Someone just posted a link to this marshmallow recipe, saying that she used it to fill whoopie pies, so of course I had to try it. I'd never made marshmallows before; I always thought of them as something you had to buy. And marshmallows just aren't something that you keep around the house, so up until now, I've thought of them as a rare treat.

I was amazed to read the recipe: it's so simple! The process is simple too: pour a boiling sugar syrup over a gelatin and water mush and beat until fluffy, then pour into tray. It's like a boiled white icing, only using gelatin instead of egg white. I googled for "homemade marshmallow recipe," and found several variations of this recipe (including some almost word-for-word). So I decided to make it. It's been decades since I've been afraid of boiling sugar syrup.

And, just like an egg white will swell up and become sheer white when a boiling sugar syrup is poured over it, so did soaked gelatin! The gelatine started frothing and beating up as soon as I started pouring sugar syrup over it, and in only about 15 minutes or so, it was a nice marshmallow-fluff consistency, so I poured it into a pan. The dregs of batter that I licked off of the beaters tasted just like marshmallow fluff: tongue-numbingly sweet, soft and fluffy, horribly sticky, with a bit of stretch to it, and just a hint of vanilla flavor. It was marvellous.

The recipe says to leave the batter cooling for several hours, or overnight, before cutting, but mine were rubbery and cuttable almost as soon as I'd finished cleaning up. I cut them into irregular shapes: rectangles, squares, pentagons, triangles of all sizes, and rolled them in confectioner's sugar. And they really did taste like marshmallow: sweet, airy, and with just a bit of chewiness. I can't believe it worked! I can't believe that I actually made marshmallow, and it was easier than making fudge!

I want to do this again. And I want to experiment. I could pour the batter into any kind of mold, including 9" round cake pans. What kind of frosting or filling would accompany a cake-shaped marshmallow? Also, the recipe called for a large amount of corn syrup. I wonder if that much was necessary, if maybe it would work with only a little, or perhaps with a different goo, such as honey or molasses. And I'd also like to try it with agar, since I know a lot of people who wouldn't eat gelatin versions, and vegetarian marshmallows are kind of expensive.

I still can't believe it worked!

I never thought I'd start an LJ post with that heading. I like the rain. I don't like rain when it's marble-sized chunks of ice water that soak through everything, but short of that, I'm generally fine. I don't mind the kind of light sprinkle that you don't need an umbrella for. This month, the rain near Boston, where I am, has ranged everywhere from really serious rain to the kind of rain where water doesn't actually fall but just sort of hangs there. Yesterday morning, there was that kind of gentle sprinkle that suggested the sun would come out by the afternoon.

Except it hasn't. In fact, the sun has barely come out all month. I think there have been about five glorious sunny June days. Otherwise, the sky has been consistently steely grey.

Normally, I wouldn't think twice about that. In fact, I don't think I've ever really gotten sick of the rain before this. I usually don't spend enough time outdoors to really notice it. But normally, it's over in a few days anyway. And there was a thing in the Boston Globe yesterday saying how because of the heavy cloud cover, this has been the dimmest June since 1903 already.

I Googled a bit this morning to see what other people are saying about it, and it seems that this is because of global warming. Warm air can hold a lot more water than cold air can, and more heat makes water evaporate and turn into clouds faster. What that translates into is a lot more rain in some places.

I knew that global warming would give us all some kind of wake-up kick soon. I was kind of picturing something almost apocalyptic: a record hot summer, air conditioning demand leading to massive blackouts, special flip-flops made of melt-resistant materials, people doing Bikram yoga on their back porches, palm trees sprouting up overnight. Or maybe the other way: glaciers advancing across Canada again, and 10-month winters for the rest of us.

I didn't think that global warming would look so grey and rainy.

According to John Scalzi, the majority of blogs ever created have only the following 3 posts:

1: "OMG I have a blog! I will update every day on my life and my opinions and I will change the world!

2: "Sorry I haven't posted in a while. Life's been crazy. But I'll be back!"

3: "Here's a picture of my cat."

(Original post here.) By that definition, I have long since lapsed into the "Here's a picture of my cat" stage. Although I've been reading my flist relgiously since summer break started, I've barely made two posts in the past year. I'm terrified to do a big "I'm back!!" announcement like I used to, since I'm sure I would only leave you all again until the next such announcement.

Apparently, while I was trying not to fail my courses and looking for interesting ways to spend my Friday nights this past year or so, the economy has gone down the tubes. Maybe I'm out of the loop because I don't read newspapers much, but I don't quite see where this came from. All I remember is that Bush wanted a war in Iraq, probably for oil, and then suddenly people are talking about how bad the economy is. What happened in between? Is there a Wikipedia article or something that explains things?

Personally, I don't even really understand what kinds of problems we're having. I'd heard for years and years before that it would take 18 earths or something to support the world's population at current levels of US consumption. So the critics called for a drastic reappraisal of how we use energy, land, and other resources. There are a number of other things that I was sure were unsustainable. I walked into a store that sold nothing but useless knickknacks and was sure it would someday be out of business; sure enough, its doors are closed.

What's happening is only a reappraisal. The US economy wasn't going to go on indefinitely selling stuff on credit to people who couldn't afford whatever it was and didn't really need it; it all had to collapse at some point. It would be better for the natural world, and better for us in the long run, if we simply didn't make and buy as much stuff in the first place. I don't even think that the current recession is serious enough to produce such a reappraisal. And critics have also said that something's seriously wrong if it's cheaper to ship something around the world, perhaps multiple times, than make it closer to where you are. They also called for a reappraisal of how we view labor and energy.

Even the unemployment rate doesn't worry me. It's about 7.5% in America right now, but goodness knows many countries have it far worse. It seems kind of odd to me that people are worrying now that it's 7.5%, but it was something like 5% for years and years, and no one said anything. And even if the unemployment rate never goes back down, perhaps what it means is that the human world simply doesn't need that many workers to function anymore. If that's the case, then we just need to reappraise what it means to have a job--maybe it's something a lot more valuable than we used to think it was. Or maybe in the future, two and three day workweeks will become commonplace.

I'd like to hope that this so-called recession will become serious enough to trigger a full reappraisal of how we commute, use energy, produce and buy stuff, and maybe even eat. Maybe in the future, everyone will eat a variation of the hundred-mile diet, because they can't afford otherwise, and everyone will live within fifteen miles of the city center and commute via public transit because they can't afford to keep cars. But I doubt that this will trigger changes like that. It'll all be over before anything so serious happens.

When I was in the third grade, I still lived in Nashua, New Hampshire, which is so spread-out that there was no possible way to get to school other than by school bus or car and we even had to be driven to the library. But we did have a quarter-acre lawn, all around the house, with both a grove of trees along the side and in a corner, and a nice grassy slope in the back which turned wonderful for sledding in the winter. Anyway, for about a week in the third grade, every night I dreamed that I was digging in the dirt area, by the grove in the side yard, almost in the front yard, and I'd find a little box. I could picture the area where I was digging perfectly: it was almost at the very front of the house, maybe about fifteen feet from its sides. I knew just how far away from each of the trees the hole was. The box would be a little square one about six inches down.

