ほぼ日刊JF

What’s this?  An update?  It’s been quite 久しぶり (a while) since I did so!

Yesterday, I visited a special museum and then saw a movie that was good but not so special. More specifically, I had the privilege to go see the Tezuka Osamu museum in Takarazuka, which is where Mr. Tezuka spent part of his life. Not being particularly well-educated about Tezuka Osamu, I was puzzled by most of the characters and such on display, but I did know about Astroboy, which I’m sure you must know as well. I got to learn about Tezuka’s obsession with bugs and that he seems to be at the origin of fan service in animes, and that he even made a movie about Cleopatra’s erotic adventures with a green-skinned Julius Caesar. The theme that they were trying to emphasize through the museum though was that Tezuka Osamu was a humanist who believed in peace and mankind’s unity. Although there was a notice that said “We realize that many of these images might seem racist to non-Japanese people. We believe that this is just the result of seeing them in a wrong context.” which… yeah.

After that, I met up with Sami, my future roommate in Sackville, and we went to see Last Blood, also known as Blood: The Last Vampire’s live action. The movie was actually about 90% in English, which disappointed a bit because I’ve yet to see a Japanese movie in theatres just in Japanese. I felt the movie was part Blade, part Matrix, and part Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The part where Saya fought against American demons felt Blade/Matrix, but then later on, the small portion of the movie that’s in Japanese, features forest combat against ninjas that feels so much like wu shu. We left the theatre, with Sami being particularly frustrated because the movie did not really have an ending. For nostalgia’s sake, since Sami had lived in my dorm, we came back to my place and hung out for a while, discussing how Canadians and Japanese relate to people differently and the difficulties of switching from a very hierarchised, structured way of relating to people like in Japan to a horizontal, very unstructured Canadian way. It was good times.

So that was my day. I’m trying to do what I wanted to do in Japan as my days count down, and I realized if I don’t schedule it, I’ll just sleep my days away. I also need to budget properly, as I realized that I’ve been spedning 25$ a day and I’m not really sure on what I am spending that money on else than possibly food. Soon, I will be shipping stuff back home and I’m hoping I won’t have to spend 1000$ just in shipping fees, so we’ll see…

I will probably look back and regret this as wasted time in Japan, but I’ve just been lazying around lately. Spent most of the day in bed, playing video games. At one point me and Markus went out and played a game of Senjou no Kizuna, but since it’s tournament time, nobody else was playing in the non-tournament games, so we just fought against bots. We tried to join the tournament, but the way it works is that Western Japan is Zeon, and Eastern Japan is Federation. Since me and Markus are playing federation, but we’re in Western Japan, we can’t join in. :/ But the good news is, Western Japan is winning! Take that, Tokyo!

Else than that, we were talking if Japan met our expectations that we had before coming here… For me, I think I had already lowered my expectations a lot, so I wasn’t expecting much, really. Although for the first few months I was kind of pissed off a lot. Now I’m okay, things have settled down. I don’t feel things are special though. There’s days I’m happy to be here though, but other days I’m just “meh.” I think I need to learn to appreciate things though, or else too many things in life will be “meh.” I figure this’ll help me deal with it when I go back to Canada though…

Oh, by the way, I’ve been vlogging and such, I just didn’t add the vlogs to this blog. I’ll do that at some point, properly timestamped and all that. Not tonight though…

In a very stereotypical scenario, tonight (at around 2 AM) I was working on my homework in my cold room, warming myself up with a kotatsu and munching on some mikans.

All I’m missing is a cat to curl up under it now.

Feb 27 Blog:

Later on that night, fire broke out:

I hate keigo (polite Japanese).  It makes me sound like a total idiot because I can’t do it.  Conversation class makes me nervous now because I can’t do anything in it.

Yesterday, I played D&D all day, and as a result, didn’t really get much homework done. So today, all I did was homework. I still have lots of homework left. I don’t understand. Not really liking the pace of winter intensive, it’s too much. I’m already flaking, I might just stop doing homeworks all together soon. Looking forward to spring semester.

Throat still feels like someone took a rake to it. Today I napped from 6 PM to 8 PM, so probably I will only sleep 4 hours at night. I’m expected to find a part-time job with this. Ha…

Good news is the yen is falling. I might get through this yet…

Got up this morning, feeling like hell.  Hauled myself to school anyways.  Lived through grammar class.  Then I checked out the library, where I borrowed a book, “Yakuza Moon: Memoirs of a Gangster’s Daughter” by Tendo Shoko.  Definitely not a literary masterpiece of Japan, but an interesting look at someone’s life.  I wanted to borrow a Murakami Haruki book, but they were all out.  I saw a classmate with “Kafka on the Shore” today.  I will poke him about it.

I also watched “Udon.”  It’s a pretty good movie, I recommend it, if you like Japanese food and all that.  There’s also a hilarious “Captain Udon” scene.

I went back home, still coughing and dying.  Helped a friend here in the dorm get his internet hooked up, then went back to my room and did some kanji homework.  I didn’t have time to do all the homework I needed to do though…  I shouldn’t have read a few chapters from that book and watched that movie, I suppose…

Tomorrow’s kanji test will suck, like the last one.

So, I was trying to make another vlog. I recorded myself three times. What did YouTube do? It just trashed all my videos. Then I go back on the main site: We are currently performing site maintenance. Please be patient - we’ll be back shortly.

Anger….

Okay, quick recap of my day then, in text:
I am sick, still sick, it’s not cool, my nose is runny now, it will probably be runnier tomorrow. It seems I’m permanently sick nowadays. Other people are getting sick too, so it’s not just me though.

I tried to make Western-style mayonnaise, because the mayo is different in Japan and I want to make lobster rolls (but with fake crab) for an Atlantic Canadian food night that would also have poutine, Newfoundland pea soup and Acadian mini-sugar pies on the menu. It failed horribly. It didn’t emulsify and all I was left was this big oily liquidy goop. I tried microwaving it for fun. It just made clumps. Maybe garlic fingers would be a better idea… With donair sauce?

I explored Stickam recently. I heard about it way back but never really checked it out much. I didn’t think it was so interesting. I decided to try to see what it was like. I still think it’s not very interesting, actually, I think it’s a very weird place. It’s basically a land of crappy radio channels, 12-14 year old girls that feel the need to expose their entire life (usually they are either emo or hormonally raging), and creepy 30 year old guys that come in, shirtless, somehow thinking that’ll turn on these underaged girls. So, in other words, there was nothing interesting for me there, so I probably won’t be coming back.

I watched Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Last episode of Lost was alright, not great, but alright. Seems there’s a new character now (that Indian guy next to Hugo. That makes two Indians on the show. Although Sayyid is supposed to be Iraqi, the actor is Indian…) As for Battlestar Galactica, it was good, but not as good as episode 13 and 14. I guess I just like revolutions and such, even though I’m such a coward right now I would be worthless in an armed one. I guess the message the show is trying to get across is coming out now: we all have to work together, or something.

And yeah. That’s about it. On YouTube, I was trying to rant about a community that would be for serious, academic and intellectual discussions on subject, something seperate from YouTube which you can’t really have those things on it. That doesn’t make YouTube bad, I don’t want to have serious discussions all the time, I also want to just talk about personal things or watch funny videos or whatever, but I’d love a sort of reputation-based community in which you could talk about things seriously and people could academically point out the flaws in my arguments and so forth, and would want to hear me talk endlessly about Acadian history, or Chinese politics or whatever…

Anyways…