hahaha you guys, I am such a horrible Facebook friend and I LOVE IT. There's this girl who worked with me at the movie theatre for like two months before she quit. I had her on my Facebook for like a year and we never ever talked to each other, so at one point when I was clearing out my friendslist I took her off. She came to see a movie at some point last year and was all, "I think I accidentally got deleted from your friendslist," so I felt guilty and added her back. Then I remembered that all she does with her Facebook is complain!! And also never talk to me. So I took her off again. Today I got this message from her: "How do I keep getting deleted from your list :P"

HMM I WONDER!!

Also what the heck, why does she seek me out every time I delete her. Srsly.

Also, today on Lang-8 I corrected someone when they spelled "Disneyland" as two words. So it begins.

So just now I finally joined Lang-8! It's a language exchange site; you write journal entries in the language you're studying, and native speakers can come along and correct them. A site that lets me mess around in my second languages AND asks me to correct others' grammar mistakes?? I seriously can't believe it took me this long to sign up. xD

Anyway, this is me! If any of you happen to have a Lang-8 account, let's be friends!! :D

HEY SARAH WHY ARE YOU WRITING A TRIP REPORT ABOUT A TRIP THAT ENDED (unfortunately ;_; ) A YEAR AGO

BECAUSE I WANT TO SO SHUT UP AND ENJOY IT!!

For months now I have been completely stuck on how to write my Universal Studios Japan entry, so I guess I'll skip it for now and write about it alongside my other theme parks at the end.

( day thirteen )

~ Apparently everyone who wrote the JLPT in Japan or the U.S. has their results already. Uncool!! I can understand Japan getting them early, but why does the States get their results before Canada does? I am getting pretty impatient over here. It sucks to not have any idea how you did. D:

~ So, remember that Korean class I was going to take that got cancelled? It's kinda sorta happening anyway! xD The teacher e-mailed me a couple days ago to see if I'd be interested in group lessons with her and one of the other students who'd signed up for the course. Um, awesome?? We're starting next Saturday. :D And right now I am paying all this attention to my other two most favourite second languages, just so they don't feel neglected. xD lol!

~ I was going to write a longer entry but ... I've changed my mind. Have a good night, everyone! xD

Sometimes I feel the need to write an entry about Pirates of the Caribbean just to ensure everyone knows that my love for these movies runs deeper than my love for pretty much anything and everything else.

That's a bit of a winding introduction just to say I've discovered that on YouTube one can watch the entire trilogy dubbed into Spanish. As one of my nearest and dearest hobbies is watching and rewatching my favourite movies dubbed into any of the languages I can kind of understand*, I think I can safely say that the rest of my weekend is shot. :D

* I've already seen the Pirates trilogy in Japanese, and was perhaps way too fascinated by the whole "kokoro"/"shinzou"/"haato" thing. xD AND THEN IN AT WORLD'S END THEY MESSED UP MY FAVOURITE LIIIIIIINE D':

Anyway, I apologize if this is all I want to talk about for the next month or so. :D Who here remembers when I was equally obsessed with Prisoner of Azkaban in its Spanish dub? OH WHO AM I KIDDING I STILL AM

~ Soooooo my MJ class got cancelled. I am seriously unimpressed. :| How did that combat trauma in Euripides class not get cancelled but these two rather more mainstream ones did? I guess people who are interested in mainstream things are not always the same people who take university classes just for funsies, but geeze. How frustrating for me.

~ Went to the doctor today and got a list of shots that I need to get before my trip! Typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis, and, if our plans change to include places outside Lima, malaria as well! hahaha oh my goodness, how exciting. (Originally we were definitely going to visit places other than Lima, but now Machu Picchu has been closed indefinitely due to flooding. My life right now is full of disappointments, apparently.)

~ Off to work again ... Two more shifts until my weekend! Which has become even more of a weekend, now that I don't have any classes~~~ ;_; ;_;

Today I just want to say that I am happy to have so many friends who aren't afraid to examine their own thoughts and opinions, and aren't afraid to have those opinions questioned. :)

Also, thank you so much to everyone who commented on my not-drinking post! I was not expecting to get so many awesomesauce comments. I'll try to reply to you all when I am feeling slightly more intelligent. xD

So for those of you not in the know, I don't drink alcohol. I made this choice before I was of drinking age and I have kept with it because it is the choice that makes sense to me. I cannot articulate my reasoning any clearer than that, but that's fine; this is not a choice I feel the need to justify. I have no problem with the thought of other people drinking, but I have no interest in being one of them.

Having said that. Obviously I do have friends and co-workers and relatives and acquaintances who drink. This does not bother me, but it seems very much to bother them. I can go months at a time without this being brought up, but then it begins again: "Sarah, we're gonna take you out drinking. I really want to see you drunk, it'd be so funny! I'll take you to my favourite clubs, you can crash at my place, it'll be so much fun!!" A fine proposition, but one that I am sick to death of hearing. Look: I don't drink. You know I don't drink. You know that I have been of legal drinking age for four years and I have never had a drink, or wanted to have a drink. You know I don't see any appeal in getting drunk. I have told you that alcohol just makes my parents sleepy, and is likely to affect me the same boring way. I am so not interested in this plan at all and yet people keep suggesting this to me. My friends are mostly over this stage, but every time I have a new group of co-workers it's the same thing all over again. And how sure of themselves they must be, to think that they will be the ones to change my mind, that they will be the ones I let take me to the clubs. Look, dudes - my best friends have not been able to get me drunk. What makes you think you'll be able to.

