face it: reach for the skype
I recently spent a year living in Japan, and while much of my time was spent snoozing on trains, decoding the English language for Japanese salarymen and eating takoyaki, a fair portion of it was tied up with trying to keep in touch with people back home. This was both a comforting and painful endeavour, because I got pretty darn homesick sometimes – for example, even though I had the whole of Tokyo at my fingertips, I still found myself misting up over other people’s Facebook photo albums of nights at the Labor Club. (…Being away from home can make you a little crazy, it seems.)
So on those lonely Tokyo nights, as I hugged my bottle of Suntory whisky (for a relaxing time…), I would often long to just chat with a friend, to see their familiar face. An impossible notion, surely – I was miles away from home, tucked away amongst 13 million other people in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. But wait – it’s the 21st century! We have technology for these kinds of situations! Technology like a wonderful little program called Skype.
Skype is what we used to dream about in the 90s – a way to video chat with people who were across the globe, across the country, or even across the street. Plus, it’s (mostly) free! All you do is download the program and add your friends and family (they need to download the program, too). At the very least you need a microphone, but ideally you need a webcam as well.
Skype was like a little window into my Japanese life. I could show my friends my apartment, the weird Japanese stuff I’d bought, and the bottle of mystery beverage that I’d just purchased from the convenience store (which also gave me the opportunity to show off my mad kana skills). Skype was also a great way for my parents to reassure themselves that I was managing to feed and wash myself, and not living in squalor underneath a hostess club in Roppongi somewhere.
But like most things, video chat is a mixed blessing. When you’re feeling a bit melancholy and homesick, and all you want to do is have dinner with your friends, it’s kind of hard to see them all there together having dinner without you, even if you’re talking to them at the time via the wonder of technology. Sometimes it just makes you all the more aware that you’re sitting in your apartment alone eating a grilled cheese sandwich, listening to the guy upstairs vacuum and talking to a computer. Keeping in touch may be a lot easier these days, but in the long run it can be pretty hard on you.
Skype helped me be there for people when I couldn’t actually be there for them. And Skype was there for me – just the fact that I had the option of seeing my friends and family made being overseas, in such a fascinating but challenging country, so much easier.
So what’s the moral of this week’s rant? We should all be taking advantage of Skype. It’s the 80s sci-fi dream – so go and live it.
