I have done this meme twice in the past but I love it so much I am doing it again!

List seven songs you are into right now, no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. ( Read more... )

ahaha, I love how I now have three days' worth of writing that doesn't even amount to what I'm supposed to have written in one day. But it's not so bad yet! If I step it up and start busting out 2,110 words a day every day from now on, I'll still win. Anyway, I am not posting to talk about my piddly word count, I am posting to say: New excerpt! I actually feel really horrible posting an excerpt like this so completely out of context, but it's not like I have a lot of scenes to choose from right now! lollll. Also, the writing style still sucks but I think I'm getting there?

Also also, Gail Carson Levine wrote a NaNoWriMo pep talk this week, omgomgomg. After last November's almost complete lack of NaNoing, I am back to feeling the NaNo love. :D <3

For those of you not in the know, I shall be spending the first Sunday of December writing Level 2 of the Japanese Level Proficiency Test. I took Level 3 in 2005 (I can't get over that I last took this test FOUR YEARS AGO -- pretty sure I didn't intend for there to be such a huge gap) and passed with 80%, but now we are less than a month till I take Level 2 and I am pretty well FREAKING OUT. Like seriously, I am cutting down my work schedule quite severely just so I have more time to study. D:

Anyway, I was going through some kanji on Read the Kanji, and I figured I would post ( my Level 2 kanji grid! )

In conclusion: BRB STUDYING!!

lol sorry this post was kinda pointless. x)

Uuuugh my sleeping habits are sooooooo gross right now. I had to FORCE myself out of bed at one in the afternoon today. I hate this. D:

But in other news, I just watched this unsubtitled Morning Musume interview and understood quite a large chunk of it, so yay! :) (And yay for Aichan talking about Disney Sea. xD )

Answers to yesterday's book meme:

1) The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami, and I'm kinda surprised no one guessed this just because I was under the impression that Murakami's so hot right now. I don't love his writing but I like it well enough; mainly I keep this book around because I find collections of short stories somehow really inspiring and motivating. x)

2) The Odyssey, Homer. I thought this would be slightly less obvious than if I had gone with The Iliad but perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption.

3) Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti, although the_wykydtron is correct, I ignored the fact that there's an introduction.

4) Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo. Guys, what's the point at which you recognized this one? I'm curious. xD

lol, one non-fiction and then three translated fiction. Actually I think most of the books I own these days are non-fiction, and a lot of those are language textbooks ... I don't think this meme would work very well with those. :|

In other news, it's Friday night and I hope This Is It sells out tonight because it still hasn't yet!! Meanwhile we have nine showings a day of A Christmas Carol, what is this madness.

Day five of NaNo is over and my word count is still rather smaller than what it should be, but I have finally posted an excerpt (taken totally out of context, haha have fun with that)! Please do not judge either me or my writing based on this piece, I'm still trying to feel around in an attempt to get the tone I want. And also I have no idea how one goes about eating a pomegranate. D:

So, uh. I guess that's all for now?

Stolen, complete with pretty formatting, from chroniclers:

♦ Take four books off your bookshelf
♦ Write the first sentence
♦ Write the last sentence on page fifty
♦ Write the second sentence on page one hundred
♦ Write the next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
♦ Write the final sentence of the book
♦ Let your friends guess what book it is

( Read more... )

Man, I really feel I don't own many books that could be guessed like this!

In other news, I really hate this time of the year when the sun has set before I even leave for work.

So during the first half of October I was totally obsessed with my NaNo novel, to the point where I was terrified I was going to get sick of it and so forced myself to stop thinking about it for a while. Now it's November and I have no idea how to get back to being obsessed with this thing! How do I get back into the headspace where I can write this thing like I want it to be written?

