I just knew THIS would happen...

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:annoyed

That's right, folks... the class I initially didn't want to take, didn't need to take, then took out of obligation (saving the class from cancellation due to low enrollment), ends up being the one class that lowers my GPA.

Usually I find whining about grades extremely annoying, but goddamn.

Egogoogle: December

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:bouncy

Google: Still on top via my GameFAQs Contributor Recognition page. I think I'd prefer that to my actual homepage...

Yahoo: Still on top via my old Castlevania: SotN manual transcription. I swear it's on a different site each time I see it (damn me and my lack of proper permissions!). Who still needs to read that anyway?

MSN: Still on top via my J.S. Minnow homepage. Can't complain!


I was a few days late, but with finals and my M3 Lite (which I love as much as the DS Lite itself), I both didn't have time to do it earlier and didn't want to do it earlier.

I think I'll change the titles of my future Egogoogle blog posts. Namely, split "Egogoogle" into two words and add the year after the month.

What a week...

[ORIGINAL POST]

No, this isn't a complaint - it's more about how amazing the week was (and how amazing Iwas)!


2006.11.27 (Monday)

I checked out books at the school library for a paper... for the first time... ever! And here I was photocopying pages like an idiot.

I also downloaded The God Who Wasn't There off Google Video. Good movie, greatsoundtrack.


2006.11.28 (Tuesday)

I helped set the AUN performance at my school with Chris, the former Japan Club president. I tried to hold back my Japanese because I felt that if I said something wrong, I'd offend them somehow. Luckily, they were extremely cool.

These guys are awesome. I think it's fair to say that I always loved taiko, but these took it to the next level with a modern sound... and they're twins, so watching them was especiallyexciting. The violinist made perfection even better. Seeing other non-AUN taiko performances might just be less exciting now...

I bought their CD and they autographed it, but that just made me want to get a DVD of one of their concerts! As luck would have it, it's sold out at CDJapan, and that's the only place that sells their music. (MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/aunwp )

As for non-AUN-related events... I turned in a paper that day, and I got my M3 Lite (which is worthy of its own blog post)...


2006.11.29 (Wednesday)

Roleplay in Yokota's JAPN 400A class. I'm surprised I was able to memorize it so well...


2006.11.30 (Thursday)

The DVD I needed for my JAPN 150 class ended up not working. Well actually, there just wasn't a DVD drive in the class! Luckily, the actual presentation didn't count for much; it was the paper that counted more, and Yokota said my paper was good, so I'm happy.

In ML 400, after getting DS Organize to work on my Nintendo DS Lite, Rosa showed me herPDA (which was also a phone) and I must say I'm impressed. I now know a lot more about what PDAs should have, and why that "Blackberry" PDA isn't all that hot. I then ate a lot of good food in class, making up for how I skipped lunch.

In JAPN 380, I pulled off another roleplay surprisingly well.

All I have left is the 10-page paper for ML 400...


Look for my M3 Lite review in my next Egogoogle sometime later!

Museum fun

[ORIGINAL POST]

Today I was at the Japanese American National Museum with the beauteous Rosa for extra credit for ML 400. It was pretty much how I remembered it from a year ago when I went with Chris and Mayumi... minus the Taiko drums, which I looked forward to seeing again.

There were students from Japan as well, and those girls were something else...

Note to self: ALWAYS bring the DS Lite whenever I go out! Sure, the battery light was showing red (during WiFi Tetris DS battles, anyway), but I could have used it as a makeshift PDA (or at least a notepad) by going into Pictochat and just chatting with myself. For about $150 I could get the ultimate accessory for my DS Lite and download an actual homebrew PDA program (DSOrganize), but I don't see why Nintendo doesn't just release actual PDA software for the DS. I don't really care for those Touch Generation "games," but at the end of the day, the DS's touch screen really does make the DS better than the PSP (widescreen LCD screen be damned).

Egogoogle: November

[ORIGINAL POST]

I'm late again here, but between another disappointing birthday, school, and time-wasting YouTube projects, it slipped my mind.

