The Golden Gator Awards -

I apologize in advance for any stray kanji or strange markings. Japanese computers are weird.

July 26th:

GAO. I've spent most of the week trying to update my journal, clean, send postcards, and try not to be bored off my ass, but man is it hard. Everyone moved out over the weekend, and thus there is no one to randomly abduct me off to who knows where. I've been trying to wander around on my own/call folks or something, but it's pretty hard. For one thing, I'm tired as hell. I finally had some time to crash over the weekend after touring around, but I've been pretty drained. That and it's been raining in bunches, so there's not much I can do anyways aside from museums, but I'm trying to save those for the final week since I can walk there/don't need a bus pass. I've done a few things though. Yesterday I just went to Japanese class. Fairly uneventful. And we had the teacher nobody likes, and during the whole class, me and ManYi are passing notes saying 'please kill me now'. It was great though, cause we were (re)learning how to say I'm not feeling well because ____・So, me and Manyi:
”Genki ga arimasen ne. Doshitan desu ka?”(you don't look well, what happened?)
”Kurasu de iru kara, kibun ga warui yo.”(I don't feel well because I came to class)
”Sou desu ka. Daijoubu o nairmasen ka?”(Oh really? Are you going to be okay.)
”Iie. Kono sensei ga irukereba, zenzen daijoubu o nairmasen yo.”(No. As long as we have this teacher, I'm never going to get better.)
”Sou desu ka. Watashi mo.”(Ah. I'm the same way man.)
We're punk asses.
But seriously, this teacher is so bad. She's boring as hell, doesn't encourage class participation, drags the pace of the class back into the fucking ice age, and actually BREAKS UP our coversations, which are relevant to what we're learning and are in Japanese, but have only progressed beyond what's in the book. Because that's how coversations work. She'll stop us and make us read straight out of the book. WHAT THE FUCK!? My name isn't Johnson, you're not Tanaka, and we didn't miss work yesterday. How the fuck is this relevant? Excuse us for taking the SAME FUCKING GRAMMAR and adapting it to our needs!!! GAH!
In other news, we have to do these speeches in Japanese class, and the guy who did one yesterday did really well. It was about Malaysia, which is where he's from. He's also a telecommunications major, so he comandeered the big ass television in the room and showed a tourism video of Malaysia, after which we all wanted to go. It might have been because of the amazingly cheesy and catchy theme song (Malaysia, Malaysia, the essence of Asia・, which might replace Kawaii Baby as the new theme song of ATW 06, or because it only costs $15 US dollars to fly from one end of the country to the other. Wtf are we doing in Japan, guys? But, if I go visit people in Singapore, we can on a road trip into Malaysia. We have it worked out. Now there's just the wee matter of me getting to Singapore....
Anyways, I totally failed at life today and woke up sometime between 10 and 11: when I'm supposed to be in Japanese. I decided it wasn't worth going to, since I was already going to miss most of it/hadn't done my homework yet. So, i gothed out and wandered around Tenjin to go buy the NEW DIR EN GREY SINGLE WOOT!!!11!!one1!! It's quite lovely, although the way the song is structured sounds very American. It also sorta sounds like Pierrot in the beginning. And since when were they breaking up!? REALLY? Geekiness aside, i bought that and a copy of Shoxx with Plastic Tree on the cover, and also discovered that I missed the DoremiDAN concert in Fukuoka. BOO. I missed Kagrra too, but I don't really care about them. Meh.
After Tenjinning, I went back to school to mess around online and to go to the yukata-trying on event that was today. I thought it was at 4, but after checking my email, I discovered it really started at 3. Fortunately, it wasn't quite 3:30 when I got to school, so I went next door and yukata-ed no problem. It's really not that hard to put on. Even the obi isn't hard to tie once you know how to. It was sort of annoying though, since the measurements are based on the body, and me being tall, the obi came out to be a bit short. That wasn't so bad really, just mess with it till it's right. The annoying thing was everybody grabbing stuff out of my hands to do the exact same fix I was about to do. That sort of thing just pisses me off to no end, since I'm so damn independent. That and I got yelled at cause I picked up one of the ties by the end. You're supposed to hold them in the middle, then put the middle onto your middle and wrap it around. BUT, when it's on the floor in a pile, you have to add that ONE EXTRA STEP WHICH SEEMS TO BE SUCH A PROBLEM of picking it up first THEN finding the fucking middle. OH SNAP! People getting in my face aside, it was all really fun. We took a bunch of pictures.
After all that, I went back down to Tenjin with the people who were around. It was me, Rheza, the kids from Taiwan and the girl from Pusan. I'm really bad with names, guys. And it doesn't help that I can't correctly pronounce the names of half the people here. Anyways, we got donuts (at 105 yen each, ouch) and then looked for a yukata for Tracy (she's from Taiwan). After all that, I randomly ran into Hajar and came home. The week's been pretty boring.
I did get to talk to the landlady yesterday, who is really nice. I came home after class to do laundry, and kept running into her in the elevator. About the fourth time we crossed paths, she just laughed at me. It was great. Hopefully I'll run into her again so I can practice Japanese. I really just need to speak it more. I'm really having no trouble understanding the basics of what people are saying, I just can't speak it. Or read. I'm freaking illiterate. XD I'm also debating whether I still evven want to take Japanese, since there's not a lot of times I'm gonna use it. I really want to take up Mandarin, cause...it's cool. And I know a lot of people that speak it. And they don't think I'm some weird foreigner who obviously doesn't know the language and thus talking to me is a waste of time.(go Japan!) But, it's kinda pointless switching from Japanese to Chinese cause DePaul only offers minor credit for the UPPER LEVEL CLASSES!!(go DePaul!) So yeah. SOMETIME, I'm picking up Mandarin, dammit.


かわい、ね？