(warning: particularly old content) I don't ask for it to make sense RSS feed

4/30/03

One of my favorite two baristas at SureShot is leaving. :( I had no idea until she told me this morning that she was flying out for New York to appear in a dance production... indefinitely. My other favorite is still out on tour with his band, and even when he gets back, he's not going to be working everyday. Woe. Of course, it's kind of moot, because I'll just be gone in (OH MY GOD) a little over a month, anyway, but it still upsets me. She's been serving me coffee for like three or four years now, she does it well, I like talking to her, I don't have to actually order, she's nice and awake but commiserates about being tired... and I'll miss her.

4/29/03

Tired, so so tired.

4/28/03

Damn toys, damn them. I was all studied up and ready to go to bed at 10... and then I remembered that I wanted to snag a couple apps for Sayuri. Found many a nify thing (no graphical dice roller, though, sob), and wasted over two hours (disgusted look).

4/27/03

Sigh. I think I can't afford to goof off any more weekends. I've got too many huge projects looming their heads. The stress, it is a'rising.

4/26/03

Reminded again why I like playing in certain groups more than others... I'm a cooperative roleplayer, and hogs really drive me nuts.

4/25/03

An anecdote, courtesy my Survey of Japanese Literature professor (in the summer of 1999) : Adam had several of his friends over to his apartment (in Japan) for a party one night. They were laughing it up, playing music, getting drunk, the whole shebang. At around 11:30, one of his neighbors came by. "Excuse me," the man said politely, "your bikes are in my flowerbed." Adam peered out the door, and saw that his and his guests' bikes were next to the flowerbed in question, but in no way IN it. "What are you talking about?" he asked. The Japanese man grew more insistent. "Your bikes," he said, "your bikes are going to ruin my flowers!" Adam was puzzled, but told the man that he'd move the bikes. Scratching his head over the incident, he snagged his friends and they all moved their bikes closer to Adam's building. And so the party resumed. A day or two later, the neighborhood association leader knocked on Adam's door. "We've had some complaints about the noise," he said. "Mr. So-and-so says that he asked you repeatedly to be quiet, but that you ignored him totally. This is just a warning, but the next time, we may have to call the police. Do you understand?" Adam blinked at him, and bemusedly agreed that he'd watch his noise. It took him several conversations with Japanese friends before he'd understood what the hell was going on... that in Japanese, you rarely actually come out and say what's bothering you; you allude around it instead, and usually the person you're talking to bears the burden of figuring out what you actually mean. I always thought it was kind of a funny story, even more so now that we've actually been studying how to make complaints in the Japanese fashion in my communication class.

4/23/03

You know, I've put in a good-faith effort towards spring. I've stopped wearing my trenchcoat in favor of my denim jacket, I've been wearing t-shirts... the least the weather could do would be to oblige me by not making it so flipping cold.

Silly Japanese word of the next test I'm studying for!

jiritsuteki - autonomous

4/22/03

Things I have written down on the ol' Axim in the last day or two :

(In bed on the 20th) So right after I shut off my computer I remembered what that topic was, as well as figuring out that I was being somewhat confusing. The topic I forgot on I5 was not the speech topic; it was a thoughts topic. And that topic was this : whenever I pick up my shoes to put them on, right and left are reveresed. WTF. I think it MIGHT be because I cross my legs over when I take my boots off... but it's still kind of odd.

(Today after class) I am an introvert, I'd say, but a funny one. Most introverst would avoid speaking up in class the way I do, for example. I'm sort of a selective extrovert, perhaps. Once I make a decision that I will have a personal stake in something (like my education in good classes, completion of particular work projects), I go balls to the wall on it. Remember that. Only when it's worth it.

4/21/03

The most depressing NY Times article I've read in months. Sob.

