蒸し暑すぎる

It's SO HOT RIGHT NOW. UGHHHHH. According to my alarm clock, it's currently 87 degrees Fahrenheit, which is TOO HOT FOR LIVING. Especially since it's so humid that my notebook has gotten all wet and sticky just from being out in the air. EW.

Good news is that I'm pretty much done with my homework even though it's not even 5 p.m. So I'm gonna try to start up some of my homework for later this week ('cause we have a boatload of reading to do).

Also, I wrote up my proposal for the class I'm going to teach. I'm picking a segment of Durarara!! to read (the prologue, which has Mika being a stalker and Seiji being Seiji and what's-her-face Yagiri-sister-lady being all brother-complexy), and we're going to talk about writing style and speech patterns. Everyone else in the class has far better Japanese than I do, so I feel that attempting to teach them regular Japanese (i.e. vocabulary and grammar) would be rather futile, so I'm going to play to my strengths instead. I know a lot more about light novels than they do, and I understand the writing style, and I

OH MAN, WAS THAT A BREEZE? SORRY, GOTTA GO REVEL IN THE MOVING AIR FOR A SECOND.

Sorry, what was I saying? Oh yeah, writing style. I know a lot about writing style and character speech patterns (what with editing and writing and all), so I figure that I'll actually have something to teach them there. Hopefully. We'll see if my proposal gets approved.

Other than that...not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on. Mostly been doing homework and feeling gross and sticky all day. AND TOMORROW IS SUPPOSED TO BE WORSE. UGH. WHERE IS MY RAIN?

I am seriously THIS CLOSE to just running down to the river and jumping in. But that would involve my moving. Hrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg.

Oh, yeah, and 'cause Ann asked for them, here're today's cultural differences:

There are almost always more bikes than cars on the road when I'm walking to school, which is awesome, except that they're allowed to ride on both the road and sidewalk. This usually isn't a problem, 'cause the bikers are really good at avoiding pedestrians, but barely anyone bothers to use their bike bells, which means that I'll be walking along and suddenly a biker will go whizzing right by a few centimeters from my shoulder, and I will freak out and try to suppress my urges to punch things. Yeah. A least I'm slowly getting used to it. SLOWLY.

Also, I don't think I've seen a single person wearing a helmet. What, do none of these people value their brain cells? Head trauma is not fun, guys. (Says the person who would know pretty well.)

Another thing I've noticed is that barely anyone wears bright colors. And I don't mean hot pink bright. I mean that my clothes seem ridiculously bright compared to most other people's. Pretty much everyone wears shades of grey, white, black, or pastels (light blue, yellow, and pink seem to be the most popular). The one guy I saw who had a bright orange shirt also had blue hair. I think there's some correlation here.

Also, I don't know about anywhere else, but I would say that 90% of the women on the Doshisha campus wear high heels. Yes, even the bikers. Personally, I can barely walk in high heels, let alone bike in them, but apparently these girls can pull it off just fine.

Okay, I'm gonna to study kanji now. BYE BYE.

P.S. I apologize to anyone who I offend by using INORDINATE AMOUNTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS, but it's either that or italicizing huge chunks of text. And really you don't want that.

P.P.S. Mika freaks me out. But not as much as Seiji. Was it just me or did he not come across this psychotic in the anime? Probably he was the same amount of psychotic, but it's magnified 'cause now I get to read him narrating psychotically. Seriously, his inner alarm bell sound effects would be hilarious if they weren't so freaky.

P.P.P.S. Why do I even bother to end posts any more if I'm going to keep tacking on post-scripts?

P.P.P.P.S. ある友達によると、私の日本語で書いた文章をGoogleで翻訳すれば、すごく面白い。まあ、面白いかどうか分からないけど、彼女を笑わせれば、いいんじゃないか。

宿題が眠れないほどある

It is 11:13 p.m. and I just finished my homework (出来たばかりだ), so I'm going to have to tell my boy scout shrine adventure story at a later date.

Anyway, today I went on a boy scout shrine adventure in the morning (seriously, I will tell this story later, because it's a good one, I swear) and then spent the rest of the day doing homework. WHEE. (Well, to be fair, I Skyped my parents to say "Happy Father's Day" to my dad, but I was doing homework while I was talking to them.)

UGH, NOT LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS WEEK. We're having a debate on Tuesday, my long paper's due on Wednesday, I have to give a news presentation on Thursday, and Friday is our midterm exam. Guess who probably isn't going to be sleeping at all this week.

Plus I have to give a presentation tomorrow afternoon contrasting paper books and electronic books. Yeah. Well. We'll see how that goes.

Sorry for being all boring today, but I'm gonna go pass out now, you guys.

日常生活

Well, I don't think I have any way of topping the TRIP INTO THE LAND OF WEIRD which was yesterday's blog entry, so, uh, yeah. I'm not sure whether to apologize or not.

