.

Then, the pandemic hit. My work had gone full-remote. After that, we literally hung out together day and night everyday. At that point, I managed to pull him out of his room to work in the living room with me. We would go for evening walks and try out restaurants in the neighborhood. I like coffee so naturally he was my trial "customer" of all of my coffee and latte. I was used to the coffee time at work so I brought that culture back home. It is a complete different experience when you share coffee with someone. We made oat milk from scratch. We cracked jokes about other sharemates in the house. We would drink until we can hear bird chirping sound on Friday nights. We went to Kyoto for a week during the cherry blossom season. It was a blast. Although he had spent a little more than a year in Japan before we met, he did not do many "Japanese things." Honestly, corona-time would not have been this easy and fun without him.

His company decided to pull out of Japan around May 2020. He eventually left in July. We had two months to anticipate his departure. We talked a lot about our individual future plans and hypothesized how the nature of our friendship would change. However, I was still anxious and felt a bit uneasy in those two months. I had gained confidence that our friendship will last in the end though. Apparently he cried on the plane but I did not cry at all. I remember feeling quite easy on the day of his departure. I did not cry because I did not feel like loosing a friend at all. He is just going to be temporarily out of my physical life.

It has been a little over a year since he went back. We have regular unscheduled phone calls and video calls. I told him everything and thanks to his supernatural memory, he has been extremely helpful at reminding me of my own things. I sent him a box of different Japanese snacks because he really liked the sweet peanut snack, then we started to exchange snack boxes. Filipino snacks taste great but I tease him for their poor packages compared to Japanese packages. The aluminum foil is not even fully wrapping the cookie! Anyway, it is a really fun activity. I love listening to podcasts so we also had multiple attempts to do Pod of the Week, in which we would take turns picking a podcast and have an intellectual discussion about it. It is usually about economics, social behaviors, psychology and politics. The idea is to do it weekly. Although we have never been able to keep it for more than two weeks, it was always fun when we did it. The nature and the depth of our friendship has not changed and I am very happy with how we are maintaining it.

Latest Snack Box: Coffee Cupping Kit from Good Cup Coffee Co., a Filipinno Brand

We are such good friends because we are very similar in big things like values, how to treat people, general world view and the way of thinking, but we are actually very very different in small things in terms of habits and personality traits that do not affect others.

Thank you for tolerating my loud voice and relentless teasing, and most importantly, thank you for making me feel important.

When you are fortunate enough to meet people who connect with you, genuinely care about you and love you, all you want to do is reciprocate and treat them the same if not better.