Bonsai Blog

So I’m at school during lunch break, updating my blog because of a funny story.  At least it’s humorous to me.  Background:

Chihiro, Ayana, and two other girls did an English project, and picked Paparazzi rights as their topic.  And all they found them annoying, the conceded that it’s a way to make a living to them.  Part way through the project week (last week) they got in a bit of an argument with the teacher.  They had put work in and done it a certain way, and the teacher wanted it a different way.  The teacher ended up telling them to start over, because it wasn’t the way HE wanted it.  They were obviously very mad about that.

So this week, they did the presentation.  At the end, that teacher told them that the first two groups had done very well, but the third group had room to improve, which was of course Chihiro’s group.  I didn’t go to that class because of Japanese Lesson, so I only got around to talking about how it went today.  After hearing about it, I wanted to confront the teacher about it, because I had CHECKED their project myself, and had helped them on it a little.  It was very good.  So for a teacher to single them out as needing to improve set me back.  I’m quite disturbed and angry about it.

Before confronting the teacher though, I wanted to gather background information.  I have no problem talking to teachers, but I wanted to check my facts and make sure that they pulled the presentation off nicely.  So I talked to the teacher from Trinidad who had watched them what she thought.  And she said that they had done it very well, and didn’t see why the recieved the comment that they did.  She said the teachers would meet and talk about the group presentations next week, and she’d see what had driven the comment.

She also said I should probably just let sleeping dogs lie, as Japanese teachers can get maybe kind of scary.  But I view it from the other end.  The teacher shouldn’t have made the comment and made me come in and fix this.  It was an unfair comment, and they will get a good grade on it.  Chihiro’s an awesome girl, and the presentation was good.  It’s annoying when teachers possibly use past arguments as an excuse to critize.  If that is the situation.

Yeah.  Next week is tests, which means it will be completely boring for me. 

Other than that, let’s see what I’ve been doing…  Yesterday I went to Kongo with Jeremy (Hawaii).  A lot of my friends mention Kongo, so naively, I thought it’d be a cool place to hang out.  Yeah, not so much.  But we found stuff to do.  Like there was a park, and we scared away some Japanese kids who were playing baseball, by (what else), being foreigners.  Oh, and we found a bookstore.  I asked (in very good Japanese) if there were any English books, but no.  The lady kept looking quizzically at Jeremy.  Later, I finally got it.  He is 75% Japanese and 25% Chinese, so the lady figured he was NOT a foreigner, and wanted him to explain what exactly I wanted.  Japanese people tend to think foreigners are stupid, so even if you use perfect Japanese, they’ll be like ‘uh…’.  Maybe it’s the surprise.  I dunno.

I need an umbrella.  Since mine was stolen.  And I got soaked when it started raining when I came home from the bus, too bad that was 5 minutes to get home and it was *pouring*.  But that was Sunday night.

Lots of people on YouTube are waiting for my video about high school life in Japan.  It’s filmed (rather short) but it’s in the making process.  I hate using my actual camera to film because it uses the STUPID Apple QuickTime format.  That makes for HUGE file sizes, and I can’t use that with Windows Movie Maker.  Which means I have to go through a 20 minute process to convert a 1 and a half minute clip.  Lame.  Sorry that it’s taking so long.

Today was pretty boring.  I felt SO sick in the morning.  I hung out in the computer room 5th hour because I was worried that my stomach may have problems after lunch.  It was really hurting, and I felt kind of nauseous.  It was because I ate a budamon for breakfast.  I knew I shouldn’t have done that.

Oh, and check the photos.  Added some new stuff.  It’s in the new ‘Friends’ album.  Yay!

I’ve been *really super busy* as of late!  ESS has been practicing so hard on Snow White, it’s been literally taking up all my time.  In fact all of last week I only had 1 hour each day to myself about, after dinner, before I’d go to bed and stuff.  Yeah.  Which is why no blogs.  And Saturday, I had to go to school all day and practice.  Then Sunday (yesterday) was the actual play, and I had to wake up at 5:25!  On a weekend!  So I was really tired.  And so I took this morning off from school.  (Yay…nice host parents.  I was so exhausted though, absolutely no break from school and running around and stuff.)  I worked really hard on coaching, co-directing, and making sure everything was ok.  I also had the role of the hunter to memorize and stuff too.  It all worked out though!

The school was really far away, and took about an hour and a half to get too.  Really boring!  But we got there, rehearsed once, had lunch, then settled back.  There were three plays (including ours).  The first was ‘The Wizard of Oz’.  It didn’t have a lot of props.  But the English was pretty good, and they had Dorothy sing ‘Over the Rainbow’, which was cute.  It was pretty fun to watch.  Although, if you didn’t know the original story, it might’ve been harder to follow.  They kind of left out some details, that I automatically knew.  It was actually led by the teacher who did ESS last year, but she transferred to a different school!  All teachers have to switch schools after x number of years, no idea why.

The second play was…well, not that great in my estimation.  It wasn’t bad by any means, and the memorization was excellent.  The problem came in that it was Science Fiction, and incredibly long.  this play also didn’t do many props and was mainly just speaking.  The main character was half American, half Japanese, but had a British accent.  And while his Japanese and English were both excellent, it was a hard to follow story, and was obviously condensed.  The best part was probably when the American/Japanese guy ad-libbed in ‘You’re just a freak’n chicken!’.  It seems that he did that because the tone of the play was going a bit into the comedy zone because of a mistake, and at the spur of the moment he added that in.  It did crack up everyone in the audience who could understand it.  The problem was, it was completely out of character for the person he was playing.  And obviously the language style was out of place.  I notice these things of course because of my long time involvement in Speech…I’m so used to getting critiqued and watching other performances.  So yeah, too long and not well suited for the audience.

ESS’s play was the best, even without my bias.  We went the farthest with props and costumes, and it really showed against the other plays.  Ours came in second compared to length, but it was a lot more enjoyable because it had a very follow-able plot line, and actual acting.  The second play had a lot of sitting in a chair and dialogue.  So we came and conquered at the other school!  Too bad it wasn’t a competition.

On the train home, Shioli was sleeping with her head down and this lady came over, looked down at her, and said ‘Atama dekai!’ (Ah-tah-mah deh-ka-ee).  Which means ‘What a big head!’.  Absolutely no idea why she said this, and it was very rude.  Shioli does not have a big head, no matter how you look at it, although her hair was kind of falling to the sides a bit and made it look a bit larger. But seriously, she’s really cute, and it was very rude of the lady.  Very funny nonetheless.

Then we went to a Chinese restaurant.  I was rather happy because I love to eat gyoza!  We stayed a long time and had a lot of fun.  Really too loud though, oops.  We are high schoolers though, and ESS is particularly crazy.  We all ate dinner, which was good.  After, we sat at the table and played the thumb game, and whoever lost had to drink a bunch of this REALLY SPICY stuff.  It was really fun, and I never lost.  Yay!  I’m not going to explain the thumb game though, for lack of time.

Today I came in at lunch time, and then had Art and English.  Then ESS.  After school though, Shioli, Yukari, Yudai, Tsutomu, Jeremy (Hawaii) and myself all went to a picture boot at the mall.  That was fun, and I stuck the stickers to my phone.  Along with the ones that I have of Yukari, Shioli, Yudai, and myself.  Then we talked at McDonald’s, but Jeremy had to go home.  We all decided to have dinner together, so we got take out and brought it to the park and talked for three hours, which was really fun.  It’s bittersweet though, with less than a month left.  I did understand most of what they were talking about in Japanese though.  Sometimes it’s difficult for me to express my thoughts in Japanese, but now I can understand most of the stuff people around me are talking about.

Very fun day, yesterday was fun too.  But less than a month left, and I’m really going to miss all of my friends here~

I was getting sick of the other layout, and only reverted to using it because the dates got screwed up on the other layout.  So this is my replacement, I hope you all like it.  And yes…I will *always* use a green/plant theme.  I did choose BonsaiBlog to be the name, after all, and green is my favorite color.  I also like plants.  (No real interest in gardening however)

So anyways, two new foreign students are at the school now!  They’re both Americans, and they’ll only be staying for 3 weeks, just until July 5th at my school.  They both seem really cool and I like them.  The guy is from Hawaii and 3/4 Japanese, while the girl is from Virginia.  Yeah, it’s really cool.

Today in ESS Yukari asked me if I wanted a Reeses candy (she brought it back from America) and I was like ‘YES YES YES!’.  Then the Hawaiian guy is like ‘What’s the big deal?’.  To everyone, once you’re in a different country for 9 months…candy will matter.  I haven’t had one of those in at least half a year and I really wanted it.  You can’t grasp the concept of being away from your favorite foods for so long unless you’ve actually done it.  Don’t take things for granted!

And the play’s shaping up pretty well, luckily.  Not a huge update today, but the new foreigners deserved a mention.  Since they’re so cool.

So yeah, time for a weekend update.  I guess I’ll start with yesterday.  I did…basically nothing.  I am in the middle of trying to make a new layout for one of my other sites, and it’s very difficult because I’m using some complex CSS and DIVs, when I usually work with tables.  Not that any of you understand what I’m talking about…

Then Saturday night I went out for dinner with my host family.  It was vote between Family Restaurant OR Shukudo.  The latter is like a cafeteria-style restaurant.  We chose the family one though, and it turns out *dun dun dun* that it was a very Japanese-styled Family restaurant, which wasn’t what I had in mind.  There are more American kinds, and I had been wanting to go to one, but no.  But I did get hamburg (which is like just the hamburger part with special sauce) and some gyoza.  I’m not sure how to spell that.  But it’s like a Chinese dumpling thing, and I like them very much.

Today I went to ESS from 10AM-5PM.  Really, really exhausting.  We did make progress though, which is good.  Not much to say I guess, just practicing scenes from Snow White over and over again…

Right now I’m watching the 1959 film ‘House on Haunted Hill’.  Gaia regularly has free movies you can watch that are old ones.  But they’re kind of cool to watch, so I pop on to see which ones have been added once and awhile.

School tomorrow will be a bit different.  Only three hours, then lunch.  After that everyone walks to Lovely Hall to see a drama.  I might sleep during it.  I know that a lot of students will be doing that, hehe.  I probably won’t really understand it, but that’ ok.

And I’m still using Windows Live Writer.  If you have a blog, use it!  It’s so awesome.

(Warning: Tech blog)

For this post, I’m using a new program that’s separate from my blog… Windows Live Writer, a free tool from Microsoft (in case anyone’s interested). I read a review of it, and decided to look at how it worked. Plus I was impressed with Windows Live Messenger 8.5. I can’t wait to get my hands on Vista… Anyways, the plus is that now I can add images much more easily and also have a built in spell checker and uber fast blog preview when needed.

Lately I’ve been in love with Windows. Kind of weird. Their new interface for everything and integrated Live system is just so nice. Plus in my computer class we’re learning about how to use Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. And yes… it’s rather basic. But there are enough little secrets and shortcuts that I had no idea about that it’s interesting. So now I can be much more efficient in both of those programs. Yay! Not to mention that I have Microsoft Office 2003 and can really take advantage of it. 2007 wasn’t out when I went to Japan. Honestly though, 2007 doesn’t impress me that much. And compared to 2000, 2003 is awesome.

So yeah, it’s crazy. All this Microsoft stuff. I’ve also begun to use Outlook for one of my emails. Now WLW for my blog. And of course WLM is what I always use for my instant messaging… Firefox is (and probably always will be) my browser though. IE7 is nice, but, just deviated too much from the norm on the GUI and doesn’t have the community to back it up.