In conclusion: as usual, as soon as I am allowed to start working on something, it all falls apart. :D But oh well, at least I have some words now! Although how many, I'm not sure yet, as I cannot write any way but with a pen and paper!

omg people are texting me and I don't know what to do!! For those of you not in the know, I am pretty well stuck in the eighteenth century when it comes to telephones. My co-workers don't know life without their cell phones; I don't know or understand life with one. xD; So when I turned on my phone this morning and found not zero, not one, not two, but THREE text messages waiting for me (one from each of the past three days, hahaha), man. IT IS LIKE A FIST IN MY EAR BUT I WILL TRY TO ADJUST!

Unrelated, my fundraiser for Keyly got its first donation today, omg exciting!! I am super grateful especially because it's from someone I only kinda sorta know! I sure hope you guys don't intend to let him show you up, lol lol lol. ;)

Also I am going to force myself to start my NaNo after work tonight. Three full days of not writing is quite enough!! Bug me for an excerpt if you don't see one appear. xD

So as most of you know, I sponsor several children through Children International, and earlier this year I started helping their families set up small businesses in order to increase their income and improve their lives. (See: Liset's, Mercy's, and I am waiting to hear back regarding Ma.Fe's.) The request from Keyly's family, however, is a bit more than I can take on by myself, and so I am starting my very first fundraiser!

Keyly's Fundraiser
Check it out! There are pictures you haven't seen before there and everything! xD (See my entry about Keyly's Special Gift for more pictures of her and her mother.)

If you could help out, it would be A+ amazing and I would be so hugely grateful. Even a dollar or two helps!

Feel free to comment or PM with questions/comments/suggestions. :)

The first two entries on my friendslist right now both mention me! xD This wouldn't usually merit its own post but I have been having a rough week and this has suddenly improved my mood tenfold. So thank you to missmomoko and trumpydoesmagic for randomly throwing my name into your posts, hahaha. <3 <3 And, as always, thank you to Apostles for keepin' it supernatural. xD

Now I guess I should actually write something here ... I haven't started my NaNo yet because of this awful mood I've been in but I'm not really concerned about it yet, it's only day three so I figure I've still got time. :P

Oh, I guess I should tell you how my Hallowe'en volunteering went, but I'm kind of not even sure how I feel about it. ( Read more... )

Today SUCKED but now it's OVER. Let's do a MEME! I love these interview memes, hahaha. This time it was athena_crikey who asked the questions. ( Read more... )

Feel free to ask me to ask you five questions! x)

So I feel like I should actually post about the reason I updated my movie list when I did ...

47. Michael Jackson's This Is It, 2009

... but instead I think I'll just link to the FourFour review (spoiler warning, obviously). I like that he writes that "there is little to intellectualize here"; it makes me feel less dumb for so far not having anything to say about the movie that isn't a variant on "omg I loved that part!" x)

I already kinda hate working at a movie theatre while this is playing, though. Not gonna lie. :|

My goodness but it has been forever since I updated my list of books I've read/movies I've watched this year! And I have pathetically little to show for it. D:

Books!

20. On Michael Jackson, Margo Jefferson
Reading reviews of this book after I'd read it, I came across one that pointed out that this book provides you with more questions than answers, and my reaction to that line was "THAT'S IT! That's why I didn't like it!" This book is made up of four cultural study-type essays written in a style that makes the entire book feel like fiction. There were some interesting passages, and then there were some passages that I definitely didn't even understand. Basically I spent most of the book thinking, "... And your point is?," because Jefferson does bring up so many different questions and then just as easily discards them. And at one point it seemed that she was trying to use the National Enquirer as a serious and legitimate source, so in the end I must confess I'm not much of a fan of this book.

21. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier
Very interesting and funny, but as usual I think I forgot most of it as soon as I finished it. :X I do remember one thing, only because it was so shocking to me -- according to Angier, in terms of size, a human adult is to a cell as a cell is to an atom. THAT SOUND YOU JUST HEARD WAS MY BRAIN BREAKING. I just cannot even picture something being that small!!

