Ouch.

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Yes, "ouch" is precisely the right word...

Ouch... I didn't even get to do half of what I planned to do over this painfully short spring break. I slept most of it away and now someone gave me something to translate (though that last part wasn't entirely a complaint).

Oooh, ouch... I just found out my grades for the winter quarter. My GPA took a hit. I was a little disappointed with one class (ENG 401) - I thought I totally rocked the final, but I guess it was a "B" like everything else in that class. I really thought I would get an "A" on the final, though... just look at my beautifully crafted 3 x 5 index card (pics: 1 | 2)! As for my other class (KIN 345), I got a "B", and I really don't know what to make of it. I didn't know what I got on my mid-term (I think someone took my scantron) so I didn't know what grade I had coming into the final, but I did the five internet assignments and a... competent... job on the final paper. Japanese was just fine.

...OUCH! I am in physical pain right now since I decided to run (then walk, then jog, then walk again) to some place a little farther than Rosemead High School. I didn't know exactly where I wanted to go, but that was ok. I just needed to get out of the house! This act is apparently punishable because a few hours later, my ankles felt like they would fall off at any moment. Plus it now hurts when I laugh or cough, and I'm coughing a lot. Still, if there's anything I learned from that KIN 345 class (Physiological Effects of Exercise during Aging), it's that as we get older, it's all downhill, so we should get into a habit of exercising now. I've found some helpful info about exercising in these threads, though: "How do you work out?" and "The Gym Thread: Post your sessions here...".

I hope I'm not alone looking forward to school! (not the actual "learning" part... the meeting people part)

It's over... sort of

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Bah. Somehow I made it through the day with only about an hour of sleep (I'm not even kidding)! You all know what that meant - there was a paper due today! I finished at 5:57 and woke up at 6:57. It was quite a shock looking out the bathroom window; I was still expecting darkness but it was pretty bright.

Oh, right, finals. Well, my first final was alright; I did pretty well on the multiple guess section, but for the short answer part... I'm hoping I get partial credit, heh. The teacher can't be in too bad of a mood because his wife just gave birth, so...

Then I went to the language lab to kill some of the 5 hours of free time I had. It wasn't as fun as I hoped it would be... but at least I (sort of) studied for the test by listening to the old dialogues, and I (sort of) had fun playing around with the Japanese IME and listening to the Chinese audio exercises (I'm not mastering that language anytime soon...). I tried getting some sleep too but that was a little hard.

Bumped into Todd (from the speech contest) at lunch. Still a nice guy!

Japanese final. It wasn't hard, but it wasn't easy, either. Changing the verbs to honorific forms was tricky, like with 来ている - do you change 来る to いらっしゃる to make it 「いらっしゃっている」 or do you leave it as 来る and change the いる to いらっしゃる to make it 「来ていらっしゃる」? Grr. Translating English to Japanese wasn't as terrible as I thought (having listened to those dialogues at the language lab), though the word order might be a little different from the book. It took me two tries to get the listening part down... I'm still upset that I couldn't catch it all the first time. And as for the last part ("write a letter expressing thanks")... the hard part was remembering the expressions wedid learn! It would have been easier if something like "use ばよかった" was included... then I would know what to aim for...

Yeah, I feel bad about finishing first and leaving so quickly. I wanted to go home, but I also wanted to hang out with everyone... but I didn't know if everyone else felt that way too. Hanging around outside of the class just to hear people say "well, bye" and then walk away would make me feel kinda dumb. I just want an updated group pic!


Still one more final to go. Not too easy, but not too hard. I'm sitting comfortably with a "B", and that's not factoring in participation, so it looks like I'll have to come out with an "A" in the final to get an "A" in the class!

Saturday - the best day ever?

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Ok, so Saturday was two days ago. And yeah, I really should be studying right now. But last Saturday (3/5) was just so nice I have to write about it before I forget it all!

I owe most of the great experience to Sam. He picked me up at my house and before going to school to work on the role play, we stopped by his house where I met his VERY nice sister and father. He also treated me to some VERY good wontons! After saying 再見 we were off to school.