I think I just realized that I've been living under the impression that peer pressure ceases to exist once you hit twenty.

Post inspired by an annoyance in an otherwise fantastic last night. A minor annoyance, but an annoyance nonetheless. :|

Dear Sarah,

I am sorry to inform you that the course of Korean for Beginners - Part 1 (ASLA009) for which you have registered has been cancelled due to insufficient enrolment.

ADLKGHSLKAH;LH;LSKHG;A;LDHW;LE!!!!!!!!!

WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN TO ME

If my MJ class gets cancelled, srsly. I don't even.

KARAOKE BIRTHDAY PARTY TONIGHT!! SOOOO EXCITED!! :D :D :D

I have spent pretty much the entirety of this past week on YouTube looking up covers and performances of MJ songs (and the odd Lady Gaga song) by non-American artists, and believe you me I am planning on making a monster post about it on my next day off (SHUT UP YOU'LL LOVE IT >xD ), but for now here's a teaser: "Dirty Diana" as sung by Piotr Cugowski, for the Polish film Kochaj i Tańcz. They even used the song in one of the trailers, how cool is that! brb, listening to this on repeat forever.

In ~longer letter later~ news (once again I am on LJ right before work), my flights are booked! From late March to late May, don't look for me in Canada, 'cause I'mma be in Peru!! xD

Very quick entry because, as usual, I am minutes away from leaving for work. D:

( text-only child sponsorship update )

A bunch of stuff has been happening since my last post (for example: I turned twenty-three! :O ), but nothing of the sort that comes in easily journable chunks. Longer letter later!

I will mention, though, that today I saw a car with the license plate "NIMBUS."

Also, I've been spending a fair bit of time reading through the archives of the blog Sociological Images, to the point that last night I dreamt I was taking a picture of an advertisement in a magazine so that I could post about it and all its deeper meanings. LOVE IT! xD

omg, this dialogue from Not Always Right makes me so happy. It reminds me of one of my favourite work-related entries (look! I found the excellent typo I referred to in my survey post!!), and I am so glad that I am not the only one this ridiculous situation has happened to.

I'm late, but today was Elvis Presley's 75th birthday! My mom is a fan of Elvis and, as a result, he's the topic of several anecdotes from my childhood. Way back when, January 8th was actually the date I was due to be born, leading my parents to refer to me as "Elvis." Or, if I am to be completely honest, "Elvis Arnold." Whenever I heard this story as a kid, I always assumed Arnold was Elvis' middle name. It wasn't until we got a channel that showed reruns of Green Acres that I learned that the "Arnold" in my nickname actually came from a fictional pig. :| I ... don't even know, lol.

Anyway, so yes, that's my connection with Elvis - until I was born, I was named after him. xD Oh, and if you had asked four-year-old me what my favourite song was, I do believe I would have said "All Shook Up." xD That plus "Beat It" plus some Sharon, Lois and Bram ... yeah, that's pretty much all the music I listened to as a preschooler, lol. xD

( ~*~SURVEY~*~ )

So one of Disney's big promotions this year is Give a Day, Get a Disney Day, where if you volunteer at one of the events listed on their site, you get a free one-day pass to Disneyland or Walt Disney World. Awesome, right?! I've been really excited for this for like six months now, and earlier this week the list of volunteer positions finally went up. I searched for "Victoria, BC" and got one Victoria posting followed by a whole bunch of postings in Washington state. DISNEY THAT'S NOT EVEN IN THE SAME COUNTRY. I tried multiple methods of searching and could still only find this one posting, so even though I wasn't terribly enthusiastic for it (selling raffle tickets at a hockey game ... woohoo), I signed up. Note that I definitely signed up on the day the listings went up. Just now I got an e-mail from the coordinator of the event saying that all of the positions have been filled, and I'm not actually needed.

ADLKGSHLEAH;LIHQ;EITA;

DISNEY QUIT PLAYING GAMES WITH MY HEART

There better be more Victoria events popping up soon or I am going to be very disappoint. >:(

So I just signed up for the Continuing Studies Korean class, because I am insane and apparently I like to pretend I don't already have two languages on the go. xDD But oh man I am excited!! Studying languages is the best. :DD

So to sum up: a month from now, I will have an MJ class on Wednesday nights and a Korean class on Thursday nights, and I'm pretty sure you are jealoussssss. xD

On my Facebook I now have friended three cousins from my mom's side of the family. I see everyone from my dad's side of the family on an almost annual basis, and compared to that, the amount of contact I've had with my mom's side of the family amounts to pretty much nothing - and in fact I have never had any sort of contact whatsoever with two of these Facebook cousins. One of them wrote on my wall today asking "What's new?" I was complaining to my dad about how that's such a ridiculous question when what's new to her is everything that's ever happened in my life ever, and he agreed with me that I should reply all, "Well, let's start with my birth." hahahaha, I don't know why but this amuses me so. >xD

In unrelated news, I was on Skype today for six hours and twenty minutes (the joy of having my own computer!), and I do not regret it at all. I'm stupidly thrilled that I was there to witness the epicness that is nine people in one Skype conversation, hahahaha, so much awesome. xD xD <333!

So I never before thought to look up the Iliad on TV Tropes, but omg it is perfection. There is a trope named Achilles In His Tent!! Oh my goodness, I need to start writing more about the Trojan War again, I loves it so.

My life has been so uneventful these past few days that I have little else to say except that I am going to Sherlock Holmes with athena_crikey and the_wykydtron tomorrow, yay!