22. Wild Blue: A Natural History of the World's Largest Animal, Dan Bortolotti
After my visit to the Ocean Discovery Centre, I wanted to read about sealife! So I borrowed this book on blue whales, and I really enjoyed it. I whipped through it pretty quickly, especially the earlier chapters. This book discusses whaling quite a bit, and it sounds rather more horrific than I'd ever pictured it being, but it also gives a lot of space to the methods scientists are inventing in order to study the blue whale, a particularly difficult animal to study. Really interesting! Marine mammals are my favourite animals for sure. xD <3

Movies!

44. 21, 2008
I was soooo distracted when betaraider and I watched this that I barely remember any of it, but I do remember that we were completely underwhelmed. I feel I very rarely give bad reviews, but ... this is one.

45. Inkheart, 2009
the_wykydtron and I had been anticipating watching this movie since we first saw the trailer in front of Twilight (we would've even seen it at the theatre except that I was in Japan when it came out and by the time I returned it was gone!). xD For the first half hour, I LOVED THIS MOVIE. Then it started trying desperately to be more epic than it needed to be and I just got frustrated with whoever's idea that was. I can't hate this movie though. It features my boy Brendan Fraser! And that guy who was an author, omg. I loved his reactions to seeing his own characters in the flesh, they were just too perfect. xD

46. The Glass Slipper, 1955
I stumbled across this on TCM and it was pretty interesting. A retelling of Cinderella in which Cinderella spends half the movie being rather unlikeable! I got kinda bored near the end when there was an extended dance sequence that did nothing for the plot (this is the same reason I didn't enjoy An American in Paris, not gonna lie -- and haha, please note that both of these movies star the same actress), but then there was the most pathetic day for night shot I think I've ever seen, and in a way that made up for it! hahaha, seriously, they obviously filmed that stroke-of-midnight scene about twelve hours early. >xD Oh, and the fairy godmother character was fantastic and I'm totally going to be her when I grow up.

In other news: brb, listening to this song on repeat forever~~

Quick recap: I sponsor several children through Children International, and have recently begun helping their families set up small businesses (what CI calls Income Generating Projects) in order to increase their income. Today I received the report on Mercy's IGP and it came complete with ELEVEN PICTURES, making this post practically ( a picspam! )

~ I just had a surprisingly pleasant five days of work! I say "surprisingly" because I was in box office the entire five days, and so it could easily have gone worse, but I don't think I had a single frustrating guest the entire time! Faith in humanity: RESTORED!! I also sold a bunch of tickets to This Is It, including once while "The Love You Save" was playing over the lobby radio (I still don't quite understand how that song has made it into our Top 40 station, but it's cool that it has!).

~ I studied Japanese for an hour today, awesomesauce!! :D I learned a couple new grammar points, so that was awesome. I basically cannot explain how happy studying grammar makes me. Anyway, for much of my JLPT studying this year I've been doing the exercises in this book, but now that I'm very nearly done it I decided to shake things up a bit and start doing the exercises in this book, which just arrived for me this week. :3 WHY YES that book is all about learning the Level 2 grammar points in a mere forty-five days! We are getting close to test date and I am getting nervous. D: I also got another book that's all for learning the Level 2 vocabularly in fifty days, hahaha. Too bad I no longer have fifty days!!

(Man I do love my growing collection of foreign language textbooks. xD I definitely also own a textbook or two for languages I'm not even studying ...)

In conclusion, I fully expect my November 2009 to be all about NaNoWriMo and the JLPT, and not much else. I am looking forward to a month of obsessing over studying, it reminds me of when I was studying around the clock for the AP Spanish exam and pretty well lost my ability to understand English. xD WORTH IT.

~ In other news, Facebook just told me I should reconnect with a co-worker I saw every day this week and last saw four hours ago. Oh Facebook, you know me so well.