The roleplay was... um, fine, even without a Japanese tutor to make sure everything was ok. It's probably not going to win any awards, though.

Then we were off to Kinokuniya! He used those certificates he won and I bought some really good books: Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia and 日英故事ことわざ辞典 (Japanese-English Proverbs Dictionary). I think between these books, the three kanji dictionaries and the two grammar dictionaries that I already have (not to mention the internet), I have all the references I need.

Amazingly, he treated me to some curry rice at one of the places nearby. So, so good. おごってくれてありがとうね！

Later on my brother came by and we watched Ong-Bak... again! (I watched it the day after, too - yes, it really is that good!)

Even at night, I was able to watch episode 7 of ごくせん and episode 1 of Sassy Girl, Chun-hyang. It's actually airing right now (KXLA 44, Monday & Tuesday, from about 9:45 to 10:25), but as always, the episodes we see here are heavily edited from the original episodes shown in Korea - I'm talking at least 20 minutes cut out.

Of course by then it was about 2:00 am. What a day. (A great day for a change!)

オレがヤツらをたおす！

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The Japanese Speech Contest was today and it was great. I'm glad that I went to see it and I stilldon't have any regrets not participating this year because I don't really have much to talk about, especially in Japanese. Come on... I'm not known for talking... I'm happy being the quiet, good-natured doormat type. Lots of good topics and even better speakers... makes me wonder what I've been doing up till now. I'm not even sure I'm physically able to speak any faster than I can right now. I'll admit - saying stuff like みられる and ちつじょ（秩序）is hard!

I know I don't speak well, but that only strengthens my resolve. Hopefully my "20 kanji a week" plan will pay off eventually. Here's the short version of my kanji plan:


1) The more kanji I learn and the faster I learn it, the less time I'll waste studying it in the classroom. And there's no way I can ever learn the entire Joyo Kanji List (常用漢字表) in class. In other words,the sooner I learn all the kanji I ever need to know, the more time I'll have for learning the REALLY hard stuff like grammar, vocabulary, and honorifics. It's one less thing I have to worry about. Helpful links: Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Server, Learn the Japanese Kanji

2) The sooner I learn kanji (trying to remember all the readings), the sooner and easier it'll be learning new words. Just today I was looking over someone's speech and I was able to pronounce 「内容」, so I asked "What does ないよう mean?" and the guy answered, "contents". Makes sense... 内 = "inside"; 容 = "contain / appearance". If you ask me, recognizing the kanji and knowing how to pronounce the kanji in compounds counts as a victory. Helpful links: Quizzes on Commonly-used Japanese Words

3) The sooner I learn words, the sooner I can read books, newspapers, and magazines to solidify my grasp of the grammar. And that's really all there is to learning a language, right? Helpful links:POPjisyo.com, アサヒ・コム


It was also good seeing my old JAPN 320 classmates (who didn't recognize me immediately)... they were great too.

What wasn't great? I would have liked an intermission (I was hungry and nervous and tired and I wasn't even participating!). Also there was one guy who already won some prize (he was good but I'm sure he had some unfair advantage), and then when he won something from the raffle, he was all "I don't need another dictionary! I have three dictionaries at home!"... I don't know about you but I thought that was pretty rude. It was being given away and he said he didn't want it... and I'm sure there were many people (myself included) who would have wanted it!

And before I forget... CONGRATS TO FIORE FOR WINNING THE DAMN THING!!! (...even though he's probably not going to read this.) Others from our class won stuff too, but I already forgot who won what. We're all awesome anyway.

ONG-BAK!!! (...and some other stuff)

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Man. Today I just saw the movie Ong-Bak with my brother, thankfully in its original Thai language with English subtitles. I can honestly say, without the slightest fear of being accused of hyperbole, that it is the most mind-blowingly, super-fantastically, time-stoppingly AWESOME movie I have ever seen,or will ever see, in my entire life. The things Tony Jaa does... I swear. Wow. Now, the movie experience would have been perfect if some jerk wasn't kicking the back of my seat everytime the guy did something amazing... which was pretty much all the time. And seeing him nail guys in the head with flying elbows kinda made me want to try that on that jerk. I'm planning on seeing it again with a friend and / or my cousin next week. I don't know if I'm ever getting that DVD I bought on eBay though because the seller replied in an e-mail, "some mail has been lost / stolen"... just great.

Let's see what else happened:


Wednesday

I didn't have class that day so I told my cousin to take me to his school, Cal Poly Pomona. It was the school I was going to go to (my brother graduated there), but the Japanese program wasn't great. So anyway, it's... very big... and they have a recreation place not unlike our Pit (before it was closed down, that is). Of course, I was good enough at the games I played (including a game I haven't ever played before ) that I gathered more than a few crowds and met some cool people.

I probably should have done some homework first because I had two big projects due on Thursday...


Thursday

I slept at around 3:45 am and woke up at 7:00, not feeling as miserable as I thought I would be (and for the record, the least number of hours I slept was 2... and of course that was because I had someproject due in a matter of hours).

Would you believe I still had homework in addition to the project? That turned out to be fun, actually. It was like a puzzle, and I was able to figure it out on the two buses to school. It turns out I was learning Swahili...

Language lab! Winnie gave me something incredibly cool and cute. How like her.

In Japanese class, Fioré was teaching everyone (or at least, just the girls) how to write Korean. I wish I got a chance to ask him some things because there are lots of Korean words I've learned (from the dozens of k-dramas I've watched) and I would have liked to see how they were written in Hangul. And before that he was showing how in Chinese, all the characters have only one pronunciation, and how tones are important, giving the tired old "ma" example. Bah, I could have told anyone that. Ok, well I know he's just a more popular, better-looking, successful version of me (if I can even be compared to him), but his knowledge of two foreign languages (not counting Japanese) compared to my one(counting Japanese) makes me feel less special. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in the class who just knows English, and you know... there's a part of me that always hated my parents for not ever teaching me Tagalog. It wasn't a problem up until high school and including today. When I think about the number of opportunities I missed or the friends I didn't get to make because I didn't know Tagalog, I feel like crying... or punching walls. And now all I hear from my parents is "If you can learn Japanese now, you can learn Tagalog now." So I'm supposed to waste time as an adult learning something I should have been born with? What a load of crap!

...and after Japanese class I went home and to my surprise I didn't have to pay for the bus to El Monte Station because it was packed, or something. I still had to pay for the bus from the station to my house, but that's still $1.50 saved. Woo-hoo.


Friday

Spent most of the day wishing it was Saturday so I could go see Ong-Bak.

I also did a little translation job for someone. It was a good exercise.


Saturday

After Ong-Bak, my brother installed that bigger harddrive (leaving me with some... tens of dollars). Now I don't have to worry about running out of space when I capture shows from TV. The original plan was to copy my current (C:) drive to this bigger harddrive, but after about 4 hours of waiting, we found out it didn't work because the harddrive was too big for the program... without the patch. So he gets the patch but says we have to start all over. I didn't want to wait anymore, and I'm sure he didn't want to stick around any longer than he had to, so we went with Plan B: get rid of my CD burner and put it in that slot. I still have my DVD burner and I don't really burn CDs anymore, but if I needed to burn a CD I could still use the DVD burner.


Time to go to Target again...

Out of the frying pan and into the fire

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Today in my first class, I got the instructions for the second assignment even though the due date for the first assignment is still weeks away! I'm not looking forward to either of them.

Then in my second class, I struggled through a mid-term. It was multiple choice, sure, but choosing between things like "acute / chronic exercise", "resistance / endurance training", and "life expectancy / life span" just killed me. And I just know that if I didn't have to memorize the Japanese roleplay I would have done at least a little better...

