1) I am not a fan of Earth Hour because, in my opinion, it encourages people to feel like they are doing something to help the environment when they are not actually doing anything of the sort. I tend to dislike symbolic acts in general, but another reason I hold this opinion is because I spent my first Earth Hour sitting at work, listening to guests tell me that they'd been bored sitting at home with all the electronics off, so they got in their car and drove to the movie theatre. Wow, guys, you're a regular ol' Captain Planet over there!

2) I am very frustrated that we hear so much about the need to save energy and resources and everything like that, and yet just as many houses this year are decked out from top to bottom in Christmas lights. I am very frustrated that I can look out the window at four in the morning and see that these unnecessary lights have been left on all night.

So I totally forgot to change the excerpt on my NaNo profile before I went to work today, and by the time I got home it was too late! xD hahaha, oh well. But huge congratulations to everyone who won!! I know I've said this to several of you already but I'm just so proud of you guys that I feel the need to say it again, lol! I'm already looking forward to the next crazy novelling season. :)

In other news, tomorrow is my sixth of six straight days at work. I'm not too happy that I ended up working six days in a row the week before the JLPT, especially when I booked time off specifically for studying purposes. I'm really getting sick of how understaffed we constantly seem to be, it's ridiculous. At least tomorrow I have the option of leaving early. :/ Fingers crossed I can somehow wrangle my way out of my Friday shift, although I don't really see it happening, so maybe you should save your finger crossing for the hope that I somehow manage to pass the test!! x)

ahaha, won't you guys be so glad when it's December seventh and I can finally stop talking about this?? YES!!!

~ First off, if anyone cares, I edited the answers to my movie quiz into the post. And now I am stealing ( another meme. )

~ I should probably mention at some point that I have kinda-sorta-mostly dropped out of NaNoWriMo this year. In a previous entry where I was freaking out about my ability to finish NaNo and pass the JLPT, the_wykydtron correctly pointed out that I would be more upset if I failed the JLPT than if I failed NaNo, and ... there it is. I'm glad I made this decision, because I have definitely felt less stressed since I made it, but at the same time I'm really bummed and really frustrated that I let myself get so behind in both tasks that in the end I had to drop one completely. I shall just have to do lots of writing in December to make up for it, I guess! :3 (lol, but remind me to change my excerpt before it's too late! I'm not sure I like the current one enough for it to be up for an entire year. ^^; )

UGH though, the amount of work I'm having to do to protect my precious little study time! It's like as soon as I decided that studying was my number one priority, all of my co-workers have a desperate need for me to take their shifts. Often because they have exams to study for, lolariously enough. Well too bad, I booked this time off and it is MINE. :P

~ My mom's work is doing this thing through the Salvation Army where each employee is assigned a child in need to buy a Christmas present for! My mom was supposed to buy a gift for a five-year-old girl, and so yesterday she and I went and bought a bouncing Tigger board game sort of thing (and the necessary batteries) and a Dora the Explorer puzzle. (lol, yes, a puzzle - I'm totally going to be one of those adults from whom no kid wants to get presents, haha!) So that was fun! Mom asked what my work is doing for the holidays and I kind of laughed at that. Like, one year I think they did a can drive, and that's about it. I don't have a lot of faith in the humanitarian spirit of this company. :X

~ November has gone way too quickly, what the heck. :|

I've done this before but I'm doing it again!

1. Pick fifteen movies you know/like/love. (I'm only doing eleven because I'm having issues thinking of movies I didn't use before!)
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie. (lol, I never do this. Everyone can guess!!)
5. No Googling/using IMDb search functions.

( guess guess guess )

Edit: ( answers answers answers )

SPEAKING OF MOVIES, the theatre I work at is currently in the middle of its BUSIEST WEEKEND IN FIVE YEARS. Today alone we sold SIX THOUSAND TICKETS, when on an average Saturday we usually hover around four thousand.

SIX THOUSAND TICKETS.

brb passing out from exhaustion. If it doesn't slow down tomorrow, I don't even. Thanks, SMeyer. DDDD:

(Meanwhile, our New Moon-less partner theatre downtown sold like five hundred. HAHAHAHAHA wut)

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.

