The fun never stops at my house!...

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[

mood

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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*

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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

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[	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

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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

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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.

Ong Bak VS Tom Yum Goong

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I was watching Ong Bak again yesterday and I'm going to have to reverse my opinion stated on LiveJournal: Ong Bak is better than Tom Yum Goong. The stories are pretty much the same. In Ong Bak, Tony Jaa goes after the stolen head of his village's Ong Bak statue. In Tom Yum Goong, he goes after his family's elephant. Both are sacred, but Ong Bak's story sounds just a little bit cooler... and the jaded viewer in me couldn't help but remember a certain Simpsons episode ("Where's my elephant?"). I definitely prefer the music in Ong Bak to Tom Yum Goong's. Ong Bak just seemed to have more... I don't know... martial arts-sounding music. Not that Tom Yum Goong's music was bad - it was definitely appropriate. I can't put my finger on it, but the action sequences in Ong Bak were better than Tom Yum Goong's after all. I remember watching Ong Bak in the theater and being amazed at not only Tony Jaa's moves but also how quickly he returned to his fighting stance. His form was absolutely flawless. I think he also hit MUCH harder in Ong Bak with his elbows and knees. I can't help but think he had to tone it down a bit for the Austrailian crew in Tom Yum Goong. Then again, Tom Yum Goong had the 4-minute no-cut action scene, the guy who looked and acted just like Eddy Gordo, and the bone breaking moves. Tom Yum Goong was supposed to be an international movie with more variety everywhere and they've succeeded. I think Ong Bak is better as a whole. In Ong Bak, Petchthai Wongkamlao (Hum-Lae) actually had a pretty big role; his role was rather cursory in Tom Yum Goong despite shooting a few bad guys. He was funnier in Ong Bak too. Tony Jaa was pretty much perfect in Ong Bak, but in Tom Yum Goong, he had about ten lines... and most of them were either "Where's Johnny?" or "Where's my elephant?"... and what did happen to Johnny anyway? At least everything was wrapped up nicely in Ong Bak. So to put this in Tekken terms: Ong Bak is like TTT in its prime, whereas Tom Yum Goong is like T5 in its prime... whenever that was.

LOLOLOL...

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I was going to make my first MySpace blog entry extremely profound and highly cogent (and on the first day of the new year accompanied by some sort of introduction), but this was too friggin funny!

From Tekken Zaibatsu:

WHAT THE HELL? YOU MADE A FUCKING TOPIC JUST FOR FUCKING ASKING HOW SHE FUCK THAT BITCHS NAME IS PRONOUNCED? I haaaatteeee yooouuu. Can't you just add someone on msn and then have a voice conversation to ask them? And by the way, why the hell would you ask such an idiotic question? My friend pronounceses Lee and Lei with just LEE. IT DOESNT BOTHER OR HURT ANYONE. Just fucking say whatever you want. You can call her a BITCH and give that name to her for the rest of her life. And haven't you read? NO FUCKING NONSENSE TOPICS. uuuhhhh GOD i hate humens like you.

I must say, I like how the MySpace blog interface looks, but I don't like how I have to search for my "now reading / viewing / listening to" selection instead of just typing it in. Maybe I'll go ahead and make this the new home of my rants and pointless reflections. Too many bad memories on LiveJournal and my Xanga wasn't going anywhere.

Oh, and by the way: I don't usually write things like "LOL" except when I'm making fun of the people who do. This is probably one of those times...