Since sometime this past summer I've been slowly watching the anime Shoujo Kakumei Utena. Last night I finally got to episode twenty, and discovered that the song that plays during the duel scene is about Neoptolemus and Priam. OMG AWESOME. The Trojan War is everywhere!! xD

Book:
23. Every Living Thing: Man's Obsessive Quest to Catalog Life, from Nanobacteria to New Monkeys, Rob Dunn
Oh my gosh I loved this book. It's similar to Night Comes to the Cretaceous, which I read earlier this year, in that it discusses scientific discoveries, but with a strong focus on the lives of the scientists who made those discoveries. And the subject is so interesting and the writing style is so smooth and beautiful~ haha so yeah, I would definitely recommend this book. I continue to wish though that I had a brain for science ... I finished this book ten minutes ago and I already feel like I've forgotten most of it. :(

Movie:
52. The Princess and the Frog, 2009
GUYS. 2-D Disney is back and I could not be more thrilled!! princealia's review and the_wykydtron's review pretty much cover everything important that I wanted to say about this movie, but if you want to hear my nitpickier (and SPOILERIFFIC) points, then ( read on ... )

Edit: Just read the Kills Me Dead review, which offers a different opinion (although I agree about the songs). I am ridiculously stoked to read all the different opinions of this movie! Oh, Disney. It's been way too long. <3

51. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), 2000
I can count this as a movie if I want to count it as a movie, haha. I heard about this play when the_wykydtron went to a local production (without me!! HOW DARE SHE), and so intrigued was I by her report that I looked to see if I could find a version of it on YouTube. Lo and behold, I found the entire thing! I finally finished watching it last night, and, while it was a little more ridiculous than I'd been expecting, overall I really enjoyed it! They actually manage to include pretty much all of Shakespeare's work, including my beloved but much-ignored "Troilus and Cressida," which is awesome! As a wannabe Shakespeare fan I was definitely laughing through the whole thing (except for the occasional serious moments, which were also very good), and I'll probably be looking into the Reduced Shakespeare Company's other productions in the future. xD

In other news, last night trumpydoesmagic and I watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was most excellent, and then I had a dream that Lady Gaga featured Morning Musume's Reina Tanaka in one of her songs. Uhm. Awesome?

Things that are not awesome:
1) NaNoWriMo ends in nine days and I have only just now passed 10k. I'm not even really sure why this year is going so pathetically for me ... it just is.

2) The JLPT is in fifteen days and I am so completely unprepared. I am starting to seriously feel like I am going to fail. One of my co-workers asked me what will happen if I fail, and I replied with "Nothing," but ... I still don't want to. I'll really hate myself if I do. I don't want to have to wait another full year to take Level 2 again when it's already been five years since I passed Level 3!!

3) The above two points are frustrating me very much right now. :( I feel almost as if I should give up on NaNoWriMo so I can focus completely on the JLPT, but at the same time I intensely don't want to. ffffffffff I dunno. My next couple days off I just gotta BUST IT. And I have to ignore the temptation to fill up my days off with social outings, because I've just had an awesome four days off, but I definitely did not get any work done. :/

Things that are awesome:
1) I woke up this morning to a Christmas card from firecrackerrrr! <3

2) My co-workers being their ridiculous selves.

3) I've finally written over 8,000 LJ comments!! bahahahaha. >xD I'm pretty sure the last like 2,000 of those are entirely from July till now.

4) This song.

Yay, I got interviewed again!! :D This time the questions are from frauleinfrog. ( News travels fast in Vienna. )

In other news, tomorrow I am going to This Is It for the second time in three days, and a Twilight t-shirt party for the second time in eight days. ahahaha, my life this week is so ridiculous but I love it. FANDOM ALL OVER THE PLACE!! xD Hopefully I can fit some studying in here somewhere. D:

Time for a totally random picture post!

( hontou ni waratteru ko nante iru no kana )

Another day, another excerpt. Current word count is 6,359 when it should be over 20k; I need to force myself to make my daily word count more consistently than I have been.

In other news, I feel like work has taken over my life, although I suspect I only feel this way because I've returned to my yucky routine of sleeping all day and staying up all night, which means I never do anything else. :| Hopefully this changes with my upcoming week of excitement! On Saturday I'm going to my theatre's special showing of Gone With the Wind; on Sunday I'm going to This Is It with the_wykydtron (and I didn't even have to con her into it!); on Monday and Tuesday I am studying and writing, natch!!; on Wednesday I'm going to the university's production of "Romeo and Juliet" with the_wykydtron and betaraider; and on Thursday I'm going to the very first showing of New Moon with a bunch of awesome peeps and, inevitably, a bunch of screaming fangirls. hahahaha this is going to be the most ridiculous week ever but I love it. xD

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)

~ 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!