There is absolutely nothing I hate more than spending more time looking up fucking vocab to answer a question than I do actually answering the damn question. I mean, if Katou-sensei didn't purport to give us vocabulary lists, I wouldn't mind; looking up vocab would be part of the stupid homework assignment. But noooooo.... he gives us a vocab list full of words that I know completely or could have guessed the readings on so I could look them up easily, and leaves off, oh, all the ones YOU CAN'T FUCKING TELL HOW TO READ off the goddamn list. So I waste 30 sec to a minute or two looking up each kanji in an unknown word, just so I can get, you know, the MAIN IDEA OF THE SENTENCE. And this happens, oh, dozens of times in a given article.

AUGH.

4/20/03

Blah, it's 12:30 am and I still need to come up with a topic for a speech. I have to have an outline in tomorrow... I should probably print it out or something so it doesn't end up photocopied from a piece of notebook paper. What the fuck was I going to talk about... had such a good topic on I5 today... ARGH! I was even thinking to myself that I wished I had my Axim up out of the trunk so I could have jotted down some notes about it; why the fuck can I remember that but not the actual topic? It's because it's 12:30 am and I've been in advice-giving mode for the last five hours, spread over five different people. No wonder the brain hurts (scrubbing eyes). It's still ridiculous that I can't remember. I think my brain does this on purpose, sometimes. It's a tactic to force me into bed out of frustration. In other news, AbiWord can't handle Japanese input. Piss. Addendum to the previous, for those three of you who will email me tomorrow saying "it's not so!" : AbiWord probably CAN handle Japanese input, it just does not seem to do so BY DEFAULT, which for all intents and purposes means that it CAN'T when I have to be up in five hours to turn something in.

Well I now (at 1:22) have an outline for a speech about my two cats, their backgrounds and personalities, and why they provide an argument for nature over nurture, as well as the idea that sometimes, a stupid-seeming animal is nothing but a stupid animal. Heh.

4/19/03

Jim and I made a voyage to the Centralia Walmart today in search of cheap DVD-Rs. We did not find any. I did, however, witness a sight to make my soul despair of the future of humankind : two middle-aged women desperately scrabbling through a bin marked "JEWELRY! $1.76!" while calling to their friend to come share in the "bounty." As Jim put it, when people are need of their "WT bling bling," they just GOTTA HAVE IT.

(Editor's note : WT = white trash)

4/17/03

I hate missing the 71 by about a minute and then sitting in the cold for thirty minutes waiting for the next one, while four 73s and two 72s go by. ARGH.

4/16/03

Where the fuck does time GO? In two flipping months on the nose, I'll be landing in Osaka! JEBUS.

4/15/03

I can't believe I forgot obnoxious Japanese words the last couple quizzes... ah well. Off to the homework. The amount of homework and reading on a daily basis this quarter is ridiculous. Well, not really, but after taking slacker TC classes the last two quarters, the reading I'm expected to do in 505 is crazy go nuts. Plus Japanese Japanese Japanese and research work and Japanese... one might think that I have shit to do. Marvel. So I made my first impulse online purchase last night. I'm rather annoyed about it... not that it wouldn't have happened if I hadn't gotten a credit card, or even that it wouldn't have happened not-online, but it's still frustrating. Those 15$ could have been much better spent elsewhere, and I knew it not a moment after I made the decision to spend them irrevocable. Bah.

4/14/03

Even factoring in a four hour nap earlier, it is so totally bed time.

4/13/03

Well, I certainly have been a bastion of crap writing the last month or so. I guess that whole being less depressed thing once again proves that it shoots the creativity to shit.

4/12/03

I don't know if watching Black Hawk Down subsequent times is better, because I know what's going to happen... or worse for the same reason.

4/11/03

(slump) Funny what over an hour in a really really hot bath does to your blood pressure. Been a while since I took a bath; I'm not sure I did it at all last quarter. I have a hard time doing it unless I clean the bathtub first, which is generally more effort than I really feel like putting into relaxing.