YouTube’s new ‘beta’ look is awesome for the videos, much improved. Microsoft’s Soapbox system looks really great, but it just doesn’t have the community behind it unfortunately. Maybe it’ll get there eventually.

Last tech thing: Safari for Windows. Once they patched the huge vulnerability they left in it, I downloaded it today. Why? Because some people I know are die-hard Mac fans, including my grandparents. So I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Was it worth it? No. Installer had some issues, not even a good start. Customization for it sucks… And the fonts are just too fuzzy for my tastes. Plus it breaks one of my sites when I look at it. Why? I dunno. Therefore I won’t be using Safari anymore. Sorry Apple.

Anyways, for some Japan related stuff… I’m sick today. Went to school, but left ESS an hour early because my throat was aching. Sunday I have ESS from 9AM - 5PM. It will be a lot of work, and I’m not particularly looking forward to it. This week I’ve worn myself out, and especially now that I’m sick, I just feel like sleeping.

Last thing. Music. I’m getting back into The Killers now. Debating whether to get their album Sam’s Town when I get back to the US. I also found that they did an awesome cover for Romeo & Juliet, originally by Dire Straits.

So yeah, I want to test a picture now. So…look at a scary picture of me:

And it can even watermark my images for me! Soooooo cool. Yeah, I like this little program. It’s nifty.

The Japanese summer is just warming up now.  It’s been in the 80s from mid-May, and keeps climbing.  I drink at least 2 and a half or 3 bottles of *something* a day, just to keep myself hydrated.  And ice cream tastes much better now.  It should be the rainy season soon, so kind of waiting for that.  It may feel like Singapore then.

Aaaand I switched my AirCon in my room over to cooling, so it actually works now!  Before it was on heating from winter, so it wasn’t working properly.  Which means I should be able to sleep at night now.  Hot weather makes it so hard for me to fall asleep, I hate the sticky feeling and stuff.  But now my room is so nice…

Tomorrow the third years have tests.  So I get to go to the LL and hang out for first hour.  Second hour I’ll go with Chahiro, Junko, and Ben to get supplies for ESS’s Snow White.  Then third and fourth hour I’ll have Japanese Lesson.  Why I have a Japanese Lesson, I have no idea.  Today I pulled out my decent acting skills and impressed ESS club.  I’m not a great actor, but three years of Speech has rubbed off on me at least a tiny bit.

What are you looking at? ‘Pepsi Ice Cucumber’, a Japan-only flavor. Believe it or not, Japanese are not so different from Americans. This turns them off as much as it does you probably. No one in my class could actually believe I bought a bottle of it, and I got a lot of attention for it. Why did I buy it? I thought it would taste good. Japan has things like ‘melon soda’, which is actually cream soda- nothing to do with melons at all. And other things that are not what they sound. So, heck, why not try the ‘cucumber’ pop?

Well, turns out Japan didn’t lie about the vegetable it contains. It really does have a sickeningly sweet taste, complete with a cucumber-ish bit. Absolutely disgusting. Everyone in my class had to smell it, and I think that right there ruined Pepsi’s chances of ANYONE in my class buying it. It smells disgusting too. And the picture doesn’t show it that clearly, but the stuff in the same could be Listerine if you put it in a different bottle. Absolute same color.

Some of my friends tried it too. So I drank some, later Ryuta did. The Tsutomu wanted to try. And after school the foreign teacher tried some (Ben), and the Chahiro and Junko wanted some, and then the Canadian (Bob) tried some. So the bottle ended up with a 7 person count. I did not drink the majority of it. Then I just dumped the remaining 1/6 because I was kind of like ‘too many people’… I’m a compulsive hand washer, and germs aren’t my thing. Actually right now my hands are really dried out because I’ve washed them too much.

Anyways, new experience in Japan. Yay. Because you’d never find something like this in America, you just wouldn’t. And that’s exactly why I bought it.