Why I do believe that would be athena_crikey, who sat, as I recall, two seats down from me during the three months of fifth grade that I had here after we moved. (I have a couple classmates from the city before that friended on Facebook, but we talk so rarely and so superficially that they hardly count as friends anymore, sigh.) Athena's constant quest to move farther and farther away complicates that second question a bit, but, true to what I wrote on my NaNo author profile, I do tend to e-mail her approximately five times every day. :D

I was going to answer the third question by saying that I've had the same group of friends since grade eleven, but then I realized that that's a total lie. So I guess a better answer would be that my group of friends evolves, but at such a pace that I hardly notice, hahaha! Fun fact: I've known the_wykydtron since grade six, but we didn't become friends until the first year of university (second semester, as I recall!), when we had to take the same bus to school in the morning. This BLOWS MY MIND every time I think of it! I love how little random events can totally change the course of your life.

~ So who else is doing National Novel Writing Month this November?? 50,000 words in thirty days and it really is a blast! Here's my author page so add me! xD I am looking forward to a good attempt this time, after my total failure of last year. D:

~ As of today, I have a ticket to This is It (Oct. 28, 7pm) and a ticket to New Moon (Nov. 19, 10pm). So now I continue the wait for the two autumn movies I am most excited for, haha! Also, a shout-out to misfits_united because I totally forgot she was on my friendslist until she asked if we were getting tickets for the Michael Jackson movie, hahaha. xD

~ For its thousandth post, fandomsecrets asked for only positive secrets, and I convince this turned out a lot more awesome than I thought it would. And there were two Morning Musume secrets in the mix! One and two. <3 Now if only the "Kimagure Princess" PV would leak already, because I am way too impatient for it! xD

~ I have had a blast with my phandom phriends over these past five unasked-for days off, but tomorrow I go back to work! And I need to restart my job search. Even if I stayed at the movie theatre part-time, it would be nice to do something new as well. I also need to start researching grad schools more thoroughly, which is hard to get started on since the idea of me going to grad school still seems so foreign. Plus I'm not sure yet if I want to apply this year or wait until next year ... woohoo for uncertainty. :/

~ Let's end on something fun! Here's Rick Mercer in zero gravity! Feel free to skip ahead to 2:40, although my favourite bit is at 5:38, if just for the look on his face!! xD

~ lol at how poorly I've been keeping up with my own LJ this past week. ^^;

~ Today I forced the_wykydtron to watch The Neverending Story and in return she pointed out all the plot holes I'd never noticed. Which kind of pained me, because when I was a kid I thought that movie was so brilliant. In related news, the Nostalgia Critic's review is hilarious. xD

~ My test voucher for the JLPT arrived today, and I discovered that the Level 2 test is being held at nine in the morning. D: And the friend I'm probably staying with doesn't live particularly close to the test location, so that'll be a fun morning. Anyway, inspired by the arrival of the voucher, I did some grammar practice ... and got a score of 3/8. Horrendous!!

~ My future husband interviewed Michael J. Fox today! I'm not particularly a fan of his acting work (well, with the exception of the "A, My Name is Alex" episodes of Family Ties and also that episode of Scrubs where he played the doctor suffering from OCD), but I heart him so much for all the work he's been doing to fight Parkinson's disease. And I HATE that he's been accused of exaggerating his symptoms. I don't know what it's like for you guys to watch him, but for ten years I lived with my grandmother as she was suffering from this disease, and in my mind there is no way he is acting. Watching this interview tonight, there were so many times where, for a split second, I felt like I was watching my grandma. And I really heart Michael J. Fox for going out there and doing all these public appearances where it's really obvious he can't control his movements, because on her bad days I'm pretty sure Grandma didn't even really want to be seen by her family members. So yeah, just for all that he's probably one of my favourite celebs, not gonna lie.

(My future husband also did a 2008 interview with Lee Thomas in which they discussed MJ's vitiligo. They reaired it recently and it was an awesome change of pace from all the tabloid trash~)

~ Speaking of awesome Canadians, I've definitely had "Canadian, Please" stuck in my head all day. xD

Woke up to the news that Koharu is graduating from MoMusu and from Hello! Project. This sucks!! I guess December 6 will mark the end of my favourite MoMusu line-up. :( Although anyone who points out that I should be grateful it lasted as long as it did is right. The group has been unusually stable lately, but I kind of liked it that way. :(

I booked off work today in order to go to the museum with one of my best friends. :D This'll be my third time through the British Museum temporary exhibit but that's fine with me, I loved it. And the second time I went I bought an annual pass, something I actually should've had all along, because I definitely go to the museum enough for it to be worth it. So yay for going to the museum for free~!