After a week of this dream, I finally decided that it must be an omen of some sort, so I got a trowel and started digging there. I wasn't sure of the exact location, but I knew that it was at least in the right square foot. After digging a hole about six inches deep, my fingers found a flat, hard thing at the side of the hole. I had dug a few inches to the side. The flat thing turned out to be just a stone; there was nothing underneath it at all. But I wondered if maybe I'd dug in the exact proper location, not a few inches to the side, if it would have been a box and not a flat stone.


Then again, I often have too-realistic dreams. When I was in Japan, I once dreamed I was boiling udon noodles, in the kitchen where I did that several times a week. I used to dream I was reading LJ; this morning I tried to turn the page of the book I was reading, but then realized that I had been dreaming both that I had been holding the book and the words on the page. Last week I dreamed I was talking with my boss about the database I was supposed to be managing.

In general, if I go into a place asking for employment, either I am turned away or asked to fill out an application and accept that the establishment will never get back to me. The exception, though, is nonprofit organizations looking for volunteers. With those, I'm usually the only applicant.

I went into the Charles River Museum of Industry about a week ago asking if volunteers were needed. The volunteer at the desk, who looked to be about fifteen, guided me upstairs, where a 30-year-old woman and a 40-year-old scruffy guy were cutting up bolts of felt. "As a matter of fact, we are looking for volunteers. Are you available next Wednesday?" I think the woman said. I was told to put my contact information on a sheet of paper; I didn't have to fill out any application, and any paper would have sufficed.

I arrived at 3:00 this past Wednesday and was greeted by the scruffy 40-something, and helped him arrange chairs and move tables for the evening event. The woman who I'd seen was Ellen, who was running the event; she arrived at 5:00 with bags of food and tablecloths. Over the course of the four hours between 3:00 and 7:00, 200 chairs were set out (I'd spaced them too wide and had to spend more time shoving them together), pamphlets describing the museum were placed upon them, and the presentor worked with everyone getting his projector and everything all set up and running. Trucks came bearing huge 30-pound bags of ice and cases of liquor; at 5:30, a bartender came, and, with me as assistant, set up everything in buckets of ice so that the stuff would be cool for the guests. I could see that not just the presentation, but the whole day, was the tip of a large planning and coordination iceberg that Ellen had spearheaded. When asked how many people would be there, she said, "Two hundred would be awesome; one hundred is guaranteed."

The talk itself was almost something of a letdown after all of that set-up. The presentor was a car fanatic who had gone to the antique luxury car show at Pebble Beach and showed pictures and videos of some of the cars that had been there. They were certainly pretty and often very peculiar looking-- they came in a variety of colors and shapes that I'd never quite imagined cars as before-- but without knowledge of automotive history, it didn't mean all that much to me. But overall, I'd say that it was an interesting day. And shortly before the event began, the executive director of the museum approached me and we set up a time this week when we could talk about what types of internships there were available this summer.

That day was today. It turns out that the executive director of the museum works in advertising, and he'd written up a pretty sheet that listed four specific internships with vague, bullet-pointed descriptions of them. The most important of them, he said, was helping to catalog and digitize the museum's collection-- a job that I'd certainly be interested in trying, but I don't know how long I could keep it up for. There's also a project of helping put together a special exhibit for the fall, since they want to do something on offices through the last few centuries, and need to track down some of the objects. But I mentioned to him the iceberg comment, and he said that even though it's not on the sheet, the events are hugely important for the museum, and I could work with Ellen not just setting up chairs, but also on the planning and publicity that she works on before the events. I can come in next Thursday.

Which means that even though it's not an official internship position that I would have had to apply to and submit a resume for, if Ellen doesn't mind working with me, I've got a makeshift internship in event planning and coordination already. I don't need to ask anyone else if they're still hiring if I don't want to. (Since high school gets out next week over here, though, if I want to make money, I need to act fast.) But I'm still worried about a couple of things. What if Ellen can't work with me? I was asking her about all kinds of almost-trivial things, like if it was OK to read when I staffed the admissions desk by a little-used entrance. Or what if it turns out that the only kind of help she really needs is just someone to line up chairs? That was interesting once, but like data entry, I might not be able to keep it up. I'd also be kind of interested in the help setting up the exhibit thing, but if I wanted to do that, I'd need to start doing it now.

I've been job-hunting, in a sort, for the past week or so, since I've been out of school and available. It's kind of depressing that my modus operandi is roughly the same as it was two years ago, when I last went job-hunting: there's a beautiful street called Moody Street close to where I live, where there are dozens of restaurants ranging from ice cream parlors to upscale Italian and a couple of bookshops and a thrift store and whatnot, pretty much the place to buy anything in Waltham if you're not going to go into Boston. So my plan then was to just walk up and down it, asking at all of the places if they were hiring, since if there were any area of Waltham where you could do that, it would definitely be Moody Street.

This has been my plan over the past few days too, but with a little difference. I knew I had almost no prospects two years ago; today, I still have no job experience, but I have talked with the people in my university who help with resumes, who told me that it's perfectly acceptable to put your projects, like your papers and presentations, on a resume. With their advice, I put together a lovely resume over the semester of all of the papers I'd written until then, ranging from discussion of Empress Theodora's sex life to changing population patterns during the 1860's in Cumberland. I updated it just now to include things I did this semester, like writing a paper on author bias in popular biographies of Newton, or volunteering to help tutor kids in Holyoke.

There's also the question of contacts. Most job applications ask for a few contacts. For low-level jobs, just about anyone will do, as long as he or she isn't related to you; many applications put additional restrictions on, such as "people who you have known for at least one year". Two years ago, this would have been very difficult for me: outside of LJ, I hardly ever spoke to anyone. The time before that that I took this walk down Moody Street, it would have been downright impossible. But over the past year, I've kept a nice little list of names and phone numbers of classmates I've studied with or friends I swapped manga with or just people who I kept running into. With these names added to those of the teacher who I've asked permission to use as a reference, after making a few 30-second phone calls, the slots for references on applications were just more slots to fill in.

With that said, I'm applying to much fewer places than I did last time around. I have a vague recollection of stopping at every place on Moody Street that wasn't a restaurant or didn't sell cigarettes and asking if they were hiring. I did this to Main Street too, eventually asking at some 50 places. (I think this was the time before two years ago, though.) Of course, only about three were hiring, and I didn't get hired at any of them. I left feeling that something was wrong with my model of job-hunting, that there was some essential tool that I wasn't using. (I know that after I graduate, this method will not be the one I use. Now, I consider myself lucky for anything, but I'll have something specific in mind then.)

