....

yeeeeeeeeeeeah >_>

Tomorrow morning, I fly to NYC for the Pre-Departure orientation and then Saturday pile into a taxi with grayscale and yomimashou to JFK and fly out for JET.

I'd like to point out that packing, car insurance and laptop frustrations aside, I am still really excited to be heading out to live in Japan for a year or longer. Granted a portion of that might just be that I'm pretty desperate to actually get there and KNOW what its going to be like, but I am excited to meet my students, and the teachers I'll be working with, and my poor, long-suffering supervisor who has been the focus of my continuous barrage of questions for like the past...month. I'm still pretty nervous about the whole teaching thing, but I've got a month before I'll be running any classes, and I've been doing some research so that's mostly abated, so now I just want to get there.

Luckily, all the New York JETs are flying out together, so I'll be with grayscale and yomimashou, and we should be able to finagle seats together which means a 14 hour flight of company and JE variety shows as opposed to mostly misery. Well, some misery is inevitable given the length of the flight and general cramped state but it will be misery with company and entertainment. Yay!

( Other things that happened this summer )

and now, to close with some good news, after like a month or more of drought, it rained all yesterday evening and is raining even harder now *does a rain dance* no more slowly dying plants, hooray!

Brief update since I'm visiting my grandparents - but I got my JET placement, finally!

I'll be in Fuefuki, Yamanashi - Yamanashi was my third choice of prefecture, and its still within a few hours train ride (depending on how much time/money I want to spend) of Tokyo, so I'm pretty happy...but I know nothing about the place XD;; Except that they're apparently famous for their fruit? I haven't heard from my predecessor, and admin approval for the Yamanashi forum is taking a bit so I don't know anyone else who's there yet, but I am cautiously optimistic :D I'm not hell and gone from Tokyo and the area I know/friends who are there, and most of my other friends are not hell and gone from the same general vicinity (except El who had to go settle herself in Hokkaido >>) so one way or another I'm sure it'll turn out awesome!

Time for a terribly overdue update - I know, I know, but there was senior week and packing and then graduation and MORE packing and then as soon as I got home I went and stuck my eyes under a laser and had to deal with that plus UNpacking so honestly there just hasn't been time.

( May Day )

Then there were finals, which really sucked and hardly bear mentioning, and the Japanese language class potluck party, which was adorable and filled with good food and a lot of fun :D

( And then there was senior week! )

Those were actually the only two "official" events I signed up for.

( The rest of Senior week )

Graduation itself was Saturday afternoon. We had beautiful weather, and our speaker was I swear the real life, former Irish president version of superwoman, the Honorable Mary Robinson. So that was pretty awesome. After graduation was garden party, I wandered around and took pictures with people, Jen and Maddy amused my parents, we all went out to dinner afterwards.

( Cut for Brit being incredibly attached to her college )

( Last one people I swear aka life since graduating )

tl;dr - I graduated and it was horrifically depressing. I got lasik which went fabulously and I can now see perfectly well without help which is something that has not happened since I was in the third grade. Kagiheya continues to be awesome, Mikeneko continues to be...not, and I have far more stuff than can fit in my room but that's nothing new.

Oh and I still don't have my JET placement

So...I said I wasn't going to watch this for a while since the first episode was really kind of frustrating and we're heading into finals.


...I lied?

( I really didn't want to study for physics, okay )

So, tl;dr - some improvement? Not great but I wasn't skipping over as much stuff and Yoshitarou seems to be growing somewhat of a backbone re: siblings (though I still want to throw the supervisor out the nearest available window) and there was more Holmes and Yoshitarou interactions.

For the moment I'm still watching, though with reservations >>

I'M IN!!!!!!!! I GOT INTO JET!!!!!! Now I just have to fill out like one billion forms BUT I'M IN SO WHO CAAAAAAAAAAAAARES!!!!

So I spent most of spring break going "hey I should really update dw/lj/etc and like, let people know I'm alive/what's been going on in my life" and then getting distracted by something shiny or going back to attempting to get homework done or what have you so now its the end of spring break and I probably should be in bed but I'm trying to get better at this whole updating thing damn it :l So here we go :D

( Cut to save people's flists )

tl;dr - Life is busy but okay, summer is looking busier all the time, I can't wait to be done with classes and I STILL NEED MY COPY OF WILD AT HEART DAMMIT

Oh and I saw The Artist. It was really good! :D A bit darker than I'd expected, but good :D

I AM OFFICIALLY DONE WITH MY THESIS. FUCK YES.

