roboppy.net

...four apple. So far I've eaten four apples today. Yesterday I bought ten McIntosh apples from the farmer's market. Another really good one is ginger gold and they're not as tart as McIntosh. Look at all the lovely nutrition facts of apples! MM FIBER YEAAH! My roommate takes fiber pills; maybe she should just eat apples. :D I must say though that I don't get any kind of energy boost from apples (or any fruit for that matter), but I am awake, so...yeah. That's a plus. My roommate is sleeping right now. :)

I also bought carrots and kirby cucumbers at the farmer's market and they're so cheap. I think I got 10 medium sized carrots and six cukes for $1.70 or something. I mean, that could last me ages...if I didn't overeat all the time. EH WELL! I think this is the apple picking place we're going to tomorrow. WEE!

So what has been going on? When did I last update this thing? Hm. Well...(thinks)...on Monday night I went to a local Japanese restaurant with a friend I went to high school with. What did I eat? Sashimi, of course! :D Yes, fish...I do eat fish, you know. I ordered a la carte and underestimated how much an order of sashimi is. It seems ot vary between three pieces and two pieces, or maybe I counted incorrectly? Anyway, I'm pretty sure now that I don't like salmon or tuna sashimi (those seem to be the most popular though!) and I really like fluke and yellowtail. My friend ordered sushi a la carte not knowing how much an order was either, so she got three and ended up with 18 pieces of cucumber sushi. :D She took some back to her room, of course. And she was in for a little...uh, surprise when a bit of wasabi touched one of the sushi pieces (the first one, how lucky) and, never having eaten wasabi before, was...well, if you've ever had wasabi, imagine the first time you tried it. I remember wanting to puke every time I tried it. She described it as a little alcohol-ee, which I've never noticed before. Anyway, I do eat some wasabi now just because I think "Hell, why not?" but it's very little and I mix it with soy sauce. I still remember an episode of "The Nanny" where Fran was at a Japanese restaurant and being told that wasabi was just like mustard, she ate an entire blob of it at once. She immediately started making choking motions and keeled over; when she regained her composure her voice became clear (her character has a very annoying, nasal voice).

During the rest of the week I did homework and fun junk like that. Actually, I don't feel like I'm doing a whole lot of work. I did spend a really, REALLY long time trying to write my thesis statement for my English essay and in the end it came out really bad. I'm glad I don't see what letter grade I get in that class because it would probably just freak me out. The essay we have due next week is a creative one where we just have to write an autobiographical fiction. It's really wide open for anything, which means I actually have to think about what I'm going to write. I mean, I just take something that happened in my own life, change the names, maybe add some stuff that didn't really happen...maybe I can write about my 12th birthday party in 7th grade during the typhoon in Taiwan. That was interesting. I have no idea how I pulled that together because my dad basically drove me around Taipei, picking up friends and then somehow fitting everyone in our apartment. I wish I remembered it a bit better...actually, I don't know it enough to actually write about it. Maybe I can write about going to Japan with Karen in 7th grade, except I don't have a very good memory of that either. Wow, I suck. I NEED IDEAAS! Oh yeah, the paper is supposed to be 750 words, which isn't very long. Each essay gradually gets longer. That's bad because my last essay was 850 words...erm. I forgot it was only supposed to be 700.

Damn, what do I write about? Think, think, think. Oh man, it'd be great if I wrote it about 6th grade camp. I actually HAVE a journal from it because it was required for English class. But IT'S AT HOME AND I'M NOT GOING HOME THIS WEEKEND dammit, what do I do? Work from memory I guess. Crap. It would be perfect if I could get it. (sigh) Maybe I can ask my mum to read it to me and then I can get an idea of it...

I'm interested in going to this Stella comedy show at my school, but I'm not actually familiar with the group and it seems like it may be hard to get in. I don't know how many people you can fit in the ACDC, but it's kind of...a lot. Or not. Okay, maybe not.

Right now I'm thinking that I really have to pee. But I'd rather finish this first rather than lose my train of thought. Not that it's much of a train. More like a go-kart. Wait...more like one of those little red wagons with a handle. My red wagon of thought. That is currently sitting in the garage in a pile of dust beneath the unused sled. THAT ONE!

I got my first anthropology paper back yesterday; a B! Thank god. He warned us that the grades may not be as good as we would like, but I knew mine was kinda not so good. Because I just couldn't analyze my junk very well. And look, my English sucks. I'm looking for my teacher on Vassar's anthropology site but his name isn't there. Huh. He doesn't seem to exist in the directory. ...does my class even exist? AIEE!