I've applied to the two places where I would like to work: the bookstore and the movie theater. The bookstore owner said yesterday that he was accepting resumes and to include a list of my ten favorite books. When I submitted those today, he said he'd "at least look at them". (Translation: he's not hiring.) The movie theater wasn't even hiring, but they said they'd keep my application on file if I wanted to submit it.

I've also lost some of my aversion to restaurants; I've applied to three of them. One place was a sushi bar and pan-Asian place with "busboy wanted" taped in the window; the waitress just told me to write my name and phone number on a little slip of paper she gave me, and the manager would call me if he needed someone. (Translation: she's probably going to throw the piece of paper away.) Another place was an upscale Italian one where all of the waiters were dressed all in black and there were linen tablecloths, and another was a Mexican bar. (Both of these are hiring, but since I haven't had three previous jobs, I look pretty unimpressive on the form applications they gave me to fill out.) My favorite restaurant on Moody Street, a really nice ice cream parlor called Lizzy's, isn't hiring, so I haven't even submitted their form application there.

My ideal model of job hunting, of course, is to be the only applicant for a job I am so uniquely qualified for that there would be no doubt on me getting hired.

Last night I finally succumbed tio the inevietible and went over all of the books I'd looked at for my presentation on classic Maya priesthood. I also checked out more of the databases and found a lot more useful articles than I'd found in Jstor. I kind of knew that I wasn't going to sleep that night, so I didn't even get into a swing of things until about 2:30 in the morning, and I didn't start to get frantic until about 7:30. But I found a lot of interesting stuff, and I felt that although I really still hardly know anything about Maya priesthood, I could totally handle talking about them for 20 minutes. I even had a not-too-bad looking outline that I planned to follow a little bit.

I was so nervous I had to go to the bathroom before I started. I drew a map of Mexico and the Yucatan on the chalkboard, though it looked like a six-year-old had drawn it. Then I sat on the table, like I did for my Perpetua presentation, and started. I talked about the problems with using the word "priest"-- the way it's a Western term that doesn't really address Maya culture, alternate words like "shaman" or "shaman-king", and how everyone, from midwives to kings, had ritual authority in the classic Maya. I think I didn't do that introduction too badly, if I say so myself. I used the mention of midwives to segue to a funny story about one example of a midwife performing magic, collected by an ethnographer in the 1970's: If a woman bears twins and one of them dies, the surviving twin is held to have eaten the spirit of the dead one. If the woman has another child, it has to be protected from this older hungry one. So the midwife takes a chicken, puts it in a bag, beats it to death on the back of the older child, and cooks it into soup. Then she feeds the soup to the child, telling him or her to eat this chicken and not the new sibling. The child must finish the chicken, no matter how many meals it takes. This got a decent laugh.

But everything kind of went downhill from there, because I never really had a central theme or figure to serve as a backbone. I didn't even really get into Maya cosmology much. I just drifted from one topic to another, from debates about hallucinogenic poisonous toad venom to the astrological significance of the way Mayan buildings are oriented, without much of a clear focus. And by about ten minutes, in, everyone was looking like they were working hard just to keep paying attention at all, even the people who'd looked most intrigued in the beginning. By the time I was getting to the last things I had to say ("---and some of the buildings were actually pointing to MAGNETIC north!!") everyone was wearing these really sad "please end this misery right now" faces. Either everything I was saying was much less interesting than I thought it was, I'm seriously misreading people's expressions, or something went seriously wrong here. I don't think I can regard this presentation as a success.

I think I have a new crush! I just took a mat class from Li Ma-Scholtz, who is one of the only pilates instructors in Massachusetts who is certified by Romana Kryzanowska, who is one of Joseph Pilates's only remaning pupils. Anyway, the class was fabulous: there were only five of us, and instead of simply going through the exersizes with us and kind of letting us fend for ourselves if we didn't understand it, like you'll get if you go to a pilates class in the gym, she demonstrated parts of the exersizes and walked around the room, correcting our poses and helping us. Plus most of the exersizes were familiar to me, but done in ways I'm totally not used to, like having your egs at a 60° angle instead of lying flat. Or they were exersizes I'd seen in Pilates's books, but didn't really understand until she walked us through them.

I feel kind of ridiculous for letting this LJ go for so long without talk of pilates. I first had a pilates class when one was offered free in my dorm this past October; one of the RA's really loves them, so she persuaded a teacher from a nearby gym to come in and show them to us. I didn't really understand what was going on besides "that was an interesting sensation" during the session itself. I even wondered why anyone would ever pay for something like it. But afterwards I just felt so happy-- like every muscle in my body had been stretched out and worked out just the right degree. I felt strong. The RA who'd thrown the thing warned me that I probably shouldn't do something like that the next day; "You'll hardly be able to walk," she said.

Sure enough, the next day, my whole midsection was aching like my legs would if I walked 20 miles (which is a sensation I'm perfectly familiar with). I could hardly sit up or twist or do any motion that required core strength at all. And after two days the aching had simmered down enough so that I could sit up without pain, and I went through all of the exersizes that I remembered again on my own and started looking forward to the next session. I've only had five classes so far even counting that one, but each time, I feel that my personal repertoire of the exersizes and how to approach them has expanded.

I only just learned that Anime Boston is this weekend-- I'm that much out of the anime loop. Even back when I was a hardcore anime fan and went there wearing a Japanese schoolboy uniform, I didn't really understand that convention. I mostly enjoyed the series by watching them, and I couldn't understand how you could supplement that at a convention. I'll probably go just for Saturday, since the Pillows are playing there, and they made the music for one of the first series I ever watched. But I feel kind of guilty that this whole anime thing for me has kind of passed LJ by for me-- I've gone all the way from wondering what anime was to being kind of sick of it with hardly ever a post about it. Hence my posting about pilates now: for me, pilates are already an old thing for me, doing them two or three times a week is routine, and I've been looking forward to that lesson for months; none of you even knew that I did them. I wonder if in two years, I'll have forgotten all about Japan, with nothing but a few half-hearted mentions of Chocolate Waltz with Almonds or A Beast By Nature to mark its passing.

It's spring break for me! I'm so glad to be back home now, even if I did have to stay up until 3 in the morning on Friday night finishing my paper on the significance of handwriting in Lady Audley's Secret. My mother's latest diet requires her to eat large quantities of ricotta cheese, and since that requires us to keep large quanitites of the stuff around the house, I'm perfectly happy with it. It's true, I did have to bring home about four books that I should really read this week-- but for now, I am basking in laziness, reading LJ for the first time in about sixteen years, and my increasingly silly-looking Japanese book collection.

But the thing that baffles me most about spring break is how exited people get about doing stuff for it. All people have been talking about all last week is the all the fabulous stuff they're doing over spring break: flying to Florida for snorkeling, flying to Washington to climb mountains, driving to Virginia, going to Cape Cod for a few days and then to Pennsylvania. This is only one week! And it's right in the middle of midterms and all-- I know most people finished up their hell week last week (mine's split), but that only makes it that much stranger to me that people managed to deal with all of the papers and midterms and all this past week and plan whirlwind trips on top of it. I know that I'm probably not going to move any farther than the refridgerator this week.

The even odder thing is, over winter break, I took advantage of the relatively long break and went to Washington, DC. I visited almost all of the museums of the Smithsonian, plus some of the other things to see there, like the Constitution, then went to New York for a weekend with my cousin there to see more museums. It was amazing! And when I got back to school and told people all about it, no one had done anything more strenuous than going from their couches to their fridges over the whole break. Those same people are going scuba diving in Hawaii this week. What gives?

The near-universality of the belief among college students that alcohol is a social lubricant and lowers inhibitions puzzles me. Granted, I have almost never drunk before, so I can't say from personal experience, but I've gone so long without drinking that I can't really imagine starting now. The way I see it is that alcohol is just a kind of symbol for lively parties and loose tongues, and that holds regardless of the actual physiological effects of alcohol. That is, if you walk into a party and everyone's drinking and laughing and having a good time, then you know it's the kind of party where you can say and do things that you might not be able to do otherwise. Serving and drinking alcohol is, in my view, just one way hosts and guests tell each other to be comfortable over here. This explains why you can hold a great big kegger with everyone getting falling-down drunk even with non-alcoholic beer. (Or, for that matter, why I've gotten drunker on iced tea than I have on alcoholic beer: I just liked the parties where iced tea was served more.)

I've also heard things like, "I wouldn't be able to do that without a couple of drinks first." Presumably, the speaker of such a phrase has drunk and paid attention to the changes that happen to him or her mentally with each drink. But the way I would see it is that the speaker is influenced by the culture's perceptions of alcohol lowering inhibitions, and interprets the way he or she gets warmed up to any given party based on the presumption that getting more and more wild is because he's drunk more and more. I'd suspect that the person who says that would do the same things he or she claims to only do after a couple of drinks in any party where it's pretty clear that wild stuff is going to happen.

(For what it's worth, last night I drank a lot of iced tea.)

I have just made perhaps the most delicious fudge I have ever made in my life. ( Description of the fudge. )


I checked my school email for the first time in a few weeks the other day, and there were two emails that made me think a bit.

One of them was an email from the budget director at UMass Amherst to all students. It had a link to the page that contains spreadsheets that show UMass's budget. ( Here's why I'm so happy about that. )


The other email I recieved was from one of my history professors, actually one at nearby Mount Holyoke. It read "I hope you realize that the final paper had a list of requirements that were clearly stated on the assignment and is expected to be one essay. I'd recommend that you take until Saturday morning to construct a full essay as expected." This was dated Thursday, Dec. 20th, shortly after I emailed in a three-page paper. It was supposed to be 20 pages in all; we were supposed to incorporate and expand upon what we'd written in the ten-page draft earlier, not simply footnote it. And it had been due on Wednesday, Dec. 19th.

Honestly, though, I'd been over-ambitious and not entirely honest with myself when I signed up for that course in the first place. Even before I went to Japan, I'd thought about doing a massive project on the Victorians, with a history professor and an English professor. I had several reasons. First, although I was not yet reading novels in Japanese, I knew I would be for sure by the time I got back from Japan, and I wanted to know how an English professor chews up a novel. But how can you analyze a novel without knowing a whole lot about the period and the culture that produced the novel? So I'd want to take an English course and a history course that studies the same period. I'd be interested in seeing the various ways in seeing the ways that the novel does and does not reflect the reality of the time period-- I'd expect that you'd see reflections of the period even in fantasies and stories not set in the present, like the echoes of Roe v. Wade in Katherine Patterson's historical fictions that involve searching for an absent parent. Finally, as a reader, I'd be interested in tools I can use to understand books from very different times and places; the world has produced a lot more literature than what's been written on this side of the pond in the last thirty or forty years. And I don't see how I could do that without careful study of a single time and place and the literature that was written then and there.

( Plus I like the Victorians. )

( I had some shenanigans finding a willing professor, though. ) When he asked me, "Are you good with computers?"
I said, "Well, I know basic HTML..." and didn't mention that it's been years since I've known anything more than italics and bold, and normally I'm happy just to be able to turn my computer on.

It turned out that I was not at all prepared for that course in almost any way. ( ... )

In order to write the final paper for the course, we were supposed to ( ... )

But as is, I only had enough information to turn that into a three or four-page paper at best, not 20. It was exactly the right size for a five-minute presentation. If I'd discussed the population trends for all of England as well as Cumberland as a whole, I'd have ten pages that would be mostly conjecture.

So, the day of my last finals, the day that the paper was due, I balked. I stared at the screen for hours at end. I messaged mousapelli, saying, "I have a 20 page paper due today and I don't know where to begin!" She replied, "I know how it is; I don't want to write this Latin test either!" "Well, we'll both take a big nap on Friday, right?" I said, and felt better for about fifteen minutes. ( ... )

So I'm not surprised that I got a reply like I did; I was expecting something much scarier. As is, I didn't even read that email until well after that Saturday. But given how sloppy and unfocused and unprepared I was in general during that course, I wouldn't be able to give a good effort on that paper no matter how much time you gave me.

Looking back, I think I should have just been more honest with the professor from the very beginning. I should have emphasized that although I'm most interested in Victorian culture, I'd never taken a course on the Victorians and didn't know the first thing about them. And that I can barely use Word. If I'd done that, he would have probably put me in the 200-level version of the course. It doesn't presuppose so much knowledge of the period to begin with, its computer exersizes are easier, and its focus is much broader. It's the course where he shows slides of paintings and discusses Frankenstein.

As is, I might just fail that course. But that would be an honest assessment. And even if I fail the course, taking it was really interesting. I never thought I would make population density maps of England, and I'd never even heard of the Parliamentary Papers. I learned a lot of things in that class. But I honestly was not prepared for it, and I was never prepared to write that 20-page paper. Trying to would be dishonest to myself.

And I can take the consequences of being honest to myself.

And the questions I had about how to read a novel are, stop me if I'm wrong, questions that any English major thinks about. That English professor was right: I don't want to take an independant study, I want to take a normal English course. All of the Victorianists who weren't available last semester will be available in the spring. But it may be that I really want just a perfectly ordinary English 200. I'll figure that out during add/drop.

I'm not quite as taken with free rice as a lot of other people are. Firstly, lots of peopel have argued that donaating food to staving countries helps prevent farmers there from ever having livelihoods; second, since when is an allium an onion and not also garlic, leeks, shallots, nira, chives, and the like?