For those interested in reading it, I am actually quite proud of the damn thing and would love to hear your thoughts :D It is about 50 pages long, I should warn you, but not terribly dense? Or at least not to me, but then, I wrote it. Here's the abstract, if you're wondering what its about:

In recent years, manga, anime and other elements of Japanese pop culture have gained increasing popularity in the United States. This has led to a wider awareness of Japanese culture through the appropriation these pop culture materials as a source of cultural information. Manga, in particular, provides visual as well as linguistic examples of Japanese culture, and thus has the potential to be an excellent source of cultural knowledge, perhaps even suitable for classroom use. However, as with any cross-cultural text, manga's ability to serve as an example of Japanese culture depends heavily on how it is translated.
Currently, most manga is translated for the purpose of entertainment, not scholarly discussion. Consequently, there is considerable push from publishing companies to gloss translations with Western ideas and cultural norms, on the assumption that the stories will then be more accessible to readers and have higher sales. Unfortunately, with growing awareness of the Japanese origins of manga, rewriting can instead lead to widespread misunderstanding of Japanese culture as being very similar to Western culture, especially when the series' pointedly retain their Japanese setting. This loss of cultural context and the misconceptions it encourages on the international stage are here exemplified through a case study of the English translation of the sports manga, The Prince of Tennis.

Yes, I used The Prince of Tennis in my thesis. Yes, I passed around books at my presentation. Yes, it was beautiful.

( Link under here )

The file is a pdf, if anyone can't read that let me know. Also, there will be a proper life update entry at some point, but right now I have too much to do, so all you get is yes I'm alive, yes I have my JET interview information, yes I have too much homework and no I am not getting enough sleep.

GOT AN INTERVIEW FOR JET!!!!!!!!!!

Things I have done recently! In no particular order

~Presented my thesis to professors and small group of friends :D it went really well despite my nearly losing my flashdrive with the presentation on it in my sleepy-braindead-ness the evening before. Now I just have to find the time to add like three sentences to the actual paper, make it a pdf, and TURN IT IN. I will probably upload the beast on mediafire or something if anyone wants to download and read it. It is 50 pages of academic argument for how they should leave more Japanese cultural info in translated manga using Prince of Tennis as a case study :D Yay for my college letting me turn my inner fangirl into my thesis topic.

~Watched the first episode of Lucky Seven! It was excellent :D and I have relatively high hopes for the rest of the drama but we shall see. Nitta and Shuntaro have the beginnings of a beautiful relationship and what we see of the ladies is awesome, though we admittedly do not see enough of them.

~Started watching Chinen and Yamapi's new drama which I can't remember the name of and am too lazy to look up with grayscale. We generally spend it yelling at the screen when things don't make sense (often) and complaining that Chinen doesn't get enough screen time/freaking out when he does get screen time which is great fun. He doesn't appear very often, unfortunately, even though his character is doing things that make it seem like he should be getting screen time. Nothing makes sense. Who is the old guy seriously

~Had a very impassioned discussion at about 10 minutes before midnight about characterization and other plot-related choices in Harry Potter with several friends and by impassioned I mean nearly shouting and talking over each other but in a very friendly discussion-like way

~Met with my dean and ascertained that yes, I really can take only 3 classes and count as a full time student (for some reason I thought I needed 3.5 credits per semester, turns out I was wrong) so there's that solved and hopefully once internship starts up I will still be able to stay on top of HW. We'll see.

~Preordered Wild at Heart and am inescapably sad that I'm not going to get it till, like, MARCH because the bits that are in the Lucky Seven opening sound really catchy.

Everything else is class or homework related, which is not very interesting to read about (I'm infecting carrots in Microbio? Our control plates grew stuff because we weren't using sterilized technique? I have a kanji quiz I'm not prepared for on Wednesday? See, not interesting) and no news about JET yet augh augh augh so I suppose that's it.