So I definitely spent twelve hours at my workplace today (minus a quick trip to the mall to finally pick up some holiday cards for the exchange!): eight hours working (omg so. busy.) and four hours watching Gone With the Wind on the big screen! The movie started at eleven in the morning and, to be honest, I am really surprised that I was able to force myself out of bed in time to watch it. I was actually on the verge of sleeping in and skipping it before I realized that if Sarah of 2008 found out that I missed a chance to see GWtW in a theatre, she would never speak to me again! ( random rambles about GWtW )

Thus ends day one of Sarah's Week of Star-Crossed Lovers. xD

Time for a totally random picture post!

( hontou ni waratteru ko nante iru no kana )

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.

~ 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.

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 )

So I definitely used my carbon tax rebate in exactly the way it isn't supposed to be used, but I was in the mood to throw money at two of my favourite web sites. xD For the first time ever I have a halo on my NaNoWriMo profile, woohoo! Maybe this will act as motivation to actually finish this year ... but I doubt it. :P

I am also taking bets on how many of my thirty-five icons I actually use, and how soon I regret purchasing them, lol. xD But oh well, going out and collecting them all provided me with a couple hours of distraction last night that I would've otherwise spent just whining about how sick I am. So. :D (Hilariously enough, I think I've actually used like half of these icons before, but I never keep icons so I had to go out and find them all again!!)

Nothing much else to report except I watched Dead Man's Chest the other day for the first time in an unusually long time, and so now Pirates is back to being my favourite thing ever. <3 I have Pirates of the Caribbean on my nametag at work (we have our favourite movies on our nametags), and the other day a guest asked me why I like it so much. I was just like, seriously, I could write an entire book on why I love this trilogy so much, don't ask me such a question when I'm trying to keep the line moving!! xD <33

Co-worker 1: "Do you have 'work' written on your hand so you would remember to come here tonight?"

Co-worker 2: "No, Kelly wrote that on my hand so I would remember to do it."

~ 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

Today is CI's made-up holiday! Happy Special Hug Day, everyone! xD; I got a letter from one of my sponsored kids today, yay. <3

Anyway, I am really just posting to say that I cannot stop listening to the preview of Morning Musume's new single, "Kimagure Princess." I have no idea why they thought it would be a good idea to chipmunkify the girls' voices, but other than that I love it! Although that's nothing new, there's only ever been like three MoMusu singles I don't like. xD

I was thinking the other day about how there was a long while where I was really embarrassed to be a MoMusu fan, to the point where I actually stopped listening to them for a year or so. Actually, I guess that happened around the time the MoMusu forum I'd been visiting closed, and so I felt like I was the only one continuing to like this group that everyone else thought was awful. Eventually I just decided WHATEVER, I love MoMusu and I don't care what anyone else thinks!! I feel like this is an attitude I need to take up in other areas of my life. Like, I continue to be embarrassed when people ask me what my hobbies are (answering with "Writing" or "Studying languages" always ends with my conversation partner asking, "... And??") or what kind of music I listen to (lol, my vague answers to this question have my managers on a constant quest to find out - although they definitely know I like Miley*), and I have been putting off telling my parents what I want to go back to school for for fear of being teased. :/ So ... yeah. I gotta stop being so embarrassed of my interests, I guess.

Okay, time to study!

* The lobby's Top 40 station has "Party in the USA" in its rotation, and there are two of us who have to constantly defend this song from everyone else who is hating on it. During one such discussion, one of my co-workers accused me of having a girlcrush on Miley. Well I guess I can't deny it, lololololol~ 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

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

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??

Last night I had a co-worker tell me that Disneyland Paris (actually, she said "Euro Disney," but every time someone says that I inwardly cringe because IT'S NOT CALLED THAT ANYMORE!!) has no Haunted Mansion. To which I replied, uh, yeah it does, it's called Phantom Manor and it opened with the park.

Today in a ridiculously long guest service meeting at work, the presenter was trying to make the point that no one talks about how expensive Disneyland is because they have such a good time there, only he quoted the price of a park ticket as $99. To which I thought, uh, no, your most basic ticket is $72 U.S., which is still only $78 Canadian. But thanks for coming out.

I'm sorry to post about this stuff all the time but this is obviously my version of SOMEONE IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET. I seriously just want to be like, GUYS. It's a THEME PARK. It's not ROCKET SCIENCE. GET IT RIGHT!!

Ugh omg why am I not at Disneyland right now. Can someone explain this to me plz??? D: