Hello. I don't f-lock any of my posts, lazy as I am, so any and all of my obnoxious opinions are out there for the world to see.

Feel free to friend - or not friend - me, either is fine. Just note that I do not have to friend you back for you to see my posts.

Thank you. :)

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if anyone has any pictures/vids/stories of Adam, or thinks of some music that he really liked, please forward the information to chaemae@gmail.com

thanks!

やっぱり日本のほうがいいんだ
今朝お兄さんが亡くなる時
誕生日の終りだった
十七時間の未来では

さあ
ここだね
（ニューヨークもカリフォルニアもアメリカのどこでもね）
誕生日の始まりだけなんて

今日、長そうです...

日本で、もうあたしの誕生日だろう
東京の人に祝ってもらった
でも
ここでは
まだ誕生日じゃないんぞ

おもしろいんじゃない?
東京は、十七時間の未来なんて
ここで立って、見回ってるんが
十七時間の未来には行けないん
待つしかない

今窓の外のグランドで
たくさん男の子がフリスビーしてるんぞ
毎日してるの
無料のテレビ見たい

はは
カリフォルニアやっぱりいい所だ
でも雪がない
ちょっと残念ね
よくタホーへ行かなきゃ

さあ
一時間四十八分後で
誕生日だよ
十七時間の未来で
三時間の未来で
何してるの?
教えてくれて

そして下手な日本語を許してください
実は
だれか名前言えない人(家族）
このブログを読むなんて!!!!!
-________-

ワ。ル。イ。

...

じゃ、もうすぐ十九歳になる私
今「さようなら」って~!



:)

in the big picture: to do everything I do because I want to do it, not because I (and other people) think I should

in the small picture: to do everything I don't/didn't want to do for trivial reasons (read: self-consciousness, evasion) because it's silly not to

this applies to small things like changing my course and not walking into a coffeeshop because I see someone I know from high school through the window, and don't want to talk to them for no good reason at all (when walking into the coffeeshop doesn't even necessarily dictate that I have to talk to them), and regretting the lack of coffee later on in the morning



HI I'M ALIVE I'm in college and doing just fine, my brother's sick and it's a great night out, how do you do?

I do not approve of chemotherapy.

Our dog may be abused and neglected and spoiled (and fat) but he is a member of the family nonetheless and as he cannot speak and as I am probably the only one who remembers him in such times of neglect, I shall speak for him: he does not approve of chemotherapy either.

You guys, don't do anything stupid before I get home this weekend. Not that my existence matters very much to the household.



(but at least someone will remember me! says the doggie)

SO I wanted to make this a photo post but I CAN'T FIND MY CAMERA CORD so so much for that.

Instead, you can have the two weeks I've had since I got back, random summary style. (Note: there may be a bit of skipping around because everything has sort of blended together in my head.)

This is a very late continuation of a New Year's Eve post detailing Life in Japan and Life After Japan. For part 1, CLICK HERE.

( two weeks cut, pasted, and strung together )

Here is a continuation of my Life in Japan stories! For part 1, CLICK HERE.

( continued )

And so the first day of the new decade unveils itself with quarreling in the kitchen, a lone cup of coffee on a Starbucks card that does not work outside of Japan, and one fluffy white bullet going berserk on dead dead dead yellow grass spanning space enough to build a small town in the middle of Tokyo.

( warning: chinese ensues )

Clearly I am not going to write the exact same thing twice, because I just am not that bored. Instead, I shall present you all with a summary of life in Japan as it was before I left, and life at home as it has been since I got back!

( JAPAN BEFORE I LEFT, IN VIGNETTES )

Sometimes I wonder why God made people so awkward. We keep our true feelings inside because we don’t want to get hurt, and the funny thing is if someone does not, he almost certainly will be because others are just as afraid. They grow wary, they think you’re testing the waters, and then they say things they don’t mean that stabs everyone right back to square one. It’s a lose-lose situation.

Everyone knows this. Everyone is afraid of this. So in the end everyone has their masks on all the time and people who care brush by each other like they can’t even see and all of life runs like a game of Guess Who.