And a note for my Shamoners: last night I had a dream featuring Crazy Fountain Boy. Y'ALL ARE JEALOUS~~~~ xD

lol, I just saw my manager's Facebook status:

[Manager] loves that Sarah [last name] sponsored me for the BC Dream Walk and Run 2009. You should too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please?! Come on!!!!!! You know you wanna!!!!!!

Two of my managers are doing this walk for charity and I gave them each ten bucks for it and they are making the hugest deal out of it, hahaha. Yesterday at work the other manager was all, "You gave me money so I can't be mean to you today!" hahaha, guys, calm down, pretty sure my head is big enough already. xD; I do hope I inspire some of my co-workers to give to this too, though, because if we raise enough money, the managers are going to do the walk in drag. xD

In other news, today is my only day off this week and I had intended to spend it running errands ... until I woke up this morning and discovered that walking is a challenge, sitting down must be done carefully and stairs present a serious obstacle. Holy crow, paintball! My co-workers want to go paintballing once a month but I'm pretty sure these old bones wouldn't be able to handle that, lolz.

omg today was such an awesome day. <3

I've never bungee jumped (although I've watched three of my friends jump), one of the reasons being the cost. But now I'm not sure which is the more ridiculous - is it paying $100 to jump off a bridge, or paying $100 to allow people to shoot little balls of paint at you? xD I spent most of today paintballing with thirty or so of my awesomesauce co-workers, and it was so terrifying but so much fun, and now I am IN PAIN. I only actually have three bruises from paintball injuries; I guess the pain in my legs and back is a result of how little exercise I usually get and how much I got today. I actually made it through my shift tonight, haha, but I am not excited to see how I feel tomorrow! (Although luckily it's my day off.)

My most triumphant moment was probably in the second game we played, when I somehow managed to be the last person left on my team and I somehow managed to keep the other team (I admit their numbers had probably dwindled by this point as well) away from our fort long enough that the game ended before they could win. haha, I was so shocked to find I'd been the only one left!!

The most spectacular time I was hit was probably when one co-worker managed to hit me right in the mask and the paint splattered right through into my mouth (ugh, paint does not taste good D: ) and then down my neck. As I stood up to announce I was out and leave the field, I heard said co-worker shout, "I LOVE YOU, SARAH!!" ahahaha, the juxtaposition is hilarious to me. xD

Also, it's kind of funny to me how I am so not a fan of war or physical violence or any of this stuff that paintball grew out of, but at the same time I got such a bizarre joy out of looking up at our tower to see a bunch of my co-workers in camo and masks and with paintball guns at the ready. (And shouting "There's a bunch of them at one o'clock!" "Which way's one o'clock?" "Can't we just use left and right??" haha omg.) I don't know, someone explain this to me. xD;

Hopefully at some point I'll have some pics to share, but if you want to see the different fields we played on, take a look. :D

So I'd totally forgotten that I once forced my mom to listen to BoA's Best of Soul for like a month straight until she came home from work yesterday all "Someone on my bus was talking about BoA!" hahaha awesome!! Today I lent her my copy of BoA's English album and she said she's going to put some of the songs on her iPod. brb, turning my mom into a J-pop fan! xD (Uh, because somehow BoA's English album counts as J-pop in my head?)

Driving lesson tomorrow. After this one, I'll only have two left. Ugh, I'm still so bad though. D: And I still don't enjoy it. the_wykydtron is on a quest to find the one thing that will spark in me a love for driving but I don't have high hopes. I do kind of get a kick out of picturing me driving my friends around and in this way forcing them to listen to my favourite music, haha, but still. That's not quite enough to keep me motivated here. :/

Anyway! I'm sure a lot of you have seen this already, but just in case, I am posting it again. I feel confident saying that this video is pretty awesome even if you aren't a fan of Michael Jackson. A one-man a capella group who manages to layer like six songs on top of each other without it turning into a huge mess? This will always and forever be one of my favourite YouTube vids, hahaha. <3

I fail and am currently without an appropriate icon, but tonight is my friends and my annual Escaflowne marathon!! After this exciting all-nighter I will come home and sleep, and then I will drag myself up again to go to work in the evening. Over a day without Internet, you guys!! I am never going to catch up. D:

Anyway, I shall leave you with my favourite Esca AMV: El Tango de Hitomi.

In the middle of a lolarious conversation about a certain manager who likes to move everyone around to different tills for reasons no one else understands--

Co-worker 1: "And so by the end I was looking around and all I could think was, 'This is not where I belong!'"
Co-worker 2: "'Not where you belong'? You sound like a Disney movie."

