U I vethed na I onnad.

Mostly I want this for the memories. I hope I'd never be in a situation to go through this again.

A couple days ago, I noted a very big earthquake, because Tochigi doesn't get earthquakes. We get teeny tiny little things that don't matter, come and go in a minute, and people don't even blink at. That was, on the Japanese scale, a 6-strong off the coast of Ibaraki, and by the time it got to us it was about a 2-strong. Maybe.

That is not what hit us on Friday afternoon. What hit us in Tochigi was a 6-strong, down from a 7 in Sendai, Miyagi. There was no real warning before it happened on the day of. It was immediate and it was immediately bad. The confusion was apparent - Tochigi has never had an earthquake of that magnitude. All of us in the teacher's room grabbed our desks as the shaking started, looking around for some hint of what we should do. Two of them went under their desks. It was only after the first round of shaking stopped, five, maybe ten minutes later, that it finally came into everyone's mind to leave the building. The emergency doors were all shut. The building was dead quiet. The teachers started running through telling everybody to get out.

The kids are good at this. They go through the drill every year. They came out and into the yard where there was nothing to fall on us, getting into lines according to class while the only thing I could do was walk around and offer hugs to anybody crying. And there were many kids crying.

The clock on the outside of my school building had stopped. A suspended TV nearly fell on one of my girls before the evacuation order was given. We spent almost two hours in the cold (and it even started snowing on us twice, though that didn't last long), huddled for warmth under tarps, while the boys acted like, well, boys, and half my girls cried and the other half alternately comforted them and asked me if I was scared. (Like I could tell them 'yes', I'm the adult!) We talked. I tried to take their minds off it as much as I could.

We were blacked out all night. The blackout continued until about 2:40 this afternoon.

It was damn scary. Still is. The aftershocks - many of which were awful and continued to shake everything in the apartment - lasted all night, keeping me awake for most of it, in the pitch black, and have continued all day today. They're getting smaller, but they're still noticeable. They're still strong enough to shake things. The roads are pushed up, cracked, and blocked off. Houses are mostly standing, but roofs and stone fences around them are gone. There's minor damage everywhere. My school is actually going to be closed on Monday, which would be nearly unthinkable at any other time.

But!

I'm alive. I have power back. I have food and water. Now I just have to worry about the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. 8|b There has been an explosion and the roof and walls are gone, and it's leaking. However, we are approximately 150 kilometers away from this plant. We also have several planned blackouts between 4 and 7 on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

This has not been the best weekend ever, and it's not even half over.

[EDIT] AND THERE'S NO GOUKAIGER TOMORROW. WHY SHOULD I SURVIVE A HORRIBLE EARTHQUAKE ONLY TO BE DENIED MY SENTAI???????!!!!!!!

(All for you, Amanda.)[/EDIT]

I wish I had more self-confidence for those times when only two people deign to acknowledge that I posted something I wouldn't immediately start biting my nails off and wonder if my writing is really that boring or flat out bad. Then I wouldn't have to feel like such an emo bitch all the time.

I know it sounds ungrateful and I know that I'm probably going to be judged for being a comment and elitist whore by anyone who reads this, but I can't help it.