It’s impossible to win. All the players want is to rip away as much of the others’ masks as possible while keeping their own intact. Revealing too much will only allow other players to chew you, digest you, and then spit you back out to play with, now knowing how best to toy with you and let you suffer. So everyone is forced to keep up their masks and forced to play the game, whether they like it or not.

What would happen if everyone dropped their masks, all at once? I tend to think that the world would be a better place. Perhaps I am too idealistic… but not really, because I acknowledge that it won’t happen any time soon (if ever), and so I don my mask with everyone else and meld into the shadows.

It’s been a while. My dorm room is eerily clean, the toilet glints so white I am reluctant to use it, and I am sitting in front of my laptop waiting for my shoes to dry. They are, incidentally, tied to the ceiling – more accurately the heater on the ceiling. This is the last time I’m downing coffee at 8 PM at night, however delicious the photo may look.

*

RIGHT.

So I was originally planning to follow that up with an explication of life in Japan, but I got distracted by my bed. And now (two days later) that I am back in California things just don’t look quite the same anymore.

For one, I am currently on a bed in a room that is larger than my entire apartment. No, I am not kidding! One bedroom in my house could fit probably two of my dorm rooms in it, kitchen and bathroom and all. My entire house could probably fit 20, and more.

I am also incredibly unaccustomed to the ceiling being more than 5 inches away from my face, but more on that later.

There is a monk in my house. He has a machine with him that supposedly tests your quantum frequencies and tells you things like your objective level of pain and whether or not you have cancer. The machine also makes ridiculous blooping noises in series, like Star Wars cartoonified. Every so often as we are eating, it goes off,

Bloop-bloop-bloop-bloop-bloop-bloop-bloop-bloop…

Nothing much has changed since I left. My brother still has a tumor inside of him, the doctors (East and West) still can’t figure out what’s wrong, my mother is, as ever, trying to make herself feel useful by being bossy, and as a result my sister is feeling harassed and my brother is banned from eating just about everything delicious in the world. Oh, and apparently mystical monks are now allowed in the house. Clearly mommy has finally gone off the far end of things.

My dog is a cutie pie though. <3

It’s hard to think about Japan here, where the sun is so dazzling bright and the sky bluer than blue can be. California is not such a bad place to be, after all. There are people waiting for me here, my beaten-up ducttaped trash heap of a car is the same as ever, and oh, did I mention the food? I was in awe the first time I opened the fridge door (FOUR TIMES the size of my fridge) and found it ABSOLUTELY FULL. TO THE BRIM. WITH DELICIOUS CHINESE FOOD AND ALL SORTS OF THINGS. And that’s just the fridge, you know, it doesn’t even count the pantry. I had gotten to the point where I had literally forgotten there was food other than yakisoba and miso and don and delicious Korean food, you know?

(Read: I’ve probably eaten 5x the amount I regularly eat in a day since I’ve gotten back. Watch me grow fat. O__O)

Everything is so large and so spacious. I thought I would be shocked by the lack of people on the streets – like my dad said, if Martians landed on Los Angeles, they would think we were a planet inhabited by cars – but to my surprise I completely readjusted in less than a day. After all, it’s always so warm and sunny and comfortable here, and… it’s just the way things are.

(When night falls, though, and I’m lying in the darkness surrounded by empty space twice the size of my dorm room and wondering why the ceiling is so far away, I remember the neon lights of Shinjuku and throngs of people on the streets, Korean boys drinking and store clerks bowing, late night coffee at McDonalds and rolling around upside-down on a creaky bed having half-coherent conversations until morning, and I miss Japan like mad.)

Today as I woke up the Nickelback song kept repeating itself over and over in my head, for no apparent reason. Maybe I'm just in that kind of mood today.

But it occurred to me that the lyrics were wrong.

Instead of the day when nobody died, I think it should be:

If everyone cared, and nobody lied,
If everyone loved, and nobody sighed,
If everyone shared, and swallowed their pride,
Then we'd see the day when nobody cried
When nobody cried

I've been in an odd sort of mood lately, but more on that later. Off to school now.

edit: And my odd sort of mood has dissipated by the time I got home, due to some ridiculous happenings at school, so I guess I can no longer continue this post!

edit2: I do realize that the current Nickelback lyrics alliterate ('cared/cried', 'loved/lied', 'shared/swallowed', 'day/died'). Just... you know, meaning-wise.