Ahaha. x) I continue to adore my co-workers despite the fact that I seriously need a new job. On Wednesday we Slytherins got our prize of mini-golf and dinner. The mini-golf was really not exciting but the free dinner was so worth it. I definitely ordered more expensive things than I would've if I'd had to pay for it. >xD And now we're about a week away from paintball! I'M ACTUALLY GOING THIS TIME, unlike last time when I decided sleeping in was the preferable option. I've already made a financial commitment to this round, so. xD;

Anyway, I guess it's time for me to answer the questions from this post! (Which you are still allowed to contribute to, if you'd like!) ( Read more... )

Quick! Two fun facts!!

One! Now that it's past midnight -- today is my mom's birthday! :) Why yes she is indeed one day younger than the King of Pop. I think I always remember this fun fact so well only because it is perhaps the only semi-positive thing she has ever said to me about MJ. ^^;

Two! The first time I heard any of the songs on Pink's Funhouse album was on my flight home from Tokyo. That whole flight felt like such a neverending visit to a strange parallel universe that when I was flipping channels the other day and caught the music video for the title song, my first reaction was surprise, like This song exists here, too??

Today was spent unintentionally making myself sad again (with the double whammy of Moonwalk and Moonwalker), then tonight was spent getting frustrated at work again (it's a petty and uninteresting story), and so I am very glad that the_wykydtron surprise visited me today, because that was definitely the highlight. I am also looking forward to the Saturday morning paintball that one of my co-workers is organizing; hopefully it will give me a chance to get out all of this newfound aggression. :P

The main reason I'm posting now though is because earlier today I was reading the Yesterland Captain EO thread, and I found the first post on the second page really interesting:

I always wondered what it would've been like to be around when Walt Disney died, but now I'm not so sure that a legend's death is what I expected it to be. It's *incredibly* painful.

I just ... yeah.

Yeah.

Wow I have no energy today. -_-;

Books!

11. Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Comets, Craters, Controversy, and the Last Days of the Dinosaurs, James Lawrence Powell
I confess I didn't read all of this book; as there is only so much I can read about rocks, I admit I skipped a couple pages here and there. But even so, this is a really interesting book about the Alvarez theory (that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a comet or an asteroid) and the scientists who attempted to corroborate or disprove it. There's actually surprisingly little in this book about dinosaurs -- it's mostly about the scientific community --, but it's written really well and at a really comfortable level for people like me who have no knowledge of science. :3 I would recommend it.

As an added bonus, I am now quite convinced that it was a comet or an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (and Powell's description of what that must have looked like was pretty awesome, in a crazy action movie sort of way). Fun fact: all through elementary school I was taught that it was an ice age that killed the dinosaurs, despite the fact that the Alvarez theory had been out for over a decade! Did anyone else have this experience, or was it just me? :X

12. Making Money, Terry Pratchett
FICTION?!?!?!! aha, I actually only started reading this because I was feeling sick and wanted to read something light enough that it would distract me from how gross I was feeling. I didn't have any books of my own that fit the description so I went over to my mom's bookshelf and grabbed the first thing I saw. :X While it made for a very good distraction, it was apparently not quite good enough to break me out of my non-fiction phase. >xD;

Movie!

33. God Grew Tired of Us, 2006
Augh, I never have the words to write about documentaries. :X This one follows three Sudanese men who fled as children from the civil war in their home country. After something like a decade of living in a refugee camp, they are given the chance to move to the U.S. So there is definitely a sequence showing the men as they try to adjust to the various different technologies that can be found even just within their new apartment. Actually, sequences like that were kind of the highlight of the movie for me. Seeing (North) American culture through the eyes of these men who come from somewhere so different is both really interesting and at times amusing -- I liked when one of the men, all excited, exclaimed, "We have this drink in Africa, but there it's called Coca-Cola and here it's called Pepsi!" haha, cute. ^^;

But for the most part it's a pretty serious but really interesting documentary and I actually kind of wished it was longer, because near the end they started skipping entire years and I didn't care for that. Aaaaand you should just go watch it for yourself, because I have no idea how to talk about it right now. :X

All right, time to eat and then go to work! I definitely do not have the energy to work today, but at least it is a short shift. I have been back at the movie theatre for a full month now (three and a half months left of my promise to stay through the summer xD; ) and so far I am not hating it yet -- yay!! Well I think it definitely helps that I have been making better use of my time off than I was at this time last year. :) For example, on Friday the_wykydtron and I went to the British Museum exhibit that's currently at the local museum, and omg I LOVED IT. <3