So I'm gonna go against the grain a bit here and say that if I had a time machine and was going to use it to go back and watch performances in the past, forget concerts! The first thing I would do is pay a visit to Elizabethan England and watch one of the very first productions of a Shakespeare play. I know there's a reproduction of the Globe now where they perform plays of the era, but oh man so not the same as actually being there! Theatre etiquette was totally different back then for one thing, hahaha. So yeah, that's first.

After that I would actually answer this question properly and go watch a Mozart concert or opera.

And then I would find out the truth behind the Trojan War!!

And then I would join the majority of my friendslist and go and watch pretty much every concert on the Bad tour, lol. xD

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

I busted out 2,300 words just now, making this the first day I have actually met my word goal, hahaha saaaad. xD Ridiculously enough, after confessing I find it so much easier to write longhand, I owe these 2,300 words pretty much entirely to the web site Write or Die, which punishes you with annoying colours and sounds if you stop writing. Apparently the threat of my screen turning red is enough to keep me going - who knew? :P

Anyway, so yes, I posted a new (and short, oops) excerpt. My total word count right now is actually probably somewhere around 4,300, but I have yet to type up the scene I wrote last night which is why I am officially only at 3,831. KEEP MOVING FORWARD!

Completely unrelated, I am pretty frustrated at the prospect of another week of avoiding TV. And just earlier today I was thinking about how when I was a kid I used to be frustrated that you could never see anything about MJ on TV?! HA IT IS TO LAUGH.

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... )

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.

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~~

~ 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? :(

With all apologies to athena_crikey, I've spent tonight watching more K-pop videos on YouTube - but in my defense, it was only through searching for something totally different than I happened upon what is currently my most favourite video ever:



Here we have K-pop group Girls' Generation (whom I first learned of through their song "Gee," which made the rounds a few months ago in a "Look at the crazy stuff you can find on YouTube!" sort of way) performing on a show that is apparently called Star Dance Battle. First they do Super Junior's "Sorry Sorry," which is awesome enough in itself because, while I don't think I ever mentioned it here, earlier this year I was OBSESSED with this song for like an entire month. (I discovered it through a Morning Musume fanvid that I can no longer find, but conveniently enough there's another one!)

BUT THEN THEY DO "SMOOTH CRIMINAL" AND IT IS SO FIERCE AND I HAVE WATCHED IT A BAZILLION TIMES ALREADY OMG. Seriously, that move at 1:35? FIERCE!!! And I totally lol at the "MOON WALK" text that appears onscreen, hahaha, this is not a video game!! xDD

I also found this video in which a few members of Girls' Generation dance to a mixture of "Jam" and "In the Closet," which is kind of amazing!! It's only for the first thirty seconds of the video though. When I was a kid, a group came to our school and danced to "Jam," and as I recall it was the highlight of my week. xD

In conclusion, I know I have asked this in two MJ communities already haha, but if you come across any videos of international artists dancing to his music, feel free to send them my way! I will watch the heck out of them. :D

~ 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

Had a very good two days off! :D On Monday I ran a bunch of errands I'd been putting off for a while and on Tuesday I completely reorganized one of my bookcases so that the books that had been living on my floor for so long now have a home. Progress! :D

I'd been hoping that today would also be a day off, because I was scheduled in the frozen yoghurt section of the concession, and while I was enjoying my days off, it was getting renovated to such an extent that the managers weren't sure whether or not it would be open today. It wasn't open today, but they still wanted to me to come in anyway. It was basically the most pointless shift of my life, haha. It's kind of amazing that the six hours passed as quickly as they did, because I seriously think I spent most of them desperately trying to find something to do. :P I did a lot of cleaning, and I also tried to figure out the new espresso machine. I only trained into the frozen yoghurt area like two months ago, and am a little frustrated that I have to learn a new machine so soon after learning the old one, but oh well, so far the new machine has provided nothing but amusement. xD I ended up taking a lot of sips of other people's coffee today, because I would make a drink for a co-worker and then they would pass it back to me asking what I thought of it. Considering I think coffee tastes pretty horrible anyway, I was not the best judge here, but the general consensus seems to be that this espresso machine produces disgusting drinks. And also you can't customize them in any way. So I am pretty excited for when we open again, and guests start complaining (rightfully so, it seems). Aha, ah well, I don't have any shifts in there for at least a week anyway! ^^;

At the end of the night I had to watch an instructional video on the machine, which was ridiculous since I'd already been using it for five hours. :P And I ended up missing large chunks of the video anyway, due to my co-workers hilariously making fun of it. What is it about instructional videos that make them so easily mockable?? xD

And then my manager's iPod was playing "Somebody's Watching Me." lolz!

BORING ENTRY IS BORING. You're welcome. :D

Real life paragraph: Today I filled out the application forms for this December's Japanese Language Proficiency Test! I'll be taking Level 2, the second most difficult level, and I have no idea whether I'll pass or not. D: Especially since I studied a lot in May and June and since then have sort of ... stopped. So yeah, definitely one of my goals for September is to pull out my textbooks and get back to work. I have been seriously lacking in motivation lately though, argh. :/ I'm looking forward to Monday and Tuesday, my next days off. Maybe this is ridiculous to say but I feel like I've been working too much. :P

Fandom paragraph: The lobby at work used to be filled with the sounds of a DVD that ran a twenty-minute loop of advertisements. Recently, we were all very excited to hear that it would be replaced with satellite radio. For the first couple weeks we had it on a Top 40 station which was okay, but it was getting really repetitive as well so I was glad when I walked into work today to find it'd been switched to a station that plays songs from the '90s - including "Scream"! :D :D :D Sad to say though that the one co-worker I know would've had a spontaneous and embarrassing dance party with me wasn't working today. :( OH WELL, I was still ridiculously excited! xD This isn't the first time I've listened to MJ at work - the managers usually have their iPods playing in the office and they each seem to have a couple MJ songs on them (one manager was singing along to "Heal the World" yesterday, it was really sweet <3 ) - but it was the first time I've heard one of my favourite songs blasting through the lobby, so I was pretty stoked. xD

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

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??