Oh, but the fun didn't stop there! Winnie was at the language lab so I thought, "Well, today's not all bad..." But when I was about to leave, I realized I couldn't find that yellow attendance slip! After making a whole scene, I just ended up filling out another one. You know, it's kind of funny how I always act so clumsy with that one piece of paper - but only when Winnie's around... uh, heh... *nervous laugh* By the way, I found that yellow paper real quick... I was using it as a bookmark for the Japanese book! Though I suppose I am a little lucky that I finished my mid-term early enough (such as it is) that I was able to finish the language lab assignment before 1:00 because I don't think that other guy would have been so cool about it.

My Japanese roleplay was pretty bad... just incomprehensible in every way... and not that I don't like Jason but I WANT A NEW PARTNER ALREADY! Because hey, it wasn't my idea to say ガキ instead of 子供... I heard Zabuza say it when referring to Naruto, Sasuke and Sakura, so I had an idea of how it was used... but by the time I remembered to point it out it was too late and it would have taken too long to explain, and without the episode playing, my own comments wouldn't have held much value anyway.

On the plus side, I downloaded all 16 episodes (700 mb each!) of the k-drama Full House, and I don't feel bad about wasting space on a third DVD-R (six 700 mb episodes can fit on one DVD-R, so there's only 4 episodes on the third) because I also got the Full House Extras, interview, and OST! I still have to watch them before I burn them to DVD, though, since those subtitles could use some cleaning up.

Also I made my first eBay purchase yesterday. It's the movie Ong Bak (aka Thai Warrior) on DVD with English subs. I heard it was all sorts of awesome so I just had to get it! And it's a good thing that guy accepts money orders because I don't have a credit card and I don't use PayPal. Usually I just bug my brother.

I still need to get that bigger harddrive with whatever little money I have left... but I can't afford not to download all day!

What a month...

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It's been almost a month since my last entry, but it's not because nothing happened. I'll start with this:


The first day of classes

One of the worst days of my life actually began the second I woke up. My first class is at 9:50 and it takes about 30 minutes going to school taking two buses; knowing this, I set my alarm to 6:00. I woke up on Tuesday and I felt refreshed and not tired at all. Immediately I realized something was wrong (because if I'm not tired that only means I overslept), and with wide, worried eyes, I turned my head and looked at the clock. It was 7:55!

Of course, the day my alarm wouldn't go off just had to be the first day of classes - and no, the volume wasn't too low, and I didn't get the AM / PM mixed up... the switch was simply off, even though I made sure it was on the night before! I wasn't exactly sure when the bus would come by (I remembered it coming around before at 7:25, so I thought it would arrive at around 8:25, give or take 5 minutes), so I was extremely stressed. A five-minute shower and a half a glass of orange juice later, I was out of the house, running to the bus stop waiting for a bus that may have already come.

Luckily it came at around 8:45 and I made it to class on time. Now, I thought I had enough time for a real breakfast, so I bought something at the Carl's Jr. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to actually eatit, and with my second class immediately after my first (both having strict "no food" rules), I was only able to eat my (cold) French toast dips and (cold) hash browns at around 1:00, turning a good breakfast into a pretty lousy lunch. And even though I got the combo, they forgot to give me my orange juice - I thought it was in the bag!

This whole ordeal reminds me of my first day at this school, when I took the wrong bus. I took the "480", but I took the wrong one! Instead of going on the "480 Downtown L.A.", I got on the "480 Montclair"! I walked around for an hour or two, looking for some bus that would lead me back to the El Monte bus station. Thankfully, I got on a Foothill bus (good thing I carried a lot of change), which pointed me to another (MTA) bus stop, and I was moments away from missing that one, too! Anyway, I made it on time; the class was at 1:00 and I decided to catch the bus at around 9:00 AM, giving me plenty of time.

Japanese was fun of course, but I really wanted people to make a bigger deal about my new hair. There was one new guy, and it was over a year since he last took Japanese, but then we all found out that he should have enrolled in Japanese 200A instead of Japanese 200B. He'll have to wait anotheryear, and well, I felt pretty bad.


And what's just as bad as a blackout?