I'm currently reading the first volume of Kyō Kara Maō (Kyō Kara Ma no Tsuku Jiyūgyō, or roughly "The Job that the Demon Starts Today"), and although I'm not above occasionally dropping the names of some Japanese authors that I've read that you probably haven't, such as Todo Shizuko or Nagano Mayumi, I'm reminded once again at how difficult it still is for me to read Japanese. A short little exchange that might take a few seconds of screen time takes me minutes to get through.

Nevertheless, I was so ticked by approximately the first half of the novel that I had to watch the first two episodes of the anime again; there were so many things that I caught that I did not remember from the anime despite having watched the first twelve episodes or so dozens of times. ( Don't read if you don't want to be spoiled for KKM novels or just aren't interested in KKM. )

Don't you hate it when you've pulled an all-nighter trying to write an essay, said essay is due in one hour, you're not even 4 pages in, and every piece of evidence you had, every shard of reasoning, which were so numerous that you thought that you had an inpregnable fortress of primary source evidence and logic on which to build on even a few hours ago, seem limp, fragile, and either so self-evident they're not even worth putting in your essay or so contradictory to everything that you have to say that you'd have to rewrite everything-- again-- to accomodate it?

If you don't go to UMass, then you probably don't know that one of the changes made to Franklin DC over the summer was the change of the sandwich bar from a make-your-own-sandwich deli bar to a have-someone-make-a-sandwich-for-you deli bar that is staffed at all times.

Today, when I went over there to have a sandwich made for me, there was a strikingly gorgeous red-haired girl behind the counter.

"Hey, what's up?" she said.

"Um, ... how do I know you?" I said.

It turned out that on the bus ride from here to Mount Holyoke, where I take one class per week, I'd met her and one of her friends and had a whole conversation with them. But somehow, I didn't remember them at all, and I could not recall even a single part of that exchange.

Procopius writes in his Secret History that Empress Theodora had all of the prostitutes in the city rounded up and sent to some place so horrible that some of them preferred death. But John Malalas, a contemporary Syrian writer, describes it kind of differently. According to him, there were a bunch of pimps who bought paupers' daughters, gave them only clothing that was immediately identifiable as "prostitute", and had them work for them as something like indentured servants. Theodora arrested these pimps, gave the prostitutes enough money to buy their freedom and a little extra to get them on their feet, and new clothes, then let them go.

Feelings of the week:

-Feeling of eating pizza at the Mt Holyoke student union: absolutely fabulous. Any other pizza is cardboard by comparison.

-Feeling of catching a catnap at 4:00 in the morning in the geology lounge in Mt Holyoke right by a reproduction of a skeleton of a giant sloth while pulling an all-nighter to write historical geography paper for course there: very, very strange.

-Feeling of emailing a professor the very worst paper I've ever written at 9:12 in the morning the day after said paper is due at midnight: ashamed; I won't be able to face him at all next Tuesday!

-Feeling of seeing my advisors and signing up for courses the first week this is possible: extreme satisfaction. (This is a first for me!)

-Feeling of getting a haircut: therapeutic

-Feeling of procrastinating by writing a list for LJ the night before quiz in Latin and midterm in medievel history: happiness

Last spring, I emailed my parents describing a cute little novel, Mitaka and Me, by Gin'iro Natsuo, who I later learned is a reasonably popular poet. It's the sort of story that's mostly dialog, with little stick figure illustrations in the margins. I said of the book, "The flow of time is so delightfully random," and went on to explain how, for instance, she described all of winter in just three pages but spent 20 pages on a spring storm that only lasted one night.

Now, though, I don't think I'd describe the flow of time in a book paced like that as "delightfully random" at all, because there's nothing random about it: that's a perfectly natural, organic way to percieve time. Who of you has not, for instance, seen something so interesting that you wanted to LJ it immediately, and then before you know it a whole week has gone by? Or the way the first three and a half weeks of the month you're given to write a big paper on just slip by has been well-documented, I think. On the opposite side, I think everyone has sometimes experienced a few hours, perhaps even a few minutes or seconds, that feel as heavy as entire months.

This Thursday morning I got up early to go to the stores that would be selling underpriced Halloween candy. I got to Stop & Shop at about 11:00, and I think I was one of the only people in the shop other than the employees. In the seasonal section, there was about a fifteen-foot section of wall jam-packed with dozens of varieties of overpackaged, brightly colored, absolutely unhealthy junk. The only other people in that section of the store were two ladies pricing everything and an old lady who asked for the price of the 25-pack of candy bars. (It was $6.49; I figured on my calculator right there that that was only 13 cents per ounce.) And I knew that I was in the right place, at the right time.

Later, as the ladies were finishing pricing the things (I figured out the price per ounce of almost everything on my calculator), one of them said, "I think we've done this rather well: there's nothing on the top shelf, nothing on the bottom shelf, and no gaps in here anywhere!" And I saw that that was true: I hadn't even noticed that the bottom shelf was completely bare, and the only things on the top shelf were the 25-packs of candy bars, which are easier to grab from there than flimsy stacks of bags would be. And although that section wasn't more than 15-feet long, everything there was so tightly crammed together it looked like a mural, no thinness or gaps anywhere. The impression I got of suddenly having arrived in the right place had been carefully orchestrated by the people who had put together the display.

Well, there have always been things in the interviews that I didn't like-- Harry losing his Parseltongue ability is one. But even as a non-AD/GG shipper, I think this is cause for some celebration.


Purely rhetorical question: At 6:30 the night before you give a presentation worth 50% of your grade for a 1-credit course, is it better to feel worse that you haven't been taking notes on all of your sources all along, or worse that you're pulling an all-nighter for the 1-credit course that you don't care about when you're behind in three other classes?

It's less than a week to Halloween, and apparantly at UMass, that means that everyone who wants to gets to dress up. By now, it's quite commonplace to see, say, a girl with huge purple wings or a boy in full pirate getup in the dining hall, or to just randomly see someone in costume anywhere. Just now, dodging back to my room for a break in studying, I saw one of my hallmates dressed as Poison Ivy, with her bf dressed as a punk beside her.

I almost feel that this season has just snuck up on me. A month ago, I was thinking like this: "What shall I dress as for Halloween? I wonder if I could pull off the schoolboy thing again. Or maybe, for something different, I could go as a witch-- I'd have to get a wig and a hat and acquire big witchy robes and all, but that shouldn't be too hard to get ahold of. I wonder where I should buy them? Or maybe I should make a toga-- I still have the photocopies for the design for one from that Lillian Wilson book that I made before the last toga party I didn't go to. Well, anyway, I still have a month to do things with; I don't need to worry about things just yet."

