Aino Minako-chan

I'm sooooo excited about going home for Christmas; I'm already getting impatient, which is bad. So here are some random thoughts for the week:

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( An Open Letter to the Girl Walking to the Train Station Tuesday Night )

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I got a letter from one of my sisters last night, and she included pictures of the kids. How come no one ever told me that Niece got glasses? She's soooo cute. Also, Nephew looks like a mini-version of my brother-in-law; it's pretty scary. But I'll be seeing them in 2 weeks! Hurray!

I must admit, though, that there will definitely be things that I'll be missing about Japan during the holiday season. End-of-the-year parties. [sigh] Luna Sea concert. [whimper] And, of course, New Year's Day sales. [sob sob!!] Seriously, basically every store worth its beans sells awesome grab bags, filled with random crap that you never knew that you wanted, for super-de-duper low prices. Stores that normally sell a single shirt for 10,000 yen will offer a grab bag with 6-7 items, dresses and coats even, for the same price. Pay 1000 to get a bag filled with random socks or jewelry, and get your money's worth if you even if you just like one or two of the dozen items included. And I've had awesome luck the past two years with a slightly more upscale jewelry store in Shibuya; I've gotten etched silver rings and 18k gold jewelry for super cheap. Ohhh, grab bags! You'll all be gone by the time I get back to Tokyo, and I will miss you. [sob sob sob!!]

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I would like to quickly note that I have no desire to see the new Beowulf animated movie thingie. Partially because I'm always wary of people