Pictures and Whining

So!

I'm starting to get caught up. I'm half-way down my list of blogs, and I did post an entry about the Fuji climb on my Japan blog. Also, those pictures are up.

I've turned the heel of my first sock, and am on the foot. Except for the gaping holes in the gussets, it's really not so hard. And self-striping yarn is just fun.

I have moved to Chapel Hill. YEA! I'm close to campus, just a short ride by bus from the stop that is about a minute from my door. My roommate is really nice. Tomorrow is SILS orientation, and school starts Tuesday. Now all I have to do is find a job, and I am set. Of course, the job might be the hardest part. But hey, what can you do?

I'm Still Not Dead! Just Not Very Communicative!

Hey, kids. Yes, I am a terrible blogger. I am doing my level best to get caught up this weekend, because guess what? School starts next week! OMFG! After that, I certainly can't expect to be blogging much more often than I am now. Let's hope, however, that when things settle down a bit and I get a regular internet connection again (ahem), I can at least blog semi-regularly.

Maybe.

Anyway. Here I am. How are you? I'm so sorry I haven't gotten caught up on all of your blogs. Hell, I don't even know if anybody is still reading this besides my mom (hi, M). If you are, Hey! I'll get caught up on your stuff soon. Er, soon-ish.

Quick me update: I am now in North Carolina, trying to find a place to live in Chapel Hill, trying to find a job, getting freaked out about the start of school, feeling a bit (okay, a lot) out of sorts because of the lack of settled personal stuff. Once upon a time I would have thought that home was where my stuff is. I have now amended that to where my stuff is organized.

It's good to be home, albeit weird. I've mostly adjusted, I think, and done most of the immediate gratification things I wanted to do - hung out with the rents, sat on the couch with the dogs for hours on end, eaten Taco Bell, Burger King, Cuban food, Chik-Fil-A, Steak'n'Shake, gone to the movies (more on that later), bought clothes and shoes in my size, driven around 'til I was tired of it again... All that. So, acclimated, I guess. I just miss my friends. A lot.

Trip and travel updates and pictures are still pending on my other blog. I might get around to doing some of that tonight. If you're lucky.

Okay, enough about that crap.

Knitting update: I've made a couple of wristlets for my new tattoo, and I've put them on Ravelry but I haven't yet put the patterns on this blog, as I've meant to do. It's on the list. But they're coming, as are pictures of stuff. I have also gotten Anne Budd's book on socks, and just today I cast on for my very first sock! Squeal! I like the yarn, JoAnn Sensations Bamboo and Ewe in a variegated purple and grey, and I'm excited to see the sock unfold and figure out how to do the heel and all that. Yea! I'm hoping to have the pair done by the time the colder weather gets here, but since school will be starting I just don't know what will happen to my knitting time.

Geekery update: Wanna know what kind of geek I am? I'm a Star Wars novel geek, that's what. When I got to my parents' house, I discovered, amongst the large piles of things belonging to me that they have patiently kept, the X-Wing series book 5, which I vaguely remembered giving to my mom to take home for me when I finished it two years ago, in the storage-unit-already-closed-but-still-in-the-US time frame before I left. Well, it looked a lot more fun than The Brothers Karamazov, which I was ostensibly reading, so in I plowed. And I've been geeking out to those, or the ones that I own on the East Coast, anyway, since I got home. Yes, I know.

Also, I saw G.I.Joe. I expected it to be utter crap, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it immensely. It was so over the top it was fun, and I don't think it was taking itself all that seriously, which I appreciated. Now that absurd child fight scene - well, that was a little disturbing, not gonna lie, but it was also just so damn absurd I'm not even annoyed about it. Then again, I was so absolutely delighted to be in that theater that I may have been more charitable than usual.

All right, that's me. I'll be getting on that stuff I mentioned above, hopefully, but until then, sayonara! Oh wait, I mean, Bah! Y'all come back now, y'hear?

Hilarity Monday: Good-bye Japan Edition

Oh, damn, has it been two weeks? Things have been crazy, as you might imagine. But I'm not dead, and I am home. In fact, everything is pretty peachy, except that it's in this weird in-between state.

Brief update, which will hopefully be embellished later: Mount Fuji was complete torture but we did it; Tokyo was cool but utterly exhausting; my flight was long but uneventful; I got to see my sister in Seattle, very briefly, which was great; Florida is hot and sticky but wonderful; my parents were delighted to see me, and I them; sitting with the dogs and cats is pure therapy and just delightful; there is no wireless internet at my parents' house, no way to connect my computer to their internet, and their computer is sloooooooow and annoying (sorry, M); I leave for North Carloina this weekend.

So that's it, in a nutshell. I hope to be talking all about Fuji and Tokyo and how weird and yet wonderful it is to be home in my Japan blog, but to do that I will need to spend yet more hours hanging out at Panera Bread COmpany or Barnes and Noble, since they are the nearby places with free wireless internet. Today was the first time I got to sit at Panera and I ended up drinking so much coffee my hands were shaking. And that was just getting caught up on correspondence and starting the UNC appointments and stuff! Just imagine the possibilities for caffeine overload in getting caught up on all the blogs and web comics and other things to which I became addicted over the past two years.