(rubbing eyes) Well, I wrote the previous paragraph four hours ago. I just got back from going to the ER with my mother and father (Mom had surgery on Thursday, and she got some symptoms that could have been bad news). It's a good thing I went—my dad is insufferable to me normally, and I don't know how Mom manages him normally, but when she's already freaking out because she could be in a severe calcium imbalance, she didn't need to be cooped up with him in a hospital. She's fine, and I managed to head off Dad's obnoxious "I told you so"s. Mission complete and now my tired ass is falling into bed.

4/10/03

Why oh why, on a day when I had many interesting things to talk about, did I not get to a computer until it was 2 am and all energy had fled? Backchanneling and videophones related to Japanese, status accorded to good typists in IRC... even the experience of completely failing linguistically in my Japanese class this morning (I stuttered to a stop in Japanese and found myself unable to recover in English... total linguistic halt) would be interesting to reflect on but I just can't handle the idea of being awake for more time than it'll take to finish this sentence.

4/09/03

I should have more days like today - get up, go to class, and then have the entire late morning/afternoon/evening to myself. I tend to forget what it was like before I had a job. Not that my job is incredibly taxing (or at least wasn't the past few years... since about June last year I've been pulling eight+ hour days, counting classes, more often than not), but it's just not quite the same as it was. Back when I was taking 200 level classes and had afternoons totally free because fuck if I was going to do homework. Ah, memories.

I forgot for Tuesday, but here goes for tomorrow... silly Japanese word of the next test I'm studying for!

hogoboueki - preservationist economy

4/08/03

I must have the aura of someone who doesn't want money today. Both the subbing barista at Sureshot this morning and the woman at the HUB tried to shortchange me (by 6 bucks in one case, 10 in another... sheesh). I went around earlier and spent some time in the Active Worlds simworld thing as part of a class assignment... I was immediately reminded why I dropped away from IRC once my "community ties" evaporated. Chatting people are D-U-M and that spells dumb. Gripe gripe. Not to mention the fact that the second one of the shirts I snagged from The Buckle using weird aunt's gift certificate has come up with a hole in. Shitty clothes that I wouldn't buy anyway, but even when they're free, they rip! BAH!

4/07/03

Saw Dreamcatcher tonight with Seth and Jase and Kyle. Ickiness and creepiness was had; I correctly predicted from which source heroics would come... not a bad way to spend a couple bucks. I doan wanna get up in 5.5 hours. Particularly since I won't get to sleep for another 30-45 min. Wah.

4/06/03

I even wrote something here. And then it went poof!

4/04/03

And when I grow too old to dream, your love will live, in my heart.

4/03/03

How wonderful to wake up to a memory of a kiss in the night and a bouquet of roses on my desk. Yesterday marked Jim's and my third year anniversary, an anniversary that had the bad taste to fall on a night I was to be on campus past 8, not to mention being Bug Day. In other news, my TC 400 teacher told me today that I shouldn't be in the class because I'd get bored, and paved the way to get me into her 505 class. Which is pretty damn sweet. And the Axim came. More on that after I have time to play with it (it's been charging, and I don't have the cradle with me so I can't get super neato stuff yet... though it comes with a pretty damn sweet Solitaire).

4/02/03

How rare it is to find music that exactly matches the beat of your step, and how amusing to find that the song is George Clinton's Play That Funky Music.

4/01/03

Just watched Monsoon Wedding and here are thoughts. Sometimes I really wish that I were Indian so that I could wear saris. Why do Indian men and women have to be so goddamn hot? I really shouldn't watch romantic movies ever again, unless Jim and I break up and I meet someone romantic, or unless Jim shapes up quite a bit; I just can't handle watching romantic scenes or passionate kisses... it just drives me up the goddamn wall. Not to say romance is dead exactly, but it's just not quite the same thing. More info than the world needed. Perhaps I just need a really hot Indian guy to come my way. Bad bad mood today. Probably because of the dreams last night (inside-out sweatshirt and gloves on the ground outside a school building... don't forget, it was nice).