Google and Yahoo say I'm on top via my Castlevania: SOTN manual, while MSN puts my J.S. Minnow site on top. How messed up does the world have to be for MSN to be the most preferred search engine?

Also, my cousin finally got a MySpace account. Well actually it looks like he got it quite a while ago, but he only started posting his blogs a few days ago. (And I thought I was the only cynical bastard around these parts!)

Egogoogle: October

[ORIGINAL POST]

Still on top via my outdated Tekken 5 Story Battle Dialogues FAQ. Yahoo and MSN still have myJ.S. Minnow website on top, as they should.

Sorry I'm a day late; I got caught up listening to this debate ("Todd debates Dan Barker"). I was watching this video on YouTube and from there I tried to get a full, unedited video of the debate. I had to settle for the mp3.


Some of my favorite quotes:

- In any argument, there's a burden of proof on the affirmative.

- Salvation is the solution to the problem of its own making. If salvation is the cure... then atheism is the prevention.

- Ethical people will do what is right no matter what they are told; most religious people will do what they are told no matter what is right.

- Dan: If you had known what was going to happen on 9/11... in advance... and if you had the power with no risk to yourself to stop that from happening, would you have stopped those planes from flying into those buildings?
Todd: Oh, of course.
Dan: Well then you're nicer than God, aren't you?


And if there was any doubt that we'd all be better off without religion, let me bring this pic up again:

They might as well be holding swastikas.

And now thanks to these assholes imposing their religion on the rest of us (which all seems... I don't know... Taliban-ish), we have the worst president in the history of presidents.

And that's still an understatement.

The first (real) week of school

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:amused

2006.09.21 (Thursday)

My first class was ML 400 (Research Methods in Modern Languages), and at first I didn't recognize anyone except Chris #2 from that Japanese literature class. Most of the others were Spanish majors and a handful seemed to be Chinese majors. It seemed pretty boring, being a class all about learning how to write a paper (because apparently I totally didn't know how to write one for years), and it is. The substitute teacher also felt it was appropriate to speak in Spanish, even though we weren't ALL Spanish majors. Alienation FTW!!!

Next was JAPN 380 (Business Japanese). I didn't believe the teacher was actually the teacher at first (I almost said "wow"), but she's pretty good. I decided to pass on the offer to take JAPN 150 that day...


2006.09.25 (Monday)

JAPN 400A (Advanced Reading and Composition). The first one to enter the room (besides me) was "Heather" (who I certainly have never heard of before), followed by Hiro (who I always forget is in my class) and Ed. Then Chris #2 and two other girls (Naomi #2 - who lives in the same city as me - and "Nancy," I think). It's a new book but it doesn't seem to be any harder than anything in Koike-sensei's JAPN 300ABC classes, and Yokota-sensei seems to say more stuff in English. I was suckered into taking JAPN 150 (Contemporary Japan Through Pop Culture) that day. Yokota made a good point, though... it is free credits, it could help improve my translating skills, and Heather said it should be an easy "A." This late in the game I can't afford to get anything less.


2006.09.26 (Tuesday)

Now that I'm taking JAPN 150, I have to get to school several hours earlier for the first time in years. According to Yokota, I was the "key person" in keeping the class open (due to low enrollment), though when people were coming in, it didn't look like the class was in any danger of being cancelled. It seems fun, but it's still the same amount of work from Yokota's other literature classes.

ML 400: New room, and with people hilariously having no choice but to stand up or sit on the floor (since we ran out of chairs), we were forced to change rooms yet again. The "real" teacher seemed cool, until she said calling the USA "America" was "politically incorrect." Well, that's the first I've ever heard of it! Aren't there songs like "America the Beautiful" and "God Bless America?" Wasn't there a movie in the 80's starring Eddie Murphy called "Coming to America?" Are Americans now "North Americans" (to say nothing of the folks up in Canada)? And that's just the top of my head. So fuck that. (At least I saw the back of a REALLY hot girl...)

JAPN 380: Lin-sensei recognized my Gackt pic on my sample Japanese resume. She also recognized my Nintendo DS Lite... neat. I also saw Jason, who I thought graduated.


2006.09.27 (Wednesday)

JAPN 400A: If there was any doubt that I am the class's - nay, the school's kanji master, I just removed it. I taught Nancy how to write the "TAI" in "JOUTAI" (and I loved how she described it: "mu-tsuki-hi-hi-kokoro"), and I corrected someone's "GO." I also met up with some guy who wanted me to merge the Anime Club with the Japan Club. At least he didn't seem like an anime otaku...


2006.09.28 (Thursday)

JAPN 150: I got a weird feeling today. While it's certainly true that I am the smartest guy in class, I feel pretty stupid. I just know there's an idiom for this...

ML 400: Got into a group with two very nice girls (in every way ), including this one girl who I seemed to recognize from ENGL 401 over a year ago. I hope that was taken as flattering and not "obsessive," because I'm pretty sure she wouldn't know who the hell I am. I think I hit it off with both of them... probably should have gotten their contact info, though. We were all told to sit in the same chairs so the politically-correct-to-a-fault professor could learn everyone's names. (Goddamn, I really should have gotten their contact info... )

JAPN 380: One look at my shirt (my "tachi shouben kinshi" shirt) and Lin-sensei was going off on NHK's Domo-kun and sumo wrestlers. And then we went over the surprisingly compicated task of exchanging business cards, Japanese style.


In sum, there's always something to look forward to at school, though I'd rather not have 3 classes in a day. And I don't know if it's just because I took the summer off, but there are some girls at school who are SERIOUSLY hot. Hottt, even. I'm not religious or anything, but JESUS CHRIST!!! I'm talking "heavenly / angelic / goddess-tier" hottt. There is no longer any point in ogling any pic or video (...er, not that I have before), because whatever she looks like, she won't match the incomprehensible good looks of the girls I've been seeing at school. And the other day there was this kinda-skinny, kinda-short, quiet, long-haired, twisty-turny fidgety girl at the bus stop taking my bus (267). Damn it, I love those fidgety types too, heh.

(And yeah, I suck, but reading and writing about how much I suck is always fun. I'd normally post this on my LiveJournal but they have a stupid post limit, and there's another reason why I won't post on my LJ but I won't go into that right now. These posts always take hours...)

Weird-ass dream (2006.09.18)

[ORIGINAL POST]

The dream:

- My brother was developing his own version of Dance Dance Revolution.

- The guys from Mythbusters were making my ideal joystick for Tekken and shmups, not unlikethis one.


The day:

- I was watching an old Lewis Black clip on YouTube.

- I was on AIM asking if a guy could mod my X-Arcade stick with Sanwa sticks and Seimitsu buttons, not unlike theevilfunkster.

- I was up pretty late at night watching Mythbusters.


Funny, that.

Egogoogle: September

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:accomplished

Still on top, though why is my extremely old Castlevania: SotN instruction manual transcription #1? At least Yahoo! and MSN have my J.S. Minnow site on top, as they should.

Ordering from YesAsia.com

[ORIGINAL POST]

I'm just going to document the two times I ordered from YesAsia.


Order #1: PS2 game "Ibara"
Payment method: money order
Shipping method: free shipping

2/23: PS2 game "Ibara" ordered; money order sent; received emails "Thank You For Your Order" and "Order process on hold"

2/27: received email "Mail Order Three day Notification"

2/28: received emails "Payment received for order" and "order has been approved"

3/7: received emails "Confirmation for Clearance of your Check/Money Order" and "Invoice"

3/14: arrival


Order #2: DS game "kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten"
Payment method: PayPal via bank account
Shipping method: free shipping

8/14: DS game "kanji sonomama rakubiki jiten" ordered; payment sent instantly via PayPal; received email "Order process on hold"

8/17: received emails "Payment Received For Order" and "Order has been approved"

8/20: received email "Invoice"

8/24: arrival


Move it along folks, nothing to see here...