Today's exciting bit of news: we had our keigo (super polite forms of Japanese) class today, and I had to write an email to a teacher (requesting a meeting with him), and I only got two corrections (both of which were really minor)! YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!

Other than that...not a whole lot has been happening. Just been doing homework and dying in the heat.

Tomorrow we're going on a field trip to the American consulate in Osaka for a "security briefing" (which I'm pretty sure is code-talk for a recruitment spiel), and then on Saturday we're taking the train to Nara! If you're not familiar with Japanese history, Nara was the first capital of Japan, and this year is their 1300 birthday (something is seriously wonky with that math, though, 'cause the Taika revolution was in 645, not 710...maybe it officially became the capital in 710?), so it's a big, honking deal. Anyway, I don't know how much free time I'll have in the next few days, so expect either very short blog posts or (worst case scenario) no posts at all.

Anything else to report? Hmmm...nope, I don't think so.

Uno in Japanese is...Uno

I actually finished my homework early today! And even better, my end of semester report topic got approved. I'm writing about the relationship between youth and Shinto. (In case you haven't noticed, I have a little bit too much enthusiasm when it comes to Shinto. But it's fascinating, I swear!) Anyway, I'm taking a short break and then diving straight into Wednesday's homework.

Let's see, what other exciting things have been happening? I played Uno with my little host brother and my host father after dinner. It was basically exactly the same as American Uno, except none of the cards had words on them. (So the skip and reverse cards only had the symbols, as did the wild cards.) Also, I lost. Twice. Well, technically I got in second the first game and lost the second. My host brother was far too pleased, and I was far too pleased, and then somehow I wound up explaining the difference between robbery and burglary. My conversations always seem to veer into the Land of Strange.

Um, what else? Dinner was delicious, as always, although my host mother took pity on my total inability to cut meat with chopsticks and gave me a knife and fork instead.

Oh, I had my first two bits of "culture shock" on Saturday.

The first bit of culture shock came though a conversation with my host mom.

Me: Yeah, we went to Tetsugaku no Michi with our residential director.

Host mom: Oh, the fat woman?

Me: I'm sorry?

I figured that I was mishearing what she was saying, or maybe that there was some other meaning for 太っています that I wasn't aware of.

HM: You know, the big woman?

Me: She has red hair...?

HM: Yes, that's her. You don't think she's fat?

Well, I don't think she's fat at all. Full figured maybe, but definitely not fat. Or particularly large. She's not much bigger than me.

Me: Um, no, I don't think she's fat, but then again, Americans have different body types than Japanese do, right? For example, compared to most Americans, I'm pretty small, but compared to Japanese people, I'm kind of big.

HM: Big? [skeptical look]

Me: I mean, I'm tall. I'm probably taller than most Japanese girls.

HM: But I'm taller than you.

AND THEN MY SOUL WAS CRUSHED FOREVER.

I'm assuming that there's some sort of connotation to 太っています that I'm missing, or just that the word "fat" in English has a much more negative connotation than it does in Japanese. Either that, or anyone who isn't as skinny as a beanpole is automatically "fat." I'm actually leaning toward the last one, because my favorite teacher from last summer said she was fat, and by American standards, she wasn't even chunky. It's interesting to think about how standards vary from place to place.

My second bit of culture shock came when a Japanese girl I was talking to told me that she preferred American men to Japanese men because men from California are "blonde, cool, and outspoken" and Japanese men are "shy, boring, uncool, yellow monkeys." I...well. Yeah. That was an interesting situation. I am not sure that I know any men from California who fit that description. And I definitely don't agree with that stereotype of Japanese men. (And I said so, and then I said that there are some American girls who like shy, quiet Japanese boys and that not all American men are like that--some of them are shy and quiet too--and she started going, "うそ!" (No way!) at me. But then she started asking about cross-cultural dating in the U.S., and why American girls would like Japanese men, so maybe I managed to break down a stereotype a little bit? Maybe?)

Anyway, I'm going to go do some more homework and then call it a night. じゃ、ね！

*sigh*

You know those days when you wonder why the heck you're even bothering to do what you're doing? I've been having one of those days. I spent the entire day doing homework, and it wasn't even like it was meaningful homework. It was almost entirely busy work, things like "copy down all the sentences that show that the juror system is important." I want to learn Japanese, not learn how to copy things really well. I wouldn't have a problem with the homework if there was actually a point to it, but there isn't, and honestly, I could be doing exactly the same thing at home, so why am I even here? What's the point of living with a host family if I never actually have time to be around them?

I think I need a sanity break, but knowing me, I'll just wind up doing more homework to try to get a little bit ahead this week (not going to happen) and then collapse into bed.

[/angst]

On a lighter note, I found out that Ratatouille and Up have been retitled in Japanese as Remi's Delicious Restaurant and Grandpa Carl's Flying House respectively. You learn something new every day, I guess.