(Also lulz at the Sutton training.)

10. You say "Faito! Faito!" instead of "Fight! Fight!"

9. You always have a packet of tissues on you, no matter what.

8. Your idea of fast food is a gyu-don from Matsuya.

7. You take someone else's umbrella without batting an eye when leaving a convenience store, because someone has already taken yours.

6. You get confused when there isn't a ticket machine in the restaurant and don't know how to pay the bill.

5. You start using other people as backrests on the train.

4. You see a little elementary school boy run past in shorts so short it's like he's not wearing pants, and think, "Aw, how cute!"

3. You tell your friend, "Hold on, I'm hungry, I'm going to make myself some miso soup," without thinking there's anything weird about it.

2. You fall asleep on the train and wake up exactly as it pulls into your station.

1. You see your friend eating an oreo in Philadelphia and mistake it for a riceball.


OREO? WHAT'S THAT???

I'M SORRY MELODY /SOB

I think I'm never going back to Sunshine City again.

yayyyyyyyyyyy harajukuuuuuuuuuu

Unit 2 Triple
Standard meal plan

( schedule )

A brief summary of my day.

(warning: conversations may have been edited for brevity's sake)

( as follows )

At 4 something yesterday, I hit 48,600 words.

I had also finished my NaNovel.

WHOOPS.

YAY FOR 1,400 WORDS OF BULLSHIT HAHAHAHAHA

After all that time spent coffee shop scouting, hours upon hours cooped up in libraries and Starbucks with Weina, mad sprints of word marathoning to classical music, I am done.

In celebration, I slept with my pillow facing the other way. Needless to say, I woke up very disoriented today.


So! The craze has ended.

And immediately, I have descended to... a WEBCAM JUNKIE.

No really! Yesterday (after the end of Nano) was like. Sharing Music Day. I found my study buddies (alas, no longer =/) in McDonald's and we spent at least an hour swapping music three ways on three different earphones (which, let me tell you, gets incredibly confusing) and learned quite a lot about each other.

ADELA: POWER METAL GOGOGOGO
WEENA: MY EARS
ADELA: ...I have classical, too?
WEENA: Here! Have some of my beautiful, melodic, Celion-Dion esque easy listening pieces!
TIFFANY: I CAN'T LISTEN TO THIS I'M GOING TO CRY /SOB
A + W: ... ...
TIFFANY: Here! Have some old Chinese songs!
ADELA: ♥
WEENA: My melodic pieces...
ADELA: Here! Have some K-pop!
WEENA: Too noisy.
TIFFANY: Here! Have some K-pop!
WEENA: Yay! ♥
ADELA: But that's just as noisy as my K-pop /sob

and so it went.

And then I went home. And ended up chatting on Skype for two hours and - you guessed it - swapping music through Skype speakers. J-pop instead of K-pop! Life of a fob?

In the morning, I woke up, disoriented by the odd configuration of the room (my pillow was on the wrong side), and became even more disoriented when I saw my friend, who was now BLOND.

ADELA: I don't recognize you.
MELODY: I don't recognize myself.
A: ... ...
M: ... ...

And so we stared at each other (or really just at her) through Skype for at least an hour, if not more.

Whereupon I rushed through all my homework on the train and right before class and made it just as the teacher walked in the door. HA.


Oh I was being patronizing in class today and totally got a slap in the face for it.

SENSEI: So anyone know what this yellow flower is called in English?
US STUDENT #1: Nope.
US STUDENT #2: Nope.
US STUDENT #3: Nope.
ADELA: Nope.
SENSEI: Oh, well then. The next kanji is...
ADELA: Psst, it's called rape!
US STUDENT #1: I know.
ADELA: Oh.

Totally deserved that. Also, for those of you who are not sure what I'm talking about, Rape is also the name of a flower. A YELLOW FLOWER. THAT GROWS IN FIELDS.

So when I got home today my Malaysian friend (the one in Britain now) - you guessed it again - Skype-d me! IN CLASS.