Emo kid at the DMV

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:amused

So I was at the DMV taking that written test and I was within feet of this totally emo high school punk. If I wasn't already sick I'd probably be sick. They are fascinating creatures, though... no doubt he'd (?) want to change his look after he sees how stupid he looks in his picture.

And yeah, I passed said test. Just barely, though... when did they change the passing grade from 8 errors to 6? I totally didn't know what would freeze first: a bridge, an intersection, or a tunnel... so I got that question wrong. But I guessed on the question that asked "Which child requires a child passenger restraint system?," and I got it right. As for the other questions... well, I guess I could have gotten them right if I wasn't burning up.

What's a "permit" good for, anyway...?

Egogoogle: August

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:accomplished

I'll admit that I peeked before the start of the new month, but I'm glad to say that I, the realJustin Sison, am still on top of the Google search results (via GameFAQs). Favorable results are still on Yahoo as well.

(sorry I'm a day late, but I was really sick yesterday, so...)

Hooray! I'm atheist!

[ORIGINAL POST]

Events Speeding up? [Large Merge]

(originally titled "Is it time to get excited?")


...just don't tell my mom.

--

Note (added 2011/7/6): These links (now dead), were about Rapture signs.

Egogoogle: July

[ORIGINAL POST]

Well, that was a scary few weeks. I guess GameFAQs had a database issue or something because I, Justin Sison, am back on the top of the "Justin Sison" search results on Google.

Perhaps I should get a Friendster account to squeeze any remaining trace of that other Justin Sison...

Accept no imitations!

[ORIGINAL POST]

Current mood:annoyed

Recently I've noticed a disturbing phenomenon on Google: when I Google my own name,someone else with the name "Justin Sison" appears in the search results! Sure, he's Filipino, but he's also younger and his writing has that annoying AsIaN AlTeRnAtInG CaPs style that I thought (or at least, hoped) had died out years ago. At least I was still on top due to my work as a teenager with too much free time at GameFAQs.

Until today.

I won't post the link (no reason to cement its position as the #1 site when searching for "Justin Sison"), but apparently my imposter is on his friend's admittedly popular blog. Yes, it's another boring, slipshod, no-content teenager blog. The choice of colors (light-colored text on a light-colored background?) leaves you little recourse but to highlight the whole site with Ctrl A, but the font size is so small it renders the blog illegible anyway.

Let's get rid of this injustice. I need you fine folks to search for my name everyday. Use these terms:

- justin sison triple lei (takes you here)
- justin sison ss minnow (takes you here)

Spread the word - blogs, forum signatures... every bit helps! I never thought I would have to struggle to keep myself at the top of a Google search results page when the search terms aremy own name! Is it too much to ask that he remain unpopular on the internet and in the real world for the rest of his life?

I guess this takes my self-hating to new heights (depths?). I've never met my imposter, but I'm pretty sure... I don't like him.

(I'd write something appropriate in Japanese but the MySpace blog system is still retarded)

Japan Club slogans for flyers

[ORIGINAL POST]

I was up at around 2:00 am the other day and I came up with these:

• THE JAPAN CLUB: More than an anime club... but we're praying for an end to the Naruto fillers too!
  
  
• So you learned how to use chopsticks, prefer green tea to soda, and know the words to every Ayumi Hamasaki song, yet that Japanese girlfriend you've always wanted remains tantalizingly out of reach. You might have better luck by joining... THE JAPAN CLUB.
  
  
• Interested in anything Japanese? Then you might want to consider joining... THE JAPAN CLUB. BYOB! (Bring Your Own Boxes of Pocky)
  
  
• Thinking about getting a cool Asian character tattoo? We'll not only tell you the meanings but the culture behind it as well. THE JAPAN CLUB.
  
  
• THE JAPAN CLUB: Because all the cool Japanese phrases aren't taught in class!
  
  
• Cost of a Nintendo Wii: $199
  Cost of a Sony PS3: $599
  Cost of joining the Japan Club: free
  THE JAPAN CLUB.
  