Anyways, my little Langoliers, I have not forgotten you, and I will read your blogs, will comment when appropriate, and I will update again soon, I promise. But for right now (and honestly, for the next couple of months, I think), I am in an odd, transitional limbo, with no real space of my own and no solid, constant internet connection for my little Powerbook. Hell, I'm writing this from my parents' computer, so I can't even give you pictures! So I am sorry, but have faith! This blog will return to its former, kind-of-interesting level of quality soon!

Meanwhile, here is your last Japanese-related Monday Hilarity. Well, it might not be the last, but you know what I mean. In celebration of the bizarreness that is Nihon, I give you: BINOCULAR FOOTBALL!!!!

Hilarity Monday - Good-bye Yatsushiro Edition

Oh, crap! Almost forgot it was Monday!

Spent the whole day cleaning and now get to hang out. I leave Yatsushiro in just 36 hours, climb Fuji in three days, and leave Japan in nine days. Yowza.

Here is another Japanese video, except that this one is only Japanese because I took it here. This week I am posting in honor of the amazing friends I have made here. This friend, who shall remain nameless in type, is one of the people I am so, so sorry to be leaving behind. During a group hangout one night, the star of this video read the warning "This Is Not A Toy" on the handle of a bug zapper shaped like a tennis racket. He took this to mean "I Am A Toy. Please Touch Me." While the rest of us egged him on, he decided to see what would happen, and I decided to record the incident just in case it turned out to be hilarious. See what happens!

WARNING!!!!!: Some silly girl drops the F-bomb in this video! I have no idea who such a potty-mouth could be.



Additional WARNING!!!: The star of this video is an intelligent, capable, awesome human being perfectly capable of reading and understanding the warning on an electric bug zapper. But he, like many of us, just wanted to see what would happen. I will be extremely unhappy if somebody leaves a comment insulting him for doing the kind of thing we ALL do from time to time. Please enjoy this charitably.

Hilarity Monday - Teaching English Edition

Whoa! This entry's a bit late. But it's still pretty early Monday for y'all, right?

So, yes, this blog has been intermittent lately. Thank you to those of you still reading, and extra thanks to those of you commenting. Things have just been super hectic the past couple weeks, and they are only going to get crazier. This is my last week teaching classes, and I leave Yatsushiro early next week. After that, I'm just all over the damn place. So I will do my best to keep the blog going with at least one entry per week, but it's going to be a while before things settle down. I do hope you'll forgive me.

Haven't been doing much knitting, what with the crazy busy and the ridiculous heat. But Brenda's baby shower was this past Saturday and it went very well, in spite of all my last minute freak-outs. She loved the blanket, hat, and booties, and I hope to get a bit of time to finish the sweater before I leave. She also got some adorable baby things, and really one of the delights of shopping for this stuff in Japan is the great Engrish you can put on your baby. There was a onesy that had an illustration of two dolphins and the words "Struggle for a ball!", a bib that said "I <3 MEAL" (except with a real heart graphic, not the punctuation), and another bib that said "Funky Baby." Brilliant.

Yes, Engrish is just one of the many things I will miss about Japan. I'm drinking another right now, C.C. Lemon. It has 70 lemons' worth of Vitamin C in it, don't you know.

Another thing I will miss is the hilarious-ness of teaching, or attempting to teach, English. Perhaps you all know that the Japanese have some trouble with "l" and "r", often confusing one for the other, so that innocent words such as "election" and "clap" become ridiculously funny when spoken by some people.

Also, Japanese grammar is fundamentally different from English, and words can be translated in the dictionary that are used in totally different ways in the two languages. For instance, "enjoy" gets thrown around a lot because it would be perfectly acceptable to simply say that in Japanese, but in English it becomes weird - not always wrong, but not natural. Examples include "Let's enjoy studying English now!" or "I will enjoy this weekend." Sometimes they try to make it better but make it worse: "Let's enjoying cleaning time!" Some of us blame Coca-Cola for this, with their giant "Enjoy Coke!" ads all over the place since the dawn of time.

Sometimes the word for "enjoy" gets translated as "pleasure," so I get gems like this one on student papers: "This fall, we will go to Osaka as a school trip. I will pleasure USJ." USJ, by the way, means Universal Studios Japan. I got paper after paper of kids writing about how they're going to Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara, which are famous for USJ and takoyaki. It's just a different world, folks. Then again, they are teenagers, so they're going to have a different perspective anyway.

In honor of my last week of being a teacher of English to Japanese kids, I bring you this video. It is a bit long, but hilarious. At least I think so, but then I've been in Japan for two years. Once or twice a year there's this TV special, of which this is a clip. The special involves a group of four comedians who get put into some weird situation for about 24 hours, and every time they laugh they get spanked with a whip. You don't need to understand Japanese to find this funny, but I think you do need to be Japanese to have ever dreamed it up. In any case, this is a clip from the one where they had to pretend they were in school. Since the whole joke is to make them laugh so they can get spanked, the people who create the show do all sorts of bizarre things to them to make them laugh.

Now, my English classes do not involve the beating of children or grown men, but just take a listen to the accent and pronunciation of that guy in the video and feel a bit of empathy, kay?



Lotions, indeed.