Erm. So! I'm learning more about grammar in Japanese now, which is oh so exciting and confusing. So if I wanted to say "Yesterday I didn't study Japanese" in Japanese it would be more like "Yesterday, I Japanese didn't study" which would be fine and dandy if I had been born Japanese in Japan and never knew English grammar. I still have trouble remembering the placement of the main subject and the describing noun when you use "no", like if you said "Robyn's cat" it would be "Robyn no neko" but if you said "student at Vassar College" it would be "Vassar Daigaku no gakusei" er...wait. Huh? Wuh. Well at least in Japanese there's no capitalization and junk like that. I think. Well, there's your little Japanese lesson of the day in romanized Japanese because I don't have the right language pack to write in Japanese. Maybe I should download that now. (googles)

Well I found something that says it'll let me type in Japanese...its 52 MB though. Er. Uh? It better work.

I just found out that someone wrote a message for me on the white board on the door. I think I've been here all day, I wonder why she didn't knock. Then again my roommate wrote on the board that she was sleeping and someone left a message for her...we wouldn't have known anyone wrote anything on the board if one of my roommate's friends didn't knock and basically get her up from her nap.

I was outside of my room for a small period of time, but I know the message was written later than that. I had to pick up a package from the post office...yay! I love getting the e-mail that tells me I have a package. I picked up my Tamagotchi stickers and now that I actually have them to hold in my hands, I realize that it's a buttload of stickers. I was wondering why the package was rather large just for a bunch of stickers, but...yeah. There's 15 sheets, 6 of one design, 7 of the other. Since they're the kind that change when you look at em from a different angle they're kinda thick, I guess? 15 sheets for $10 (including shipping) is a good deal from Japan though so I just had to get it. Mweeheehee. Would anyone like a sheet? I think I can afford to spare some. Or one. I also got this package yesterday. The shirt fits perfectly, so I'm happy. :D Yeah, I can't really pull off a youth small...medium is good though. I do have some youth small shirts (like my Bork shirt that I made) but they're just a tad too small. I still wear my Bork shirt though. They'd be more comfortable if I didn't have breasts...but I guess I'm supposed to produce milk for the children I could, in theory, give birth too.

...OR NOT.

---comment replies!---

Alex: I think the magazine was $8.70 or something like that? Not bad for a Japanese magazine. At least it's not like an American magazine where ever other page is covered with ads. :D And your mom RULES!

Judy: I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE BAG! When I got those e-mails saying I got a package I thought it would be for yours and not the stuff I got on ebay...well, Australia is a bit father away than Japan but the stickers got to me in five days. Maybe tomorrow? :)

I know I said that I was going to stay in school this past weekend, but instead, I didn't. But this was beyond my control, if you disregard that I called my mum to drive here to pick me up and that I drove home. I mean, the weather sucked! Period. What was I to do? Anyway, the apple picking did not become a reality and I was full of many tears. Wah.

...I really was sad. I haven't gone apple picking for a very long time. I know I've been apple picking at some point, but I think I was younger than five at that point. Or maybe that was a dream. Apples don't sprout wings and tapdance, do they?

So I went home where instead of being confined to a little dorm room I was confined to a house. It's better than a little dorm room. I went to Barnes & Noble with my parents where I found out they sell used Japanese books in the sales annex. USED JAPANESE BOOKS FOR CHEAP! Most of them were too complicated for me, but I found a book about the history of Japan in manga form featuring Doraemon. Kinokuniya should get into the business of buying used books...it's generally hard to find cheap Japanese anything besides free newspapers which I most definitely cannot read.

I practice reading Japanese on a regular basis, but I still suck crap at it. And this is just hiragana I'm talking about. In November I'm going to learn katakana, and then my brain is going to explode and the "Nihongo" fairy is going to laugh at me and take my teeth...wait, that's the tooth fairy.

I downloaded something so I could type in Japanese. I don't actually know much, but here are some phrases you might like to know:

これは、いぬ。 (Korewa, inu.) = This is a dog.
それは、ねこ。 (Sorewa, neko.) = That is a cat.
わたしのいぬは、わたしのねこをたべました。 (Watashi no inu wa, watashi no neko o tabemashita.) = My dog ate my cat.

Actually, I lied. Well. It could be usefull...alright, no it won't. And it probably wouldn't be written all in hiragana, unless it was in a children's book, and I don't think a children's book would be about a dog eating a cat. I'm not even sure if that last sentence is gramatically correct, but you know what? WHO CARES? HAHAHA...

...I have a Japanese dialogue test on Wednesday. Uhoh. I have to start off saying 「あのう、それは、なんですか？」 (Excuse me, but what is that?) and then my teacher points out some kind of food and I ask her what's inside it and whats ourside it...sounds kind of odd. We have a practice dialogue to ...erm, practice from and the example is 「いなりずし」 which definitely has an outer thing and an inner thing (I used to love that stuff), but she said she'd say something else during our actual test. Something with an outside and inside, I guess? And then we ask if it's [adjective] and she answers. Muuh. I want an A in Japanese because I won't be able to get an A in any of my other classes.

I have been eating way too much food. I can't really explain it...I just got hungry. Except I couldn't possibly have been hungry. I mean, I gained 1.5 pounds this weekend! That's what I get for going home and eating lots of yummy nuts and dried fruits. I think I ate five apples today 「きょう、わたしはいつつりんごをたべました」 and...I lost count of the other stuff. Maybe eight plums? I hope it doesn't seem obsessive that I keep count of what I eat, but it doesn't seem to affect how much I eat. It's just a tally:

5 apples
2 carrots
2 kirby cukes
8 plums (4 yellow, 4 long john)
5 (or more) nectarines
2 peaches

I'm trying to figure out how it all even fits in my stomach, and I guess the answer is that it doesn't. And how come I just pee a lot? Isn't this a buttload of fiber? Literally? (ha...ha) Eh oh. That worries me.

I bought two skirts today from a flea market type thing that was going on in the College Center. One of them isn't really a skirt, but a pair of shorts that look like a skirt. There's a name for it, but I don't know how to spell it. It sounds like "coulat" I think? I could be totally wrong though. Anyway! They won't fit me in a few days if stuff doesn't find it's way out of my intestines. Really. Ew. Why am I telling you this? Or maybe a more important question is, why are you reading this?

I'm seeing Radiohead on Friday. This hasn't really sunk in yet for some reason. I guess because I'll be pretty far away (not that I'm not grateful that Diana got the tickets) since it's at Madison Square Garden and I saw them once before. I wonder if I should bother bringing my camera. I always bring my camera to concerts, but I don't know if there's much point in this case. I may as well just relax (behind my binoculars) and enjoy the show. I'm trying to find my seats right now on this chart...hm. Interesting. It's section 313. The last time I saw them I was in section 232 or around there...so this will be a totally different experience! From the left! Hooyeah!

What else is there to talk about? Erm. Um. Well my roommate isn't in here right now because she's studying at the library. And she's been there for a while. Yikes. It works out well that she prefers studying in the library because I prefer studying in our room...wooha! I swear that I am indeed studying. Sometimes. Wanna read what I've written for my English paper due on Thursday? Our assignment was to write an "autobiographical fiction." Yes, very vague. I haven't finished yet:

“WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Come on, come on, come on!”

Every cell in my body told me that I wasn’t ready to wake up. My mind was so addled that I’m positive my pillow whispered, “Keep sleeping.” Deciding that pillows could in fact speak English and that its order was the more satisfying of the two, I continued sleeping.

“Melanie, it’s only six AM. Go back to sleep,” mumbled Simone.

The room filled with more mumbles of agreement from three, half-conscious 11-year old girls. I inputted a weak “meerh” and went back to sleep. Only when Melanie tore off our blankets and continued shouting did we decide to ignore our biological instinct and wake up, although the idea of murdering Melanie also crept into our minds.

It was the second day of my six grade class trip to Kenting, a seaside province at the southern tip of Taiwan. From our school in Taipei it took nine hours to get to Kenting by bus. Needless to say, by the time we arrived in Kenting we wanted to do something that didn’t involve watching movies featuring talking animals. Our wish was met with a swim at the beach, an activity which was a far cry from anything we could have done back in the city. We also had to get settled into our rooms that would be our homes for the next five days. I was good friends with my roommates, Melanie, Jessie, Jamie, Pearl, and Simone, but we decided to set up some ground rules first. Of course, rules such as, “5-7 minutes max in bathroom” and “Keep your part of the room tidy” were not remotely probable by six pre-teen girls and would inevitably be broken.

Today’s activity was a three-mile beach hike. While I was excited, I wasn’t “wake up at the crack of dawn” excited. However, Melanie’s incessant shouting snapped all of us awake and we hobbled out in a zombie-like fashion to eat breakfast.

The previous night’s dinner consisted of rice, fried chicken, and vegetables, and most of us agreed that it was fairly good; today’s breakfast consisted of a loaf of bread and two jars of what we assumed to be jam and peanut butter, but it was hard to tell. A brave soul hesitantly poked the red colored jam with the spreader, at which point I decided breakfast could wait until I got back to Taipei, or perhaps I could just never eat breakfast again.

When we arrived at the beach, a cool breeze coupled with a beautiful view created a setting of an enjoyable stroll along the water’s edge. Of course, Mother Nature has a sense of humor, so she decided to send the wind on a little coffee break and let unbearable humidity take its place. While I tried to make my water bottle last for the entire hike, I wasn’t even close. Of course, Mother Nature kept reminding us that we were surrounded by water we couldn’t drink by splashing waves onto the rocks by the water’s edge that we walked on. It was fun at first to get our feet wet, but my socks and sneakers became soaked by the end and my white socks turned a bright purple. Why I even wore socks and sneakers to hike on a beach I don’t know, but I wasn’t the only one; Melanie’s socks turned a disgusting shade of brown. Gee, Mother Nature, you’re just a bucket of laughs!

The beautiful view soon became a rocky shore littered with shoes (only with left sides though; perhaps this area was once inhabited with one-legged people) and various debris. The only interesting things to be found on the shore were immense glass floaters once used for fishing nets. I was thinking that if I could name the beach, I would name it “Floaters and Shoes.” And this is why I shouldn’t be allowed to name anything.

---comment replies!---
Rebbie: YAY APPLES HOOHAAA!

Mika: Trample people? Eek! I must have really missed out...poo. Well this Thursday I plan to go to a show put on by one of the campus comedy groups....not that that's the same thing, but...um. Uh. (loses train of thought because it smells like incense in the hallway)

You must be sooo ahead of me in Japanese. We would NEVER be able to write an essay, I'm pretty sure about that. And I won't learn katakana until November! :O I'll have to break out the flash cards again...doh. From what you wrote I recognized "naka," "tsukue" and "ringo." And that's it. "Ga" sounds like something I should know. It sounds kind of familiar. I think I learned it as meaning "but" or something? What's "arimasu"? AHH!

Man, Radiohead is the crappiest band in the world.

HAHA WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM TALKING ABOUT? YOU THINK ROBYN'S BRAIN HAS BEEN EATEN BY MAGGOTS? HAH!

Well of course, Radiohead was great. But first, an introduction! Diana got us tickets (including two of her other friends, Ava and Stephanie) months ago and I had kept mine safe behind a picture in a picture frame, also given to me by Diana. :) She was afraid I wasn't going to show up since I got to Madison Square Garden kind of late. I figured I didn't have to see the opener, sooo...yeah. I got to MSG at around 9 PM and after getting through security (one of more lax security checks I've been through, so I easily brought my camera in) I took a lookie at the merchandise. Nearly everything was too big, but they had this shirt in a small, so I got it. Of course, now I know to check w.a.s.t.e. before going to a Radiohead concert to see what's more expensive. The t-shirt was $30, which didn't seem so bad, but that's a lot more than £12.00. Then again, it's stupid to fret about spending extra money when the concert itself costs a lot and transportation costs a bit and I didn't pay $2 to take a subway for 10 blocks (this sentence was not well thought out). And I don't get an allowance anymore in college, so I just buy whatever and that's that. Okay, now I'm just making myself look bad, what was I talking about? Okee, I also bought this poster ($10), and they were selling another nice poster that isn't on w.a.s.t.e. Lastly, I got this badge set ($10) because...buttons are fun. And they aren't overpriced. I've seen a lot of people in my school with those buttons...well, not all 12 on their bag at the same time, but a few of them. I wonder if anyone from my school was at the concert...

The highlight of the concert (for me at least) was easily the...erm, choreography. Thom's dancing is something to behold. It's amazing, the dancing. I mean, I'm going to call it dancing although it may look more like something else. It resembles the actions one may through to swat away an annoying fly, or maybe a swarm of annoying flies. He just moves all around the stage in a frantic matter, but in a way it's kind of graceful. ...okay, this doesn't make sense, but if you've seen it maybe you know what I mean? At another point Thom bounced around like a human pogo stick.

Okay, it wasn't just about the dancing. Radiohead is not a dance troupe. (But wouldn't that be funny?) The first time I saw Radiohead I had a view right smack dab (what the heck does smack dab mean?) in the middle and this time I was on the left side in a higher section, but I was technically closer to the stage than before. So I had an interesting side view of everything. One of the main things I noticed was that Colin almost never looks at the audience! Hm. He was staring down and facing the back of the stage a lot...or maybe he was looking at Phil. WHO KNOWS! Coooliiiin! But I could see Phil pretty well, although he couldn't move around or anything. That's gotta suck. He was wearing a green, stripey shirt. Thom was wearing a black shirt and white pants. Ed was wearing this shirt and...pants (what can I say, you gotta wear pants), and Jonny was wearing a shirt that said NYLON a few times on it in big letters. And I don't really remember what Colin was wearing since I never really got a look at him, but he was wearing pants, yes!

I don't remember all the songs, but thankfully I don't have to. I wouldn't consider that first encore to even be an encore; when they left the stage, I saw what time it was and thought "Wait, they have another 45 minutes of playing to do! MORE DANCING!" My favorite song was...the one with the dancing. Or the ones with dancing. HAHAHAHA! Alright, I didn't have a favorite live song, but hearing Myxamatosis live made me appreciate it more. I already liked the song, but he sang it pretty oddly, just really intense. And scary. (I have some audio from it, will upload later.) Idioteque was great, of course. EVERYONE LOVES IDIOTEQUE! Don't tell me you don't love it. Songs that I wasn't expecting to hear were Just and Creep (I haven't listened to either of them in a long time, eek), but they seemed to be very well liked by the audience. Songs I would have loved to hear were Let Down and How To Disappear Completely, but Street Spirit and No Surprises were really nice too. I think Thom dedicated Sail to the Moon to his son, but I may have heard wrong...in general Thom didn't say much, which is okay. Last time he was talking about electric cars, or something. :)

A really odd thing but also something you would have missed if you blinked an eye was that someone ran up on stage during Airbag and...yeah. It was weird because this guy jumps on the stage out of nowhere, gets a hold of Thom (I guess) and a split second later is tackled by a security guard. He did struggle a bit...flailing and such. And then he was carried away and all was well again. YAY! I wonder who the heck that was...what a dumbass.

I thought the crowd was good, i.e., very loud. The only downside was that the four of us were surrounded by people who were smoking, like the guy sitting right in front of me. And I thought that was against the law now, huh uhuhuhuhauhaus crap. OH WELL, I did lots of fun screaming and singing along even though we were not in a densely populated area of the arena (we were almost at the edge of where the seats ended), and I think everyone else felt the same way. My throat kind of hurts now and my ears are still ringing, but I think those are good signs. Well, I'm still alive, right?

I have some not very good photos and some really bad video but semi-decent audio considering I took it all with this camera. I used the lowest resolution to record the videos, which is why you can hardly tell what's going on in them...but if you look closely sometimes you can see a little black and white thingy moving around, which would be Thom frenetically dancing. I did use the higher resolution for a while during Idioteque, but for something like 1 and a half minutes it used up 33 MB. Um. Hm. All the other ones are a reasonable size (if you have a fast net connection at least) soo...yeah, it's definitely time to go to sleep considering its past 4 AM.

Yes, the PRS is setting in...ahhh! It's not a bad feeling, I just feel this surge of Radiohead love. I neglected them for a while. :( I remember a few years back I would watch Meeting People is Easy over and over and over again. Not only that, I made other people watch it too. I even kept track of how many times I watched it. I think I've only seen it nine times though, which isn't an obsessive number of times. But those nine times were probably in a short time period. I think I'll watch 7 Television Commercials for a while...man, I need a live Radiohead DVD or something. Or an extended version of this.

So...yeah. I ate some yummy apples today. Now I am eating dried mullberries, which I swear are the yummiest things ever, or the yummiest thing I happen to have right next to me. I had a huge bag when I came back to school, but now there isn't much left. Uh. Uhoh. That's not good.

Actually, I don't have much to say. Erm. Um. Well I think I'm going to redo my concerts section because it looks like crap. When will I do that? I don't know, but I've already started: LIVE (concert things and such). I never wrote a list of all the concerts I went to before...it looks like a lot, but it's not really. Well. Imagine if I lived in NYC; THEN I'd go to more. Yikes. I didn't go to much this summer, eh? How sad. I also worked on a little design for my Vassar site (titled "students.vassar.edu/~robynlee"...yup, doesn't get much more exciting than that!) with bright colors so I can blind more people. Yesss!

The mullberry supply is getting smaller and smaller. Nooooo!

I got this depressing e-mail from my mum:

Barbara's husband Don called today after I got home to tell us that Barbara was in such bad shape last week that doctors thought she would die. She has kidney bleeding in addition to the previous stomach, intestinal, kidney blockage, and her white blood cell was very low last week. However, her white blood cell count came up some and doctors decided to give her an operation on monday to put a tube in her liver to drain the bile (it is blocked also), so she can be well enough to receive chemo therapy (which she is not looking forward to at the moment) for her stomach cancer that came back. Now the doctors again feel that if everything work out she has a chance of leading a half decent life afterward.

This weekend was pretty uneventful. I mean, what can top a Radiohead concert? NOTHING! I did go to the Poughkeepsie Galleria just for the heck of it. I ended up buying a pair of pants and three plain, solid colored t-shirts from Delias...yes, that place. Delias. Not that it's...evil. But I used to get their catalog all the friggin' time and think, "Why don't I like any of this stuff?" Because it didn't have a 50% off price tag. HahaHA. Really, the t-shirts are all cotton and lovely soft...why am I talking about how soft my t-shirts are? You know I've run out of things to say, eh? I plan to do stuff to them, maybe embroider one, put some junk on the other, and maybe get some iron on fuzzy letters to make an "I LOVE MAGNET" shirt that no one will understand because they'll think I have something for magnets when I'm talking about Magnet. And that'll make it so much more fun!

I can't think of anything else to say right now. Euh. Um. Happy Columbus Day!...I think?

What time am I talking about? Well, PERSIMMON SEASON, of course! What else could excite me so much? Two days ago when I was in Mitsuwa, I saw persimmons in the produce section for the first time since last winter. I jumped out of my skin. Figuratively. $1 for a persimmon is fine with me. Yesterday I went to Han Ah Reum where they had loads more of persimmons for 3/$1. AHH. I got two cases (48 persimmons) which are now neatly stacked on plates in the dining room. I ate four persimmons today, but I'll probably eating more tomorrow. They're so delicious!