:D How is everyone?

Comment to this post, and I will list seven things I want you to talk about. They might make sense or they might be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

My seven things:

Favorite Disney movie.

Oh, that's a tough one. I watched Fantasia constantly as a kid - I'm pretty sure it was the only one we owned on VHS, actually, and I'd watch it every chance I got. My friend and I even dragged my mom along to see Fantasia 2000 in Imax when it came out (which was excellent). As far as musicals/movies with plot, probably the Aristocats. I'm a cat lover, what can I say :3

Salt or sugar?

Sugar. I have such a sweet tooth its not even funny. Plus, growing up, my parents pretty much always cut the salt from whatever recipe they were making, so I never really got used to having anything more than maybe a pinch or two of salt on my food. More than that often just tastes too salty to me.

Describe your room.

...Uh, at home or at school? I guess I can give descriptions of both.

My room at home is pretty much a square, cream carpet, white walls, two closets to the right of the door, three windows in the back left corner (one on the back wall, two on the far side). I have four-poster cherry wood bed, set against the back wall, dresser right in front of it to the right of the door. My dad found at a garage sale when I was about 9 or so. I think its really old, but I'm not sure. He built a canopy for it, and I've had a matching set of canopy, comforter/sheets, lampshades and throw pillows since about that time. Its varying shades of green with gold and cream accents, in what really was a pretty grown up pattern for a nine-year-old, when I think about it now, but I still like it at 21 so that was probably a good call. Dresser is also cherry wood, and I've also had that for like my entire life, though it used to fit a whole lot more clothing, back when I was smaller XD Two bookshelves next to it, nearly full, with a sea-green armchair and footrest in front of them (another garage sale find). I have my dads old desk, which is, again, cherry wood, and really quite nice :D I used to just have a painted white roll desk. There were no drawers on it, just a top surface, and so I had no drawers in my desk for like 4 years. Now I hardly know what to do with them. I don't have much on the walls, really, a big fan above the armchair and a calender, and a little cabinet thing next to the door that has nicknacks in it. I have a little wooden step-stool thing that leads up to my bed on one side as well, cause its pretty high and I was a little kid, but these days the only one to use it is my cat.

At school I live in a tower :D So my room is sort of a hexagon shape with a square tacked on one end. I'm also on the fourth floor. There's some cheap plastic shelves across from the door because I have no counter space to speak of and even with them storage spills out onto the floor. Desk is a basic wooden college desk, shelves built into one side and four drawers. The wall in front of it is my calendar and two cork boards that mostly have pictures and fun things on them, plus other notes and such taped on the walls. I have a captain's bed with drawers underneath it that like to get stuck, and above my bed are my May Day posters (Bryn Mawr thing). I was going to hang a string of lantern lights there too but the hooks wouldn't stay up :/ Next wall has some fandom stuff (Prince of tennis posters, my sole Arashi and Doctor Who posters). There are two windows, thankfully across from each other so I get a cross-breeze. My desk is crowded with paper and stationary and work I'm supposed to be doing, plus a canister of rice seasoning, lotion, my hard drive, tissues, stuffed spirit of Fred Weasley, a large jar of nutella and my computer, among other things.

What's something you want other people to know about you, but are often too shy to say?

...Aside from the initial are-you-into-slash-yes-no dance around conversation (that's always fun with new people/someone in the presence of someone else who is not into slash, yes I've done that) I usually don't feel I get misinterpreted or misunderstood by people, and speak pretty frankly about my opinions on things, so I don't think there is anything, really. :/ which is not a very satisfying answer I suppose, but there you have it.

You now have a magical power. Tell us what it is.

Either teleportation or flight. Teleportation because it would be damn convenient, flight because I love high places and flying and warm windy days :)

A musical act that you love (besides Arashi).

This is a tough one. I generally speaking don't follow actual people - I sometimes, if I find a song by a particular artist, poke at a their other songs, but I very rarely make any move to learn about the artist themselves. This goes for authors too, or actors - I own just about every Tamora Pierce book and knew next to nothing about her until I decided to make her the topic for presentation in Japanese class. I tend to really like and pay attention to works, but not the people behind them. Arashi is the first time I've been a fan of real, honest to god people since Hanson in second grade.