—

Oh, and I probably got around 45% on JTest. Not as bad as I imagined, but not good at all. The listening part (which I was hoping would be easier) was so fast, and the segment and answers were only read once. Thanks. At least my Spanish teachers would go over things multiple times so we could get it. The writing was a bit easier though, so I guess it balanced out. And a lot of intelligent guesses.

—

And I lost in Badminton today, which was sad. But it was against a really good pair, the gym teacher and some kid who obviously knew how to play. So yeah. I’m partners with Tsutomu if I hadn’t mentioned it. We’ll win next time. I love badminton so much, and gym is my favorite class now. Art has fallen from grace, because we’re doing oil canvas again…and I have no inspiration nor artistic talent. My mind doesn’t work for art.

…and I will fail. Without any doubt in my mind. It has so many kanji that I have no idea about, it is not even funny. See, I am actually very happy with my Japanese skills at the moment. I understand most of what my friends talk about now, and can honestly nod along…and not just out of pretended comprehension. So I will not be able to read the kanji very much, and that will fail me. There’s a smaller part of listening, which I think I can manage to do decently on. It’s not my Japanese skill I don’t have faith in, just the list of kanji I know.

And even to understand the questions I do know, I need to understand the kanji in them. It’s like a trap for failure. And one of the things I loathe most, is failure. I do not take it well, and I know that’s what I’m getting set up for right now. So it’s incredibly stressful. UGH.

I made a new video blog too. I answer mailbag questions. Click the link on the side to see my video blogs.  Aaaaand forums are finally up.  Click the new link on the sidebar, above video blogs.  Mostly for people interested in foreign exchange OR people currently living in Japan.

So today was the big gym festival.  From 8:30-4:00 we got to sit outside in 86 degree heat either watch or compete in an activity, which had already been pre-planned.  Most people had two events, with a few having three, and a few having one.  I was just normal with two.  I got to be in the class jump rope competition, and tug of war.  Fumiya (ironically) got the same things, but we’re in different classes now, so he was the enemy!  Of course, I hung out with him and Tatsuya the whole time.  It was ok I guess, just sitting there talking, but it was SO HOT!

In America, I don’t believe they’d do that.  I think they’d actually be concerned about safety.  But, of course, in Japan you can just tough it out.  And no reminder to bring water bottles or anything.  Sometimes I like safe, padded American life.  Anyways, I have mildly red arms and a sunburned nose now.  THANKS!  I was hoping that I would tan out to look like a Japanese person, but no luck.  Just kind of more reddish now, which isn’t cool.  Aww…

I was going to video it with my Lumix, but the heat made me lethargic and I decided not to do that.  I snapped like two pictures during lunch break, when we were allowed back inside the school.  At least we had cellphone use when we were outside.  Yay!  A *little* less boring.  But still.  Tomorrow I’ll be video-ing during classes, because a lot of people on YouTube want to see Japanese school.  And I don’t see a problem with obliging them.  Ben, the teacher from Texas, is also talking to the English teacher to do a group web-blog and put it up on my YouTube account, which would be AWESOME.  It was his idea, actually, not mine.  He watches my video blogs…

Speaking of people I know watching my video blogs, some Rotex girls walked up to me at a Rotary thing and started talking about my YouTube videos.  ‘Yeah, I saw you on YouTube…’.  It’s funny when people in Japan like find my videos and then talk to me.  That’s why I keep opinions out of them!  Docu-style is ok.  And anyone worried about the swimsuit thing, don’t be.  I purposefully worried people but I actually put it on over my gym uniform.  No way was I going to go on camera with it…  Anyone who thought I would…just no.

So today was really hot.  And hot.  And hot.  This is why I HATE Japan’s summer.  I am a cooler weather type of guy, and it doesn’t suit me at all.  Rainy season will actually start soon, so it will be semi-tropical for about a month.

Later~