  
• THE JAPAN CLUB: Because we all drive Japanese cars, right?
  

I tried to cover every angle with these. Of course, given the time that I wrote these, some of these may be sort of... out there... and I'm not in any mood to start judging them now. I'm leaving the actual flyer creation to the Photoshop goddess, the Japan Club Treasurer.

Graduations

[ORIGINAL POST]

Here's my small write-up on Chris's graduation party:

http://triple-lei.livejournal.com/2006/06/11/

And so, the downhill ride of my life begins one year early.

[ORIGINAL POST]

[	mood	|	sad	]
[	music	|	Suneohair - ワルツ	]

Yesterday was my buddy Chris's graduation party. I went with Sean and his g/f and it took us 30-40 minutes to get there (Angela said she "had plans"... so I guess that's that). And when we got there... wow, what a house! It was easily five times the size of my own. We met his own tall & skinny vegetarian friends too and I forgot their names within seconds (to my regret). The food was great, and later we bet on a mechanical ostrich and kangaroo.

Still, I wasn't completely happy. With Chris gone and graduated (along with three others from our class also at the party), Japanese is really not going to be anymore fun. I love everyone in our upper-level class, and classes with them were always fun "breaks" from the tedium of the language classes. I was close with them, but because they were a year ahead and at least a few years older, there was always a certain level of admiration... which for me is the ideal relationship. And now they're gone.

And it wouldn't be a stretch to say that Chris is the coolest person I've ever met, on- or offline. As apparently one of the few people in our classes who didn't already know Japanese (or some other foreign language), we always got along well, finding fault with as many things as we could. There were plenty of good times (like when we went to the Japan museum in Little Tokyo as a Japan Club activity), and not many bad times, though that "grammaticalization" nightmare a year ago comes to mind. Chris, my friend, we may never fully grasp the proper usage of 「は」 and 「が」、 but I know you'll do fine in Japan and in life.

WARNING: STOP WEARING CONTACT LENSES.

[ORIGINAL POST]

TNL forum thread

Random musings

[ORIGINAL POST]

Well, first things first: my computer has been broken for nearly a week, causing me to finally openthat Christmas card for money to fix / repair / replace stuff. That was my trip money, too. Right now I'm on a temporary Windows XP fix since I... have to get a legit copy of Windows XP. So until then that means no more video capturing / editing / DVD authoring. Half of my files are gone, as are my internet bookmarks and loads of other software. I'm just glad I was able to finish the UC Irvine Japanese Cultural Showcase DVD before my computer fell apart.

Three weeks ago I bumped into a friend from grade school at the bus station - someone I've known since first grade! He's of course a lot better off than I am. He did ask me for a quarter (at least it wasn't the first thing he said to me after seeing me for the first time in eight years or so), but he could pay me back with, like, a job or something, heh.

Two weeks ago I saw the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance. It was very inspiring with humor that was subtle and it hit all the right spots. I then decided to see the American version my mom had on DVD for years and I was pretty disappointed - subtlety thrown out the window. Perhaps one day I'll make a special LiveJournal entry comparing the two (along with the original and American edited version of Ong Bak), but I'll need to find the Japanese Shall We Dance first. Kinokuniya didn't have it (or it did and I couldn't find it) so I just settled on some book.

My Penn and Teller DVDs came in recently and... dear me I love this show. And I never would have found out about it if not for pirated clips on YouTube. (there are a lot of great vids on YouTube but that's another entry...)

Also thanks to YouTube, I found a new hobby I can stick with: vintage instructional films! And all because I heard it on the History Channel. Then I found myself laughing at old cigarette commercials from the 1950s. With a bit of searching I found high-quality versions freely available for download at archive.org. And uh... I have ants in my room, wtf.

Random musings (Part 2)

[ORIGINAL POST]

(continued from my last post)

...archive.org.

And uh... I have ants in my room, wtf.

...

...


...

NEW LIVEJOURNAL ENTRY TEXT LIMITS!? With no way of getting rid of it? Hmm...


(edit: I'm editing the post time to put this under the 1st part of the entry.)

The fun never stops at my house!...

[ORIGINAL POST]

[

mood

|

drained

]

...unless, of course, you have a blackout. Or something close to a blackout.

Starting about a week ago, I noticed my lights flickering. The blackouts started on Sunday, although the kitchen was strangely okay. My mom called Southern California Edison and some lady on the phone said that SCE won't do anything about it because they're only responsible for the power from the wires to our house, and judging from our situation it seemed like it was something about our circuit breaker, so we had to call an electrician. $450 later it wasn't really fixed, so we had to get another guy and he found the problem; it actually wasn't our fault... it seems the last guy from SCE who worked on the wires didn't really do a good job. So now my mom's trying to get a reimbursement. I don't think I'm going to Las Vegas tomorrow, so I'm just hoping someone gets fired and / or falls off a cliff.

I missed the first episode of the new Sunday 9:00pm UTB drama because of the power issues so I'm just going to skip it entirely and delete the season pass on the TiVo. SARS Fansubs started giving Gokusen 2 the full treatment, so I'm sure if I just wait long enough, someone will upload Haruka 17.

However, I admit I haven't exactly been paying attention to dramas lately. I've been playing Ibara (鋳薔薇). It's a vertical shooter and its name is a pun which I'll try to explain: "ibara" (written 「茨」 in kanji) means "thorn" - like the thorn of a rose. "Rose" in Japanese is "bara" (written 「薔薇」 in kanji), and the 「鋳」 in the title (which can be pronounced "i", as in 鋳る / iru) comes from the 19th Century setting, and with the rose theme prevalent in the game, the game's title implies that the "thorns" are actually bullets. You can see gameplay videos here (search for プロモーションビデオ near the bottom), view wallpapers here, and read the manga here. This game is where I got my new LJ userpic from. I don't care at all about Final Fantasy XII (and that's putting it lightly), but with Ibara I'll be set for the year.

On another note, I must say I'm enjoying the show "American Inventor" - I highly suggest you take a look, so give it a download! (or, uh, watch it on TV)

My date*

[ORIGINAL POST]

January 26, 2006 (Thursday): After taking the same bus from school to the bus station, I casually (...totally nervously) ask if "there's a chance we could hang out when we're not waiting for a bus." Then she asks, "'Hang out?' You mean, like, 'go out?'" And then I say, "Sure." And then shesuggests that we go see a movie!

Commentary: As a guy, that makes it a whole lot easier; if I don't directly ask her out, I won't directly get shot down (hence the original wording "hang out"). But if she's interested, who am I to refuse?


January 31, 2006 (Tuesday): Both of us are taking the bus from the station to our houses; I ask for her contact info and things are looking great. She asks if she can bring a friend along, and before I could think of something cool to say (if it really was a date - which I thought it was - it would be a little weird with someone tagging along), she drops this on me: "He likes movies too..."

Commentary: "He!?" Girls aren't allowed to talk about their male platonic friends when setting up a date. Seriously, don't do that, girls. I didn't know what to think the whole time I was walking home.

My source told me that "he" really does exist (as opposed to just being made up as a defense mechanism), but he's just acting as her "screener / protector," and that this is standard procedure for girls. I was also told that I should be prepared for anything; he could be gay and a non-threat, but on the other hand he could be a total stud too.


February 2, 2006 (Thursday): I see her again at the bus station taking the same bus to school and the first thing I remember hearing from her is "He can't make it so it's just going to be the two of us." WHEW. We plan the bus route together (her more than me, really). We have no idea what we are going to see, though.


February 3, 2006 (Friday): We meet on the 267 and get off at Colorado Blvd. and (I believe) Los Roblos Ave. It doesn't take long for us to reach this theater. Clearly she's been here before as she's leading me around, but then I tell her that I actually have been at the theater before when I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 with my PCC friends.