I guess, if I had to pick someone, Loreena McKennit? She's the only other artist I can think of where I have almost all her music, and listen to it fairly regularly. The Highwayman is probably my favorite song by her, or All Souls Night.

Something you can't make yourself throw away.

Oh god I am such a pack rat. I still have planners from middle school. Maybe even elementary school. I keep everything that I might have the slightest bit of attachment to, basically, in boxes in my closet. I have all my beanie babies, still, as well XD

I suppose, in a what-would-I-grab-if-I-had-to-grab-something-and-the-house-was-burning-down situation (other than the obvious: computer and external hard drive) I would probably grab Puppy, for sentimental value. Puppy is a Dalmatian dog plushie that I got when I was...I guess also about 9 because it was the year before we moved from Delaware. I was a party girl in my ballet school's production of The Nutcracker, and traditionally, party children are attached to a certain set of party parents (guests) for the show. I don't know if this is always the case, but in the two schools I went to, which did Nutcracker, the party parents at some point during production would present their party children with some sort of gift - my party parents that year presented me (and my two "sisters") with the dog plushies. I absolutely adored him and slept with him every night for years. He came on every trip and to college for the first two years as well. I somehow never came up with a more creative name than "Puppy", or by the time I did had been calling him Puppy for so long it didn't feel right, so Puppy he stayed XD

Today I worked a morning shift at the vets where there were a grand total of maybe 12 dogs and 3 of us, so I got up at 6AM to spend roughly an hour caring for animals and then another 3 spraying down cages, taking the doors off cages, scrubbing the doors, squeegeeing the water out of the cages and off the floors down the drain, and then putting the doors back on the cages because its after the holidays and we get to disinfect the entire. hospital.

(Oddly enough, my arms are not very sore. Which would be awesome, except I have to work tomorrow morning as well and I have a nasty feeling I'm going to wake up and my arms will go "ahahahaha DIE D<" which will be unfortunate)

I then got home, ate, and spent a good part of the evening helping my dad insulate our attic, continuing a project that had actually started last night. This consisted of me periodically shoving large blocks of white fiberglass stuff into a machine that chopped it up and blew it up a tube that went through my brother's room, my closet, and then into the attic, while listening to Energy Song and Fight Song on repeat and having a dance party in my garage (when not shoving blocks of fiberglass into a machine). Its the way to spend a friday night, people, I highly recommend it :D

Our attic is now filled with white fluffy fiberglass stuff that looks a lot like the fake snow they use for Nutcracker performances and will theoretically keep our house warmer and our heating bill lower. I can't quite tell if its working, because while my room is warmer, its also about 45 degrees outside despite being Western New York in the middle of January. We should have about a foot and a half of snow. We don't. But it looks really pretty and the project being done means that I again have my room to myself instead of sharing it with a ladder and tubing and several boxes of tools, and my father is not spending inordinate amounts of time half in my closet. :D So I call it a success.

Other points of interest!

~Discovered on new years that a "molten" cake, specifically molten chocolate cake, is actually just a cake that hasn't been baked all the way through. I had always been under the impression that you put extra chocolate or something in the middle that then melted but I made them with a friend on new years and apparently not.

Really yummy regardless.

~Finished GANTZ, finally! I watched the first movie sometime before Christmas and then got distracted and kept putting off watching part 2 until today. It was really, really good: fascinating premise, great acting, the suits were beautiful - a little more gory than I usually like, but not awful. My only complaint is that I found the ending really unsatisfying :/ I loved the whole thing up until the last like...20 minutes? Half hour? Idk it felt like they introduced and set up a whole lot of threads that were never resolved. I can only suspend my disbelief so far, I suppose.

~Still no word on my thesis draft >.> I should probably look it over again before I get back to school but it's breeeeeeak and I'm laaaaaaaazy ~.~ Maybe I'll do it on the train.

~Slowly working my way through D no Arashi :D very slowly, but going, and would be working my way through Shukudai but my home internet is depressingly slow :l

And....that's about it. :D how was the start of everyone else's weekend?