Since I've been home (this week is my October break...what the hell is October break?) I've been eating up a storm. Yeah, SCREW IT, I'm home and can finally eat more than apples, carrots, and nuts. Actually, those are all yummy foods, but I wanted a little more variety than what food I hoarded in my dorm room could offer. So far I've eaten a bunch of sashimi I got from Mitsuwa and last night I got two wedges of raw cheese from Whole Foods. I wouldn't have gotten cheese if they didn't have a little platter of free sheep's milk cheese to sample from...so it's definitely a good idea for grocery stores to give out free samples. Anyway, I guess it's weird for me to eat cheese after saying "DAIRY SUCKS" so much, but at least it's not the barely-digestible rubbery junk on top of pizza. Let's just say it's a far cry from what I'd see in my dorm; processed, bright orange cheese in a jar or "Easy Mac" which I'm not completely sure is food. I wouldn't object to eating most foods in their raw states; I object to grains and some legumes because they're just not very digestible in the raw state. You can soak/sprout legumes to make them more digestible. As for grains, I don't think those are very good raw.

I don't have anything against eating raw meat, although the only raw meat I've even eaten is fish and I'm not jumping to try something like beef since it isn't usually raised with the intent of eating it raw. Some people feed their dogs and cats raw beef/chicken though, and that seems to work well for them. Of course, it makes sense to feed your pets raw meat and when I think about all the dogs and cats eating canned food I wonder how healthy they are. I've never had a pet so I can't really say anything from my experience, but two of my friends have pets and they aren't/didn't do so well, sadly. One of my friends has two cats and while one of them looks somewhat normal, the other one is really, really fat. Incredibly fat. She knows this, but I don't think she sees this as a health problem. All I can say is if a human were proportionately the same weight, it would be an obvious health problem. My other friend used to have a dog, but they put him to sleep because he was having seizures and loads of problems in general. He was also incredibly overweight and it was kind of sad because I used to play with him when he was a puppy and incredibly energetic. By the end of his life he was pretty docile, just walking around and sniffing people. :|

Erm...back to what I was saying! What was I saying? Oh yeah, food is yummy. Kimchi is delicious. But this doesn't come to mind when I eat it.) I used to eat kimchi somewhat on a regular basis, and then I stopped for a long time. When I went to Han Ah Reum I decided to only get a small container's worth of it and at dinner my mum and I ate it all. So the lesson is, do not get the smallest container. I plan on going back and filling a tub (if they have a tub...hell, I'll bring my own) with kimchi and lugging it back into my dorm room. Mm. I ate it by wrapping it in nori.

I haven't been up to much last week, so I'm not sure what else to talk about...damn, this is sad. All I could talk about was what I ate? Oh, I bought some CDs! Woo! Make CDs cheap and people will buy em; I got Take Them On, On Your Own and 12 Memories for $9.99 each from Tower Records. I haven't been to Tower Records in a long, long time, but it was on the way to Barnes & Noble so my mum suggested we go. So far I am liking both albums, but they're not striking me as "WHOAAA" albums yet (you know, the ones that make you go...whoaaa! ...that was stupid, yes).

Anyway, I wanted to go to Barnes & Noble to look at their sales annex. That place rules. Cheap books galore, even some in Japanese! I didn't buy any Japanese ones since I couldn't read them, but I were taking French or Russian I would have had lots of stuff to buy. I ended up buying My First Xylofun because it was 50% ($5!). However, THE THIRD NOTE IS FLAT! Okay, that's probably why it was so cheap, but I can't imagine that every book has the same flat note. Maybe I'll go back with some kind of mallet so I can test em all out. It might look a little weird, me banging on all the books, but come on...I want my $5 worth! It bothers me. At the very least though it's perfectly flat so that I have a minor scale (click here to listen). It's just that you can't play the songs in the book because of that. I guess I can make up my own, minor dinkly songs though.

Speaking of fun, kiddie instruments, I bought this $1 10-note electronic keyboard at a flea market near my house on Saturday. I took one look at the strawberry and penguin motif and thought, "This is something I must have." I mean, it costed a freakin' dollar. I also had the choice of getting one with a banana and a bird, or one with an eggplant and some other kind of animal. Who thinks of this stuff? Cokeheads? Honestly! It sounds like what you'd expect a $1 keyboard to sound like, but it has 7 built in songs, which is pretty impressive considering it's a $1 keyboard. (Click here to listen to "Happy Birthday"...some of the songs have notes that are too low to be played on the keyboard.) Today at BJs I saw a $15 kid's keyboard that was actually pretty cool (the $1 keyboard is 1-note polyphony...not surprising, and after finding that out I thought I should have bought a few more so I could play chords) but I resisted buying that. I would have gotten it if I was sure it had a "line out" but it had this port that said "AUX/CD" which makes me think it was a "line in", but who the heck would use it for that purpose? Eh. Well. I'll go to BJs again sometime and it'll probably still be there. I also bought Christmas lights at BJs to decorate my dorm room with. It'll be a-glowin' this winter, hooyeah!