It would still be a while before the start of any movie, so we decide to grab lunch at Gelson's Market. She gets macaroni & cheese, potato wedges, and one of those flavored waters, and I get macaroni & cheese, a corndog, and root beer. We both agree that the macaroni & cheese wasn't spectacular (it felt a little powdery), and my corndog was simply just a corndog. She does share her potato wedges with me, so that has to be a good thing, right? During this time she gets a call from one of her (female) friends and says "I'm having lunch with Justin," which I take as a good thing. Then later on I make sure to squeeze out a few more movies (for later days) because there really is a lot to do near the theater.

We see Big Momma's House 2, which we agree is not as good as the first one. (Really, there were only a handful of really funny moments, and I didn't like any of the characters. The sub-plots weren't all that hot either...)

When waiting for the bus she gets a call from "Nick" and I am once again in disarray.

Commentary: My source tells me that I didn't lose any points for not showing her around and not paying for everything (it was as though she went out of her way to pay for her own stuff, a sort of independence I should admire and respect). Her mentioning me to her friend does speak volumes as I suspected, and I should be prepared to add "Nick" to my friends list; all I need to do is figure out what to do after I run out of ideas (and, most likely, money).


* term pending approval

Das Bus

[ORIGINAL POST]

[	mood	|	tired	]
[	music	|	Espgaluda OST	]

Sit down, won't you, and listen to my adventures on the bus...


Thursday: Well, it happened again. I took the wrong bus. I was hurrying to meet someone (see below), so I took what I thought was a bus to El Monte Station ("487 El Monte"). When it started going up a ramp instead of going straight to the station I got a little worried so I got off at the first stop. I couldn't tell you where I was (I would have taken pics but my camera only had one bar of power left), but I did pass a 99 Ranch Market and a Petrillo's Pizza. Then I walked all the way to Walnut Grove (!)... and then I caught one of those 24-hour buses to the station (near some "K" convenience store). That was probably an hour and a half of wandering around aimlessly (...at night), the same day I happened to jump rope in the morning for about 15 minutes. Now if that bus was going to El Monte Station after all (taking an extremely long, confusing, indirect way)... wouldn't that be funny! HAHAHA... fuck.


Tuesday: This happened, which inspired me to finally make the full page, although only #6 and #7 are up. (I really need to figure out a way to update all my pages to link to my "Things I Hate" page on the side without going through each page to add it manually AND without using frames...)


Last Thursday: On Tuesdays and Thursdays when I'd take the bus from El Monte Station to some place near my house (267 Altadena & N. Lake), I'd see this girl who I somehow remembered from my PCC days, where we both took the same bus. But last Thursday she took the same bus from El Monte Station to Cal State LA, so after much internal debating, I finally decided to OMG talk to her and yes, she is the same girl. She said she remembered me (I'm not sure if it was from this quarter or from PCC, but I'll take that as a good sign anyway...), and now we both know each other's names and majors. After saying to her that I'll "see you tonight" (which felt surreal just saying that), I was stuck in the library having some papers photocopied due to the stupid school not having the books and cheap enough not to make enough copies for everyone, so I missed the bus. Tuesday I was there but she wasn't, and next Thursday... see above.

Okay, so it's not quite along the lines of a certain someone's Steven / Nelson episodes, but it's amusing nonetheless, and here too timing has messed everything up.


(note: I titled this entry "Das Bus" as a parody of the classic "Das Boot," but it turns out there reallyis a movie titled "Das Bus." Time to get my brother to Netflix it.)

Playing catchup

[ORIGINAL POST]

Isn't this always the case? It's barely the first week of the year and I'm already behind with my LJ entries. I'm back posting here because the MySpace blogging system sucked, but it's still better than the Xanga system ("in the same way," in the words of CJayC, "a 15-car collision is better than a 16-car collision"). Well, maybe not... I can't even enter in any Japanese on MySpace, so screw that.

Let me catch up with Fall '05 grades:

JAPN 315 (Language in Japanese Society): "B+"? WTF... I guess either my project sucked after all or the last test (= final) was harder than I thought. I did all the other crap in the class in a clean and timely matter, too...