And now it's this season, and I don't have a spare minute until Halloween itself-- seriously! I have a presentation on Monday on suicide missions that's worth 30% of my grade in one course, and on Tuesday I have to turn in some demographic research that I should have been spending the last two weeks on, then Tuesday night I'll have to catch up on reading for my other courses. So I won't have time to make or acquire anything I don't have already until Wednesday afternoon, which sounds pretty bad to me. In fact, if I need to procrastinate on the research for my Monday presentation, I should be studying Latin or reading Einhard's Life of Charlemagne right now.

So it is with amusement and a bit of wistfulness that I'm watching the veritible parade that's going on right now-- I wish I could join them, but even if I can't, there's nothing wrong with enjoying seeing, say, random troupes of gypsies walk by.

One of the recent (for me) developments on campus is the random cell-phone phone booths scattered around the library (and probably other parts of campus too). Because cell phones are prohibited in most parts of the library, and if you really need to make a call, all you need is a little bit of sealed-off space, they're little metal cylinders, with some ventilation system, and clear plastic sliding doors.

I absolutely adore these things. Almost every time I see one, I step inside it and just stand there for a few minutes. As I do not have a cell phone, I could never use them to make calls. But being the shape they are, they remind me of a lot of things: Time machines. Transport devices. Tanning booths. Cold sleep booths. Sensory deprivation chambers.

Of course, these booths don't have any of the machinery that would turn them into any of those things. All they are is ventilated cylinders. You go into them and are sealed off in a little tube of metal from the outside world. All you hear is the hum of the ventilation, and all you see is the metal sides. Nothing will ever happen in there without more machinery; you can't do anything in any of them. But somehow, every time I come out of one, I feel refreshed and recharged somewhat, as if that were what they were there for.

I have just read the most amazing book: Enchantress from the Stars, by Sylvia Engdahl. It starts off with a small research team looking at a planet whose civilisation is still medieval, and is told from the point of view of the girl who sneaked onto the ship. But then it switches to the point of view of a villager from that world, and all of his sections are told in the style of a million fairy tales that you read decades ago: he's the fourth son of a woodcutter, and in the woods there's a dread dragon that many have sought to defeat. This dragon is actually the backhoe of yet another empire-- one that doesn't have any qualms about plunking down right in another peoples' backyard. And there are occasional sections from the point of view of one of the somewhat-unwilling lackeys of this empire, which are told in yet another voice. One of the goals of the first group is to get this other empire off of the planet, so that its indigenous population can continue to develop naturally. And they pose as magicians to aid the woodcutter's sons on their quest. You could almost read the quest sections in the first half of the book on their own, like a fairy tale. But soon they become so intermingled that you can't imagine them beeing told any other way than as they are.

I started reading this book at 4 in the morning, hoping to only read 20 or 30 pages before I started in on Latin homework; it's now 9 in the morning, and I have finished the book happier than almost any other book I have finished in recent memory. Go read it: it's that good.

I was talking with one of my dormmates today over lunch about how we write papers. The school of thought that I subscribe to about the topic I would describe as "bull": I would rather make my first paper mediocre. That way I test the teacher's BS detector. After all, if s/he can't detect BS, there's no reason to work hard to write good papers for the whole semester. "If I make the first paper really good, then the teacher will know that I'm slacking off later in the semester," I said.

She actually subscribed to the opposite school, the "bear" type. She would rather spend more energy to make sure that the first paper is particularly well-reasoned and well-written. Her thought is that if you're sloppy about something in your first paper, say run-on sentences, the teacher is going to be particularly picky about that thing and read your papers very closely for it for the whole semester. But if your first paper is absolutely flawless, then the teacher will know that you understand things and will be more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt later in the semester when you start slacking off.

And now that things are explained that way, I can see how the "bear" school is kind of more natural-- I've actually done it myself many times now that I think about it. I remember one course where I went as all-out as it was possible to go for the first paper, reading all of the sources as closely as I was able to and organizing my arguments very carefully. But for the other two papers (and attendance was not a major factor in the grading of that course) I wrote fluff, and I even skipped class more times than I would have liked to. I remember feeling kind of disappointed when I got an A in it.

More importantly, it's absolutely natural to start a semester feeling all gung-ho about whatever the course is about, then get more burnt-out as the semester goes on. "Teachers recognize this, and are likely to be more leniant in the last third of the semester or so," she said. It's also kind of more honest not to try to write a flimsier paper than you're capable of.

Which school of thought do you subscribe to? Teachers, do you recognize these patterns? Or am I just really overthinking everything?

Tales from my dorm, part 3:

It's three in the morning now, and just a minute ago I heard a knock at the door. A girl and two guys were standing there. "Sorry to bother you, but do you have any aluminum foil?" the girl asked.

"Umm... I have some latex gloves?" I said.

"Mm, not quite. Thanks anyway!" she said, and went to knock on the next door.

If I had posted even four days ago, it would have been a frantic post worrying if I would ever be able to register for any good classes at all-- for whatever reason my computer wouldn't let me sign up when I was in Japan (not to mention the fact that I was kind of preoccupied then!), and I've kind of let it slip until now, when pretty much everything except courses that reprise 7th grade health class and courses on 19th century presidential campaigns were all filled up. I somehow wish that I'd posted then: posts about registration wibble are only interesting either if the poster is absolutely immersed in the mealstrom at the time of the writing, so that the emotion almost seeps through the computer screen, or else is a really good writer.

In fact, there's one course that I'd only realized I wanted to take about a month ago: intro to Latin. Don't get me wrong, I love Japanese, and I'm glad that I can read it now. I'm sure I'll go back there someday. (Plus I dont think I need to take more Japanese classes to keep studying it.) But I've wanted to take Latin ever since I was a little kid-- there's something really cool about a language that's been used for thousands of years of Western history and that many classics are written in.

Besides, you need it to understand the Harry Potter spells.

And if I want to study it, I think it would be much better to study it now than to take more Japanese.

As it turns out, there are five classes of introductory Latin offered at UMass. All of them were full, of course, but I diligently wrote down the times and places all of them met, so that I could go to all of them on Wednesday; surely if I did so, I'd be able to get into one of them. Fortunately for me (or perhaps unfortunately from a storytelling perspective), a slot appeared in one of them two days ago, thus saving me from the need to pull any such heroics. Besides, there was another class I wanted to try out at the same time as every Latin class anyway, meaning that my Wednesday schedule is now an order of magnitude simpler than it would have been.

Regardless, I'm really not wibbling about course registration anymore. I'm procrastinating on packing. I never really unpacked my great big suitcase when I came back here, so unless I want to end up like Harry Potter, with several inches of hazardous sludge and severely wrinkled and unusable clothes in the bottom of my suitcase, I really need to sort out everything. (This realization, of course, came not only well after I had done my final loads of laundry and batches of ironing, but also well after the time at which it's OK with our tenants to run up and down the stairs doing laundry.) There's also the mess in my room that's oozed up again since I came back. (Not to mention the mess in the hall as the last remnants of the war on my room waged when I was gone-- I've been intending to get to them all summer.) I can't quite believe that I'm moving back to Amherst tomorrow already, and that I've got to finish preparing to do so now.

