Hairy. Definitely hairy.

"Yabai" (やばい - yah-bye) is another one of those interesting and convenient Japanese words for which there is no real English equivalent. If you look on my favorite Japanese-English dictionary site, it gives the adjective meaning as "risky", "hairy", and, amazingly enough, "motherf***ing". As an interjection, however, it is defined as "oops", "dang", or "uh, oh". That's probably as close as it gets.

So what is a good "yabai" moment? Let me give a few recent examples:

You finally get a tiny bit of free time, so you hurry to get your car's oil changed for the first time in months. When you arrive at the place you've always gone for that, however, you find poles and cables blocking the entrances and a sign saying, "Closed until further notice."
You're (finally) getting your car's oil changed at a service station you've never been to before, and you suddenly hear a loud, metallic crash from the garage followed by a long, low, "Yabaaaai..."
You're commuting to work along a very narrow, one-and-a-half lane street, and suddenly a big, old dump truck comes at you at high speed in the other direction.
You've booked 60 rooms at the only real tourist hotel in your area for a youth orchestra visiting from overseas, and when you try to confirm the reservation a month before their arrival you're told only 10 rooms are available.
A newly-hired coworker doesn't show up for work, and then a couple of days later his name appears all over the news telling how he was arrested for doing something reallystupid...
It's only a few days before midterm exams, and you suddenly find out from your students that the teacher in top charge of the course never really told you just what you were supposed to be doing...especially when it means you haven't covered material that will be on the students' exam.
You don't worry about it too much, because you have one more lesson to use to cover for the deficiency, but then you're told that lesson period has been swapped out to another subject without your knowledge.
You make a playfully sarcastic comment to your wife/SO on the phone, hoping to cheer her up, and she responds by saying, "I'll see you later," in a really gelatinous, evil-sounding voice before hanging up.
You see moths issuing from one of your food cabinets.
The field trip your son has been so excited about is now just a couple of days away. Unfortunately, so is an unseasonably early typhoon.