My computer hard drive apparently died right before the second week of school (the screen would freeze during the WinXP startup screen, and "Safe Mode" and "Last Known Good Configuration" didn't help either), which really slowed me down... more than anyone could imagine. I'm reminded of my early days at this school when my DSL connection died and I had to use dial-up like an animal - a problem made that much more irritating because I had online assignments, pretty much taking away the whole "go at your own pace" feature. And on the week my hard drive died, of course, I had to go online and write a summary of the results of an online quiz.

For an entire week I was wondering if I really lost everything that mattered to me (I'll be honest here: my computer is my life), and I set aside the money for a new hard drive, but luckily my brother came through and re-installed Windows XP, or something. I wasn't completely sure what the problem was, and I'm not sure what the solution was, either. I didn't enjoy downloading all those Windows updates and patches and service packs again, but after the longest week ever, I was still happy. I think I'm going to get a new hard drive anyway because I'm really running out of space, here; I have a lot of things just waiting to be burned to DVD, but I'd like them to be "complete" before I burn. It's really limiting my capturing capabilities (where 10 minutes is about 4 gigs), which means saving even moreprograms on TiVo - something I don't feel good about at all.


So how are those classes?

ENGL 401, English Language in America (Huld): I rather enjoy this class. It's all about linguistics, where you learn about the sounds of speech and such. There are lots of symbols to memorize, and for a kanji guy like me, it's right up my alley. Learning those transcription symbols and being able to write them is amazing - it's like using my very own 白眼 (BYAKUGAN!) on every written and spoken language on earth! I almost want to form hand seals before class...

KIN 345, Physiological Effects of Exercise during Aging (Hawkins): We didn't get to see the instructor until the second week, and when I finally saw him I was a little scared because he has a loud voice, but he's actually pretty cool. There was no book to buy so that's a plus, and the course seems pretty clear-cut: 5 internet assignments, a mid-term, and a final. There's also the choice of volunteer work (hah!), or a paper. And since he's giving us the sources, it's just up to us to write it! I can already tell that it's going to be easier than that Anthropology paper (5 pages instead of 7-8).

JAPN 200B, Intermediate Japanese (Yokota): Same old, same old. Love it. Right now I'm struggling to come up with something to write about for the speech contest, and I'm not even sure I can. It might just be easier to try for the JLPT (日本語能力試, or the Japanese Language Proficiency Test), even though it's only once a year, at the end of the year. I hear topics like "My vacation in Japan" win contests, so I'm out of luck anyway.


Anything else?

I saw two great movies: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle is now my favorite movie of all-time, actually beating out Office Space! It's very, VERY funny (even the DVD menus are hilarious), but it also manages to drive a point home, something Dude, Where's My Car? lacked (though I like that movie just the same). More recently, I was digging through my rather large still-unwatched collection of "Stuff From Pearl" and decided to watch My Sassy Girl. I put off watching that one because it's split into two files, both over an hour each, but I am so very glad I made it through (and besides, I was encoding something on VirtualDub that took about two hours anyway). There's no wasted time in the movie, and the more you pay attention to the details, the better your viewing experience. And like with100 Days With Mr. Arrogant, I recognized a few of the actors here as well. The male lead was in the k-drama Prince's First Love which finished some time ago, and the aunt was in the k-drama My Precious Child where she plays a 40-year-old woman (could have fooled me...), and she looks even younger and prettier in the movie!


Currently listening to...

I'm really enjoying the soundtrack to the current MBC k-drama airing here in SoCal: Tropical Nights in December. I still don't know how they came up with the title (it could just as easily have been the title of the previous drama starring Kim Nam-Jin), but the drama is great. I really like Kim Nam-Jin's character (I like to believe I can empathize with his struggles). The soundtrack is great, too. Some tracks are hauntingly beautiful just like Stairway to Heaven (the k-drama), and some are infectiously catchy. Either way, the 1-minute intro theme is just so good... I'm considering making it my "Start Windows" sound or my ringtone or something. I'll just stick it on my phone anyway.


I still have lots to do, and I'm not just talking about homework, so I should probably end this right now. I've been dead tired the entire time I was writing this, and I could always edit this (I end up editing for typos and other minor things anyway)...