I hope I don't turn this into the first all-nighter of the school year!

I suppose that the reason I went to the Thick as Thieves concert on Thursday starts with the Akatsuki/ The Stand Up concert I went to in Nagoya in February. I remember how startled I was at the tiny size of the concert hall: about the size of my living room. (To date I have not been to one smaller.) And I remember standing about four feet away from the stage (that is, about halfway to the back). When Akatsuki was playing, the guitars were amplified so loud that I could feel my clothes vibrating on my body. The three rows of people in front of me were rocking out as hard as I've ever seen anyone do. I felt as if I were in the very front row of a whole stadium. And when the singer stretched out his hand over the audience, almost touching several hands (and mine), I thought, "OMG, I've almost touched the hand of a rockstar!" This was despite the fact that I'd never heard of Akatsuki before then, and the mixing was so bad that I could hardly hear the vocalist over the guitars. When the vocalist later shook my hand, I felt honored.

So I wondered, afterwards, if maybe I wouldn't enjoy going to any sufficiently loud rock concert? ( Read more... )

...I think I like him.

See, Murakami Haruki is so popular that you don't get any geek points for reading him. Absolutely everyone already knows how great an author he is. He's one of the people that all Japanese majors anywhere know about. I'd ask for book recommendations at parties, and even people who said they didn't read much recommended Murakami Haruki. One of the courses offered at my school went over only Murakami Haruki's Norwegian Wood and Yoshimoto Banana's Kitchen (in both the original and translation)-- and furthermore, the dormmate of mine who took the course kept telling me that I should read Norwegian Wood for the whole semester. I read an essay that compared Norwegian Wood to Laws of Japan: everyone buys it whether or not they intend to read it; they just want to have it. When I asked one of my most book-loving Japanese dormmates for book recs, he first said, "Well, of course Murakami Haruki." "Other than Murakami Haruki," I said.

Of course I bought several of his books: three children's books, four novels, a short story collection, and his nonfiction book. I selected them more or less at random, hardly even looking at the covers, and I only even ever so much as opened only two of them when I was in Japan. My time in Japan is limited, I thought, and I need to spend it as efficiently as possible. If I already know I should try Murakami Haruki, then I'll try him in America. Given that I don't know how easy it is to obtain specific books over here, and used books were pretty cheap over there, I considered it prudent to buy myself a library that had everything I could think I might want to read someday, hence my stocking up on him without even trying him.

Now, yesterday browing heard_of_it, I saw someone recommend Murakami Haruki. "That's ridiculous-- that's like recommending Harry Potter, he's so popular he doesn't need recommendations," I thought, and posted a catty reply to that effect. (I did not first read the Wikipedia article on him, which the original poster linked to; it said that he'd been a superstar in Japan since the mid-'80's.)

Of course, such a reply is not nearly as cool as one that states that the poster has read much of his works in the original. So bound not to be out-Japanese-literatured by a bunch of people who can't even read Japanese, I picked up one of the thinner Murakami Haruki books in my collection last night: TV People, a collection of six stories.

And as soon as I opened that first story, I could see that his works are as carefully edited and smoothly readable as Yamada Kuniko's-- like Yamada Kuniko's stories, his are so carefully written that I almost don't need a dictionary to read them, since I can get so much by context. (Pulp novels are among the hardest for me to read; they generally have much harder words than slightly more literary ones, as well as tending to a certain sentence structure that makes it harder to figure out what those words mean on your own.) He does tend to repeat himself a lot (I think he could have told the same story in half the number of pages), but I'm not one to complain about that.

The story itself was a vaguely strange thing about a guy who sees slightly short people (70-80% of the height of a normal human) who all look alike, carrying TVs into his living room and workplace. No one else can see these people, and the co-worker who should have seen them as well, who he mentions them to, then shuns him. The TVs don't do anything more than show a white screen, and a faint hissing sound, until the end of the story.

So of course it took me all day to read the 50-page title story, which I should have been done with in a few hours. Every page or so, I'd think of an email I wanted to write, suddenly need to check LJ again, get hungry for a snack, think of some correction I can make on my Yamada Kuniko translation, or watch the new Hana-Kimi. It's not that I have ADD or anything-- I think it's more that reading a Murakami Haruki story, and liking it, felt too much like eating humble pie. I, who could read somewhat before I even went to Japan, and read as constantly as I could over there, should like authors like Mayumura Taku, whose brand of-- I suppose you could call it science fiction-- I hear was very popular in the '70's, or Nagano Mayumi, who most people who haven't read a certain amount haven't even heard of. Not Murakami Haruki!

In self-consolation, I suppose I should tell myself that real bookworms read the stuff they like regardless of how well-known it might or might not be.

This picture was taken of me shortly before I left Japan. One of my dormmates got the idea of letting everyone else try her Minnie Mouse ears.

Btw, the one that I've been using as a default lately of cartoon me looking slightly put-open was drawn by one of my classmates-- she immortalized the bizarre moment that I told a teacher, "Sorry, I was sleeping."

OK-- I just finished writing one draft of a translation of the fourth chapter of Yamada Kuniko's Wedding. (The book, like many of hers, is really a cycle of short stories, with each chapter from the point of view of someone who attended or otherwise had something to do with a certain wedding. After the bride's first chapter, which I liked, I kind of struggled through some of the other chapters, like the one from the point of view of the new husband's secretary, who wishes she were marrying him, or the husband's ex-wife. But I really liked this chapter.) I think I've spent some 20 hours on it-- I was translating in four or five hour chunks over the past week, after each of which I was just too exhausted to continue, then I spent a few hours going over it, rooting out the sentences that make no sense, smoothing it out a little, etc. If I really wanted to translate it well, I'd need to talk to someone who'd been in Japan for a long time, preferably in the '70's, so I could get the rest of the idioms and cultural references straightened out-- and I'd need it looked over by someone who doesn't necessarily know any Japanese.

It was incredibly frustrating to try this-- I estimate it took me half an hour per page or so, the same pace that I was reading at two years ago, when I didn't know any words, didn't feel confident of my ability to triangulate the meaning of the words, and had no electric dictionary, so I'd spend ages just looking the words up. Here, I spent ages looking the words up, in all of my dictionaries, not just for the few words I wasn't quite sure about but especially for the words I knew. I spent a long time staring at simple little sentences that I could understand, but that I felt had nothing to do with anything English. At the same time, though, it was very satisfying to spend so long examining the sentences properly and come up with a version that I thought did them justice. And it was kind of a shock to read my translation of it, since the Japanese version takes me well over an hour, but my translation only takes me 15 minutes.