Hello everyone from the JE friending meme! I haven't been doing much with my dreamwidth even though I've had it for some time, so hopefully new people will get me a bit more active over here :D

( A little about me )

( And a life update for those of you who know me already :D )

And...I think that's about it. :D How was everyone's holidays?

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MIRANDA~!


I hope it is filled with adorable Junba, Chinen being his fabulous self, and as little stress as can be managed at Bryn Mawr in December ♥

It has been snowing all morning. Like, legitimately snowing, as in great big fluffy flakes that are actually sticking and wtf this is Philadelphia we're not supposed to see this weather until December at the earliest.

I am so confused. And also a bit concerned. Weather patterns are getting wierd and that can't mean anything good...

So about that updating every two weeks. Um. Didn't quite happen, but one month later is still a lot better than 3 or 6 months later so...partial success? :DD?

My thesis is I think starting to come together, at least by way of what order I'm doing things in and how I'm going to tie everything together. I'm starting work on the tenipuri analysis bit since I'm a bit hesitant to start on anything else without further feedback from my adviser and it's a pretty self-contained aspect of the paper. I'm not terribly far yet since I have to start with the awkward summary-introduction thing and those always take me ages, but I've got Inui done and Momo mostly done from a close reading we turned in a few weeks ago, so it's a start :D Other planned characters are silver pair, Eiji, possibly Taka and Akutsu and characters interacting as groups - we'll see if anyone else crops up/gets cut.

Other than that, Lit is going well, my grad student teacher continues to be awesome and our class discussions rarely remain on the book we're supposed to be talking about but that's ok. We're moving into more fiction/fantasy-esque novels and so I'm starting to get glimmerings of final project ideas, which is good. Our Japanese teacher seems to have suddenly remembered that she's supposed to be testing us on kanji and vocabulary, so that's a bit of added work I wasn't quite expecting, but she seems to have gotten more organized so I'm pleased, and she listened when we asked her to cut the list of kanji down a bit :D Also I have finally learned the word for confused and it will make my life SO MUCH EASIER. I feel like that needs to be in chapter 1 but for some reason it never showed up in our books. Physics continues to be boring and frustrating, but either the class is seriously curved or It's just really been that long since I've taken an intro course because I somehow am managing to do well despite not really getting the material at all. Not that I'm complaining, but it is a bit odd

JET application is done, done, done except I need the letter from Glassman and, oh yeah, for them to open the online bit of the application already >> I have an interview for the museum internship, which would be highly time consuming but awesome and useful for both JET and vet school, so here's hoping. I'm still waiting to hear back from the Zoo to see if I have an interview there, but they said it would be a few weeks so I'm not overly concerned yet.

Arashi continues to own my soul, soul and now that I have an external hard drive I have far more videos to watch than I actually have time for XD but it's ok, because they remain wonderful stress relief even if it does occasionally result in my staying up till 3:30 AM on a saturday night. I preordered their new single (even though I couldn't even finish the first episode of the drama it was for, sorry Sho, but it just wasn't working ) so that will be a pleasant day in November, whenever it arrives. I have also managed to corrupt one of my friends here at school which is lots of fun :D Unrelatedly, Magic Power continues to display its ability to be more catchy than any song has a right to be and is #17 on my top 25 most played list. I just can't skip it its so catchy gdi Johnny

I love that I have a class where the professor assigns one of the most widely read Japanese novels and then tells us to read it "with our slash goggles on".

That is all.

I could give the speech about how I don't think my life is very interesting and thus never bother to update this thing but I think everyone's heard it before. Could someone start, like, poking me if I've not said anything in two weeks? Text, email, something - maybe if I have someone actively badgering me to update I actually will >>

( On to the general summary )


tl;dr life is life, faded_lace got me into Arashi and they are slowly taking over my soul, I am a senior and have a thesis which is terrifying, also too much other stuff to do, and I now have a shiny new tumblr mind the arashi spam.

Oh and I live in a tower. There will be pictures. Eventually. maybe.

.....




Ciel. Honey. What are you doing. I'm not sure I know how to deal with this YOU ARE 15 good god o.o dresses and suggestive noises for kuro is one thing but alsdkjf what

SOMEONE IN JAPAN PLEASE SEE THIS AND TELL ME IF IT IS AS INSANE AS IT SEEMS