So it's very nice to not be in school and to not have to wake up at 8 AM to drag myself to anthropology. It's not a bad class, but it's a 9 AM class, which is never fun. I want to take a dance class next semester early in the morning just to wake myself up. Of course, I might end up falling asleep and fall on my face, but I think the chances of that happening are slim. In Japanese class we learned a bunch of new grammatical things and how to say the numbers and use them to tell time or say the cost of sometime. It was all terrible confusing, and I don't think I'll ever get a hang of the numbers, but I can try. The grammatical stuff confuses me because I don't always know when to use ga, wo, he, or ni, but I have some kind of idea. It would just take me a while to figure it out. Meh.

In English class our assignment is to read My Life as a Fake (My teacher is friends with the author so he got the whole class reviewers copies...woo, free books! I haven't found many errors in mine though, just a few spelling mistakes) over the break. I've read about a third of it so far and it's so, so strange. I would never read it if I didn't absolutely have to, and it's not like its written badly, but it's just such a weird, random story that, in my opinion, doesn't have much purpose. Maybe something groundbreaking will happen in the other 2/3rds? Hm.

Last Thursday I went to the dollar store near my school and got this hilarious ring (4/$1) that one of my friends had also bought. We both think it's one of the greatest things ever, but we're kind of alone on this though. IT HAS GOOGLY EYES FOR CHRIST'S SAKE! What else can you get for 25 cents? I also bought a pack of four double-ended highlighters, of which only two worked, and the green ink in one of them is so gross looking that I would consider that unusable as well. Alright, it was only $1 so what could I expect? I also bought some funny signs for my roommate because I thought they were fitting for her (one was about stress, the other one said "Get Happy!").

Last Friday I watched Radiohead on David Letterman and I hadn't watched TV in a while, so what I noticed most prominently is that late night commercials are 99.9% about drugs and cars. Is that what people want most? I mean...it seemed so sick. Ever other commercial was for a new prescription drug or a new car. I find that extremely troubling. And late night TV is targetting the 20-40 age group I'd guess...so I can understand them wanting cars, but all those drugs? AHHH! Well. Anyway, I generally like David Letterman (more than Jay Leno at least) but the show wasn't that funny. First off, there was only one guest (Darrel Hammond, who was pretty funny) but they gave maybe 3 minutes to Radiohead after having two "Will It Float" segments and...argh! Radiohead doesn't even like David Letterman (at least Thom doesn't, I think) so it must have really sucked. It was a good performance though. I was planning to watch it by myself, but one of my friends (who's in my astronomy class and lives on the first floor; I live on the third) came into my room and noticed my Radiohead poster. So we talked about them for a bit and I brought up that I was going to watch them, so we watched it together and it was more enjoyable than watching it alone. :)

I will end this entry with my new hair cut. WOOEE! Nice n short. I spoke in Japanese to the hairdresser (because it was a Japanese hair salon...otherwise, that would have been pretty stupid) by saying 「ありがとう　ございうます」 and she understood me! Thank god! THen she taught me that in reply to that, you say, 「どいたしまして」 (I probably spelled that wrong...could be 「どういたしまして」？) but anyhoo...yeah. So that was nice. :)

[this was written Wednesday night/Thursday morning; separate entry for today is at the end]

Travis is ...GLEAT! I mean great! I mean. Hooray for Travis and their bouncing about!

But first I must say that traffic in midtown Manhattan at 5 PM is sucky suck suck. It took half an hour to travel 10 blocks. Well...it was something like that. I got so impatient (because I was supposed to meet Diana at 5 PM but it was already past 5:30) that I got off the bus at 38th St and 10th Ave (or wherever the bus was...thank god it's relatively easy to walk around!) and walked to our designated meeting place (near Applesbees near 42nd St). I should have learned my lesson before, but I swear I've never been stuck for that long for such a short distance. Blah!

So after finally meeting up with Diana, we went to Quintessence because it's my favorite restaurant. :) Much good food to be eaten there. It's weird to think about how much money you could save by not eating, but then after a while you'd probably die. It'd be a long while, but it's something to think about. Or maybe that's the kind of think only I would think about. Hohum. You could definitely go at least a week just drinking water. And then you can spend that extra money on things like MORE CONCERTS!

We got to the concert a little late (if only I had been on time) and buying some merch (what am I going to do with a Travis t-shirt in the wintertime? It's not often that I find shirts in my size though) we saw the opener, Rooney, play a few songs. I thought they were nice, but not very memorable. I didn't even know there was going to be an opener until Diana told me beforehand.

And theeeen...TRAVIS! Yaaay! Diana and I had a clear view after moving over a seat...empty seat! *gasp* Why oh why. Oh well, it was better for us because otherwise we would have had two tall guys right in front of us. The evening was relatively cigarette/substance free except one short time when I think someone was smoking marajuana. Compared to other concerts I've been to though, that was very tolerable. Yay Travis fans!