After I spend a few more days cleaning it up, would it be illegal to post to LJ? The original is copyrighted to Kuniko Yamada, 1994.

Having accepted that probably no nice long coherent review, written in paragraphs and all, will appear on the Internet before Monday, not even by me, I present my bullet-points review.

( Cut for spoilers )

Also, welcoming to my lists dark_daisuke23; it's not every day that I meet new LJers while waiting outside of a tiny local bookstore late at night! Also welcoming anyone else who I may have forgotten to (msminpdx? have I said hello to you yet?)-- I'm glad for anyone who cares to so much as scroll past my ramblings.

Yesterday I went to the open mic at Harvard Square's Club Passim for the first time since 2003, I think. When finding my 42nd LJ entry, I reread a lot of my very oldest posts, and was reminded that I used to go to Club Passim's every week with a clipboard and water bottle, carefully taking notes on just how well I liked everyone and tallying up all of the best songs. I remember calculating that there were generally about 4 songs per evening that I thought were worth paying for, which was pretty good given that you can get in for free if you're a paid member.

Yesterday, though, my perspective was a little different. After going to karaoke dozens of times, and having paid large amounts of money to hear musicians and bands that I'd heard only one or two songs of (sometimes less), I figure that the enjoyment you get out of an open mic has very little to do with the ratio of people who've clearly practiced very hard to people who clearly haven't. When you go to karaoke, you don't hope to hear ecstacy-inducingly beautiful music; you're there to just enjoy music with your friends, even if there's not a single song in the whole couple of hours that you'd want a recording of.

I think an open mic is about the same-- you're there for the atmosphere at least as much as any of the music, and if there does happen to be someone with a particularly good voice or technical command of their instrument, so much the better. Yesterday, there was a guy playing classical sitar music and a few really nice-sounding duets, but I'm not even going to try to describe them here (and I don't even remember their names)-- and I would have enjoyed the time well enough even if it weren't for them.


I am the world's laziest LJ-er-- opal581 got married on Saturday, and all I posted when I got back was the cake recipe! Honestly, though, it was a really nice ceremony, with readings from Ruth and 1 Corinthians, with all 37 of us standing in a little clump by them under some trees in a cemetary. opal581 wore a very full light blue linen dress, absolutely form-fitting in the middle, with matching hat, that made her look like a woman from a 16th-century Dutch painting, and Dweezle (her new husband) wore I believe a 15th-century German outfit, complete with hosen, leggings, leather shoes, layers and layers of shirts, and an equally oversized hat.

Of course, I realized very shortly that I should have been in more contact with the caterer; I'd made decorations to denote slices that would have been reasonably sized had there been about half as much food available on the smorgasboard and no supplemental deserts. As is, everyone was requesting half-slices (since there was really no other way to do smaller slices)-- I don't know anyone who would have been able to hold a whole 1/12th cake slice of something that rich after so much other food. Much worse, though, was that the caterer somehow assumed that I'd bring forks, and I'd somehow assumed that she'd bring forks, and as is by the time the cake was served there were only about 6 forks left. People were sharing forks (I used the fork that my aunt used) or eating the cake with their fingers-- and need I remind you that this was an exceptionally soft, moist, crumbly hazelnut cake torted with real chocolate buttercream and topped with ganache which was perfectly gooey and flavorful by then.

This is unfiltered, because it is the last experiment-- the wedding was the 7th.

( the cake )

( filling and frosting )


( assembling and serving )

( note on decorations )

My first box of books from Japan arrived yesterday.

When I was in Japan, I bought books like a crazy person. After all, over there, if you go to Book-Off (a chain used bookstore), you can buy as many books as you want for 100 yen (about 85 cents as of when I was there) each, and most used bookstores offer a pretty good selection for not much more than that. Furthermore, these bookshops are everywhere. I knew that I wouldn't be able to get so many Japanese books nearly so easily or so cheaply when I got back here, so I made it my quest to buy as many books by as many authors as I could. I'd buy large amounts of books by authors I'd never heard of, I bought everything by some famous authors, and later when I joined the school literature club, I got long lists of recommendations from the students and then bought as many as I could of them, and if an author caught my attention (that is, if I really liked one of her books) I'd immediately buy another six or seven books by her. My time in Japan may be limited, I thought, but my time in America isn't-- so I bought far more books than I could ever begin to read over there.

So I accumulated masses of books. Knowing that masses of books take a very long time to come halfway around the world, I sent my first box about a month before I came back. I enlisted my dormmate's help to stuff 22.8 kilograms of books into a box, which later no one could budge. I'd alphabetized by collection shortly before (the chronological system of ordering books was just not working for me) and managed to get midway through the Mi (about a third of my Miyabe Miyuki collection) before there was simply no more space. Of course, this box exploded at some point in transit-- it arrived in the form of a smaller box and a large tray filled with books, and many of the dust jackets are damaged-- but the point is, that first shipment is here.

Here is a very partial listing of some of the stuff that was in it:

( partial list )


Books that will come later in the summer: the rest of Yamada Kuniko's books, all of "Hana-Kimi", the first sixteen volumes of "Fruits Basket", about ten manga by Yamato Nase, a good handful of Murakami Haruki's books (he's another one of the guys that everyone told me to read while I was there), all of Yoshimoto Banana's books, a good handful of Mure Yoko's books, a little of Gin'iro Natsuo's poetry, a few Nagano Mayumi novels (she always reminded me of Janet Taylor Lisle), and hundreds and hundreds of books I don't even remember.

For the last month, I've been writing three and four emails a week, the long, super-incoherent type that take an hour or two to write, to my parents (and by now to my siblings and aunt and grandparents). My rationale in being careful to write everything is not only that my experiences while I'm in Japan are something valuable that I want to share now, but also I think I'll be amused when I go over them later and see my opinions on those experiences later, and even just writing them can be calming and help me organize my thoughts. I haven't been writing them as LJ posts because, firstly, I have no idea how much all of you know about Japan (likely many of you know far more than I do), and secondly, they would be so long that were they on my friendslist, I would not read them. But as for the experience thing, likely those of you who know more about Japan than I do may answer some of my questions, and those of you who think these posts are too long may skip them-- I'll even put them behind cuts. Also, here I can talk about things that I definitely wouldn't want to tell my grandparents. So here is my last email, only slightly edited for LJ.

Assume that all quoted lines are my translations of things actually said in Japanese unless noted otherwise, and all romanizations are in modified Hepburn style.

( Souseidou club notes; comparison of martial arts )
 
( Go club notes )
 
( Death Note comment (no spoilers) )

Now that this dorm has a gas stove, I can do something I've wanted to do for a very long time: roast peppers properly. Any tips for roasting peppers over a gas stove? I keep worrying that the whole pepper is going to catch fire or fall off the fork or something.

Not to be read by opal581 until after her tastings!

( the morning of )

( the party itself )

( After-thoughts )