~ Not gonna lie, probably my favourite thing about the Michael Jackson fandom is that there are so many people in it who go out and do good deeds! I mean, I've been in the Morning Musume fandom for years now, and Morning Musume has a couple songs that talk about environmental issues, but it seems those songs are only ever mentioned so that people can make fun of the Engrish in them. I love that MJ fans can make fun of the total lack of enunciation in "Man in the Mirror" while still taking its message to heart. <3 haha, so what I am trying to say here is I finally signed up to be a volunteer through my local rec centre, and today I went to a (very small! I was surprised) meeting in order to fill out the necessary paperwork to get a criminal records check and all that. They seem to only be looking for volunteers for one-day events (eg. a Hallowe'en party here, a Remembrance Day ceremony there), which is not my ideal kind of volunteering, but it should be fun and it'll definitely work until I find something more. :)

After the meeting, I was waiting at the bus stop to go home, and one of my co-workers drove by and offered me a ride! Aaaah so that was kind of the highlight of my day, hahaha. I love awesome surprises like that. xD

~ I signed up for a continuing studies class through my alma mater (lol, it's so weird saying that) today. If you want you may roll your eyes at the ridiculousness of me missing school as much as I am, but believe me, this class is relevant to my interests! In May I read Dr. Jonathan Shay's book Achilles in Vietnam, in which he compares the combat trauma experienced by American soldiers in Vietnam with the combat trauma portrayed in the Iliad. I am surprised there is not more fangirling in my review of it, because that was probably my favourite book of the summer. The class I signed up for is a two-hour class that will look at Euripides' play "Herakles" through the lens of Shay's work. SO I AM PRETTY EXCITED. There is very little these days that will get me up at eight-thirty in the morning, but hopefully combat trauma in Euripides is it! xD

(Uh ... for those of you not in the know? I am a Greek mythology FANGIRL.)

~ We have reached that time of October where I am OBSESSED with NaNoWriMo and I basically need November to get here NOW before I get sick of thinking about my novel. I'm so excited for this year, you guys. :D I am really excited about my story (I've actually used this story for NaNo before and lost; I think it needed a couple years of getting knocked about in my head), and I'm really excited to be NaNoing with so many new people! :D haha, and hopefully they don't get sick of me telling them that before it's even time to start writing. xD <3!

So tonight I discovered Cleverbot and found it way too amusing. ( Read more... )

In other news, today I played the new Kingdom Hearts game for two hours and then had to stop because my hand was cramping up. I don't understand how you are supposed to hold the DS in order to allow this to be a comfortable experience! Have I been spoiled by playing so many games that only require the use of the stylus? :(

One little compliment can make you feel amazing. So give me a compliment, anything in the entire world, even that my shoelaces are pretty. Put this in your journal. And once you get some comments, put that entry in a memory or tag and when you are feeling down, just go to that entry and this will remind you of how great you are.

lol, watch this get no comments. I will be all "What do you mean, no one wants to stroke my ego??" xD xD xD

Just finished playing Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. I think I liked it better than its prequel, although it felt shorter, even with all the new mini-games. I definitely had this issue where the puzzles were either way too hard for me and took hours to figure out, or they were way too easy and I could solve them right away. But in the end I found and solved 110 puzzles out of 138, so I guess that's not too shabby?

Next I have the new Kingdom Hearts game (apparently this is how much of a KH fan I am: I can't even remember the title) to tackle, although I have very little interest in Organization XIII and also I've heard the gameplay is really frustrating, so I'm not as excited about playing it as I once was.

haha, I only get this into video games when there is nothing else going on in my life. :P I am looking forward to going out and doing things again.

So my very first summer at my very first job, a couple scenes for the movie In the Land of Women were filmed at the mall where I was working. I remember this being a very big deal because the movie starred Adam Brody of The OC; lolariously enough, it also starred Kristen Stewart, who is now, I would say, the rather more famous of the two. In April, I finally satisfied my curiosity by borrowing the movie from the library and grabbing some screencaps, and today I decided to finally make this random post that may well only be of interest to me. x)

( shopping with bella )