Onward through the fog

I PASSED IKKYUU


I PASSED I PASSED I PASSED I PASSED


I PASSED THE JLPT. LEVEL ONE. I PASSED IT I PASSED.



AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

It's days like this that make me think I could easily work this job for another year.

Which was one reason I signed the form not to recontract today. If I'm still determined to stop after a day as good as this, then I know what I'm doing.

I'm looking through grad schools this week.

And this evening I taught myself Amazing Grace on my new harmonica. Its first song. I've never really played one before.

I finished two more postcards. Gotta spray these puppies and send 'em. I did send a batch off last week, hope you guys like 'em. They're just exceedingly amateurish pastels, that's all, but I think I'm getting better.

Oh, and at least four active rp plots and twice as many apps are in some stage of progress.

Now I just need to finish my Japanese homework, read some more Dostoyevski, play a little more TWEWY, and put together my writing notes over the next ten days.

Going to a friend's house this weekend to try on kimono. I'll try to find my camera by then but it seems it's well and truly lost. Pity.

Hey, tmartian42. Let me know when you've a free hour or two in which you feel like RPing, if such a thing occurs? I think the three or four of us could bang out a full scene if we just sat down and traded short tags for a bit.

Hey, uncompromisable. I'm not really sure what this shout-out is for, I just want to send affectionate greetings. It seems like I keep contacting you asking for things, and it leads me to ponder what else I could do.

Hey, ezelek. Thanks for hauling Hannon's comatose butt around a small forest moon of Endor yesterday. I'll try and schedule kimono fitting for the afternoon so you don't have to do it again. But if you were serious about executing that plot we discussed, then perhaps we could engineer some dramatic, hilarious fashion in which it is The Grumpiest Little Komrade's fault.

I have no idea how I did.

Which is relatively quite good, honestly. I expected to finish it knowing I had failed.

Results in February.

According to the principal at Favorite Backwoods Elementary, Japan's current prime minister would not pass the JLPT Level 1.

This makes me feel a little better.

Only not, because Aso has not been supposedly studying for weeks or months. D|



ps I LOVE THIS SCHOOL. Everybody likes everybody and they all like to learn and fun things are allowed to be FUN and there's no peer scorn and the 5-6s are operating on a 7th-grade level and appear to be liking it. And the first-years are five 5-year-old boys in one classroom who GET ALONG. o_O b

The 3-4s draw pictures and fold origami and leave them in my mailbox. I think the building is kind of imbued with good vibes.

pps They danced with me when I sang Jingle Bell Rock at recess. We played Cops n' Robbers, and after I captured the entire school with only the devious aid of a 5-year-old I wasn't allowed to be a cop anymore. |Db They loved it.

... And now they're singing along with the music played during Let's Clean The School time. ♥

I adore this school and everyone in it.

The JLPT application has a field for 'how many hours of Japanese studied.' Including independent study. lol. jesus.

I calculate approximately 1236 hours of class time, plus a likely estimate of 275 on FF6j alone. I figure once I've bumped myself into the 1500-2000 hour bracket there's not much point in going further, srsly. But now it's really going to be embarassing when I don't pass the test.

I mixed up Euripedes and Sophocles.
I thought the reading for 忘却 was ぼうきょく、not ぼうきゃく。
I still might have just aced two midterms in one morning.

So I just went into the East Asian Library here for the first time.

Three floors underground, past a hundred stacks full of knowledge in who knows how many languages, in the corner far away from any noise or other human beings, I found the shelf with books on Japanese math. Math in Japan. The relationship between Japan-developed AI and the language's writing system. That sort of thing.

|D

I love libraries so much. The concentrated knowledge seeps out from every shelf. I searched out the Asian folk art section too, and now I think I want to do this semester's presentation on pepakura and its roots in Japanese paper art. Because come on, how sweet would that be. PAPERCRAFT! I can bring in visual aids and talk about the difference between folk art and high art and simple craft, or maybe talk about the mathematics of the thing- I CAN MAKE MY OWN MODEL AND IT WOULD BE RESEARCH because it's a geometry/art exercise omg omg omg. Omg.

Also had my first private session with Sensei today! We went over all the bits of the Murakami book I'm reading that I'd had a little trouble with and posted about in the class blog. I learned which weird usages were Murakami-isms, which were weird but oft-used slang, which weren't actually weird at all, and which were idioms with Yakuza connotations. Heee! Murakami is FUN class reading.

Mainly, though, I learned that I was in fact asking the right questions. There were only a couple of points in there that I could've found in any dictionary with the right searches. For the most part it was things like the Yakuza idiom- if I hadn't asked Sensei I would never have found out what the hell that was. And that makes me feel damn good, that I am understanding most- let's say, 85%- of the stuff that CAN be understood without having actually grown up in Japanese culture.

i could do a presentation on pepakuraaaaaaa~

I did not pass.

Chances are, really, I'm not ready for Year 5. I finished Year 3 and then went to Tokyo for a semester. That brings me up to something like 4.6.

So yes, this semester will be brainless, but whatevs. I'll do really fucking well and wow them all out.

Had a harbor cruise with the transfers tonight. It was pretty good, tho cold & rainy. Stupid, stupid Lina, bring your umbrella, ALWAYS. Anyway we went to the Times Square station area for hot chocolate afterwards and that was pretty neat. Tokyo-ish. Lots of neon.

I know a lot of fellow transfers now. Getting kind of sick of the basic intro conversation. Where're you from, where'd you transfer from, what's your major, why'd you transfer, why here. Aren't you sick of the freshmen. How far have you gotten in the core reading. Over and over and over and over and I'm tired of it. Maybe my social muscles are just weak from atrophy. Whatevs.

ttly starting to be Squall now, time for bed.

The kanji for ちくしょう is 畜生。

I did not know this before Tactics decided to teach me. Wtf, Tactics, why must you use kanji for everything. EVERYTHING. They use kanji for まだ, for gods' sake. what is wroooooong with these people.

Just finished watching the joke subs of Advent Children. Amusing! But a very boggling experience all around. It's not as if I can just turn off being able to understand what's actually coming out of their mouths, after all, and the occasional convergence and subsequent divergence of the two streams of meaning was as disorienting as it was hilarious.

It's also only the second time I've ever seen the video, and damn but that shit is gorgeous, innit? And yes, I know I'm only the zillionth person to say that.