Oh boy we felt so badass, Skype-ing during the middle of a law lecture. Well, she was the only one really at risk there, since I'm sitting happily in my dorm all the way across the other side of the world, but hey. Share the love.

Also, her professor had an AWESOME BRITISH ACCENT. Understandable, as he was in Britain, but he also repeated the words "grievous bodily harm" at least 30-40 times within the 20 minutes that I listened to him lecture, and it was the only thing I really picked up on. Apparently grievous bodily harm is very important to lawyers.

AHEM.

So now that I have procrastinated making dinner far too long, here is a list of things to do now that I am free of the noveling nightmare!


LIST OF THINGS TO DO

-PIRATE MARATHON YAYAYAYYAY
-karaoke
-use up the rest of my manga cafe coupons
-CAT CAFE
-visit Shibuya!
-go to Harajuku. ON A SUNDAY.
-cut hair (wait for Weena)
-scout bookoffs for Yuu and Kaens
-GET ABOVE 90 ON A GRAMMAR TEST T___T
-shabushabu partayyyyyy


yay! I sound like those girls I used to think were really lame for facebook whoring all the time and using backwards smileys.

WELL HOW THINGS CHANGE

Incidentally, I saw an FML the other day about some girl's little sister who decided to get revenge on her by switching her bottle of hair dye with a bottle of Nair.

...what a horrible little sister.

O_____O k byeeeeeee


(PS. I'm still a little high from writing 50,000 words in one month. Just, you know. A bit. :D)


edit: Speaking of Skype and lectures, I have an idea for when we get back to school! How about everyone draw straws, and the loser can go to the lecture, keep Skype on, and everyone else study from home. :D

croatian rhapsody by maksim has taken over my soul

spent my morning running around doing errands and cooped up in a coffee shop

then got to school and cooped up to write some more and nearly died of exhaustion

then found out that I FORGOT ABOUT NEWSPAPER CLUB and FREAKED OUT!!!!!!!

...and spent a lot of class kind of hysterically bantering with an American boy

and being silently hysterical in general

then during break

me and my friend ran around like maniacs shrieking our frustrations to the world

and I accosted random korean boys and tried to learn korean

and then random korean boys (and girls) from my class and I

spent a lot of time teaching other how to write (and speak) phrases such as

let's play!

and

i love you!

and after class two malaysian boys hijacked me at the piano

and later in the same hour one of them came back

and we played

(with the piano)

and he walked me to the station

and I came home!

but I am still unhappy

because I did not speak very much to the boy I like

and I have to ask myself...

what is the point of playing so outrageously with everyone ELSE?

but then again,

it's fun, duh.

HAHA HAVE YOU HAD ENOUGH OF MY SELF-INDULGENCE YET

tomorrow!

I shall go to school super early

and write my head off with this lovely American girl who stays at a homestay house with THREE CHILDREN (oh my god!)

GOD SAVE ME 4 DAYS LEFT AND 13K TO GO

NANO IS TAKING OVER MY BRAIN

DID YOU KNOW HOW LONG I SPENT WRITING (AND PROCRASTINATING) AFTER I CAME HOME TODAY

HELP

BYE

Q: How many UC Berkeley students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Seventy-six. One to change the lightbulb, fifty to protest the lightbulb’s right not to change, and twenty-five to hold a counter-protest.

Q: How many UCLA students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: One. He just holds the bulb and lets the world revolve around him.

Q: How many UC Davis students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. Davis doesn’t have electricity.

Q: How many UC Irvine students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. Irvine looks better in the dark.

Q: How many UC Riverside students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: None. See UC Irvine.

Q: How many UC San Francisco students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to change the lightbulb and one to crack under the pressure.

Q: How many UC San Diego students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Two. One to mix the margaritas and one to call the electrician.

Q: How many UC Santa Barbara students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Only one, but he gets six credits for it.

Q: How many UC Santa Cruz students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Eleven. One to change the lightbulb and ten to share the experience.

that's the stuff, baby. bring out your California spirit!!

just for the record, I didn't come up with any of these on my own. I believe I first heard them from the mouth of a certain Economics teacher...

(cough)