JAPN 410 (Modern Japanese Literature): Now this is a surprise... where did that "B+" come from? I won't say it wasn't a struggle, but it wasn't a cake walk either. I prepared myself for a plain old "B", but I'll take it.

JAPN 300A (Advanced Japanese): My grade was "RD" for an unusually long time. Glad I barely cranked out that "A"... though I'm still too scared to look at the stuff Koike-sensei passed back in class today.

Yesterday was the first day of classes. And what a way to start the year - the friggin bookstore and food court were closed! What other university does that? "Blackout from the storm"... pfft. Well, at least I'm proud that I didn't give into the Carl's Jr truck. I actually was hungry and I didn't have fast food for a long time so this probably would have been the perfect excuse... but... I don't know. I just didn't like "giving in," even if that truck was the savior of everyone else at school. Man, I suck. Or maybe I'm just a bigger idiot than I thought.

My class on Tuesdays and Thursdays is JAPN 310 (Japanese Civilization to 1945), with the same small group that made those last two other Japanese classes so enjoyable. They're cool and even though they're better than me in every way, they don't give me an inferiority complex! Love those guys. Without the books available, though, it's hard to keep up with the class. Hard as in "impossible."

Mondays and Wednesdays is JAPN 300B (Advanced Japanese). It doesn't seem too bad and there are two new people... though we lost even more cool people, and earlier than expected. I guess I'm going to have to be more... er, fun to fill in the void. And I (being an idiot) didn't bring enough money to buy the book. $20 short.

There's also some other class after JAPN 300B but who cares lolololomgwtfbbqlmaohaha... ok it's ENGL 200C (British Literature Survey II). It's another class I don't really need, but those 12 credits have to come from somewhere (you can trace that to me being an idiot), and at least I don't need to buy any expensive books because I still have the book from 200B. I got an "A-" in that class and this professor seems to be even better (according to ratemyprofessors.com), so I'm remaining cautiously optimistic.

And this is after I was dropping and adding classes because of a scheduling mistake I only noticedafter I got the official class schedule in the mail. It seems I had two classes at the exact same time. While it's entirely possible that the school suddenly changed the time on me (because how could they not catch the scheduling conflict?), it's even more possible that I was an idiot.

So, this year I'm really going to try to work on the things I should have / should be doing / should have done by now. I do have hopes that this year will be good, but it's all relative - it'll only be good because last year... all things considered... I sucked. But it can't happen twice in a row, right? I've started making lists: not just the usual "things I should have / should be doing / should have done by now" lists, but other lists. One is a list of "Japanese words I don't get" (saving them on POPjisyo and emailing the list to myself on Sundays), and a "things I hate" list, which I'm considering throwing on my site. I'm intending it to be slightly humorous, but there's a good chance I'll be the only one who "gets" it, and I don't want it to turn into a "did you ever notice?" type thing... I mean I'm not Seinfeld!


Things-to-watch backlog

Dreams of Romance (ep 5/12)
A Love to Kill (ep 10/16)
Rurouni Kenshin (ep 22/lots)

How I spent my winter vacation

[ORIGINAL POST]

By Triple Lei.

- read half a book

- discussed how Batman: The Animated Series > Batman Begins > The early Batman movies (if only for Kevin Conroy) at a Christmas party

- watched Mr. & Mrs. Smith twice at said Christmas party, but didn't understand the finer details of the story due to the volume being turned down and none of us being smart enough to work the DVD remote to add subtitles or captions

- watched Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle three times and Dude, Where's My Car? twice

- actually made some progress in Dodonpachi Dai-ou-jou, won an eBay auction forMushihimesama, and got stuck in Bujingai


...


Yeah, I figured I'd get this all down so I don't forget - I'm probably going to have to say it all in Japanese tomorrow. In fact, can MySpace even handle Japanese?


EDIT: NO IT CAN'T. LOOKS LIKE IT'S BACK TO LIVEJOURNAL FOR BLOGGING AFTER ALL.

EDIT #2: Okay, I'll just use my MySpace blog for my really pointless daily rants and my LiveJournal for my slightly better-worded rants.