I haven't a clue what the setlist was (should've written it down, dammit) but here's what I can remember in no particular order:

Why Does It Always Rain On Me?
The Line Is Fine
All I Wanna Do Is Rock
Peace the Fuck Out
Re-Offender
Quicksand
The Beautiful Occupation
Love Will Come Through
Happy to Hang Around
The Humpty Dumpty Love Song
The Fear
Writing to Reach You
Turn
As You Are
Sing

I may have added too much stuff to that list, actually. I haven't completely aquainted myself with the new album yet, as far as remembering the names of the songs. I like the new album so far, but not as much as the other ones since it's just not as happy, not that it has to be happy in order for me to like it, but I associate Travis with stuff like that. I think the last song they played was Why Does It Always Rain On Me? and the first one was Quicksand. Fran also played a song by himself dedicated to Elliot Smith, which was very nice. Before playing The Beautiful Occupation he told us that it wasn't meant to be a political song, but could be interpreted as that...and then Peace the Fuck Out is a message to Tony Blair and we should apparently peace the fuck out. Mm...peace! It's yummy. They were selling a t-shirt that said "Peace the Fuck Out" on it, although you could just was easily make one yourself. :)

All I Wanna Do Is Rock was probably the most enjoyable song. First off, it's just a great song, and everyone was going a bit nutty (except for Neil...well, what can he do?). Fran, Doug, and Andy were climbing on things and Andy jumped off the top of his speakers. Actually, now I'm not sure if Doug was climbing anything, but Andy is definitely the one who likes to flail around and lie on the stage and things like that. :) Fran also likes to hop around and stuff. He was wearing the same thing as what he wore in the Re-Offender video (What's up with that video? It makes me sad!), so it was like looking at this glowing, white thing in the middle of the stage. The suit looked a bit too large, as though Fran doesn't already look small enough already? :D There was a sheet behind the stage that only came down for a few songs, but it made the background nice 'n pretty. There was a whole rainbow of colorful lighting during Sing, which felt very nice and happy.

I didn't use my binoculars much during the show since we weren't obscenely far away, but early in the show I used them and saw that Fran's head was very sweaty. This was only after a few songs, so I'm figuring by the end he may have been drenched. There was much towel wiping going on. He said after playing Peace the Fuck Out during one show, he threw his towel into the audience and people started fighting over it. Not very peaceful. Fran, you just make people go nuts!

Today is a craptastic day, weather wise. I guess it could be worse if it were colder, but it still sucked. It was really cold last week, but now it's in the 60s and today it was just gloomy and rainy and sucky. The path to the college center isn't level so there are huge-ass puddles everywhere. I try to jump over them.

But tomorrow is supposed to be better. SUPPOSED to. I hope the weather forecase is correct. It is...sometimes!

I'm eating way too many mulberries. (shakes bag of mulberries)...yeah, there was definitely a lot more than this yesterday. I officially gained 2 pounds last week, which isn't much to freak out about. Of course, it's still not good. :|

I finished the Travis site complete with stinky photos and video! Check it OUT! Also, did anyone ever notice the error in the second panel?

...okay, I just closed my door. It was open because Kathryn just went across the hall, and I wouldn't have closed it unless the noise was really bothering me. And it was. Oh well, hope that doesn't seem too unfriendly.

Anyway, there isn't much to talk about, like usual. Today I just had one class, Japanese, and it went okay besides the fact that I was really confused. Damn. At my Japanese drill session today we actually did some fun stuff (this doesn't happen often, haha). The sad thing is that there were only three students present, which is the lowest attendence I've seen yet. I think some people stopped coming because they were intimidated by our driller, and I was too in the beginning, but now I think she's really nice. She's a senior from Japan (I don't know how long she's been living in the US) and today we did an activity where we'd say a character and she would tell us an interesting word starting with that character with some background information about it. Like when someone said "he" she told us the word "hentai" and that there are lots of perverts in Japan. If you're on a bus or a train and you're wearing a short shirt, guys will try to touch you, apparently. I'll...keep that in mind when I go to Japan. For "mu" she told us about the Moomin story, which is actually a Swedish story but it's really popular in Japan. I read a few books before and they're really cute. It doesn't seem to be a big thing in the US though. :(

(i'm still eating mulberries! someone make me stop!)

Oh, vote for my threadless design, if you like it:

And if you don't like it, don't vote. :)

I bought some CDs at CD World on Saturday because they were having a 20% off sale. A prime time to buy the Bjork Live box set! I got it for around $37, so I'm happy, and it's a great set. The Family Tree set was not as great. :| I also got B.R.M.C. and Songs for Dustmites. Much music looove.

I brought my Casio SK-1 and my Groovebox to school, but I forgot to bring my instruction book and the cables I need to record into my computer with me. So! They're kind of useless. I tried using the Groovebox but apparently I've forgotten how to play it. Crap.

(still eating mulberries)

I got this Tamagotchi backpack in the mail today. It's really cute and the original price was 3,900 yen, so I'm happy. But I have no idea how to use it. This is where I figure I'm really, REALLY stupid. I took a bunch of photos; can anyone help me out?

What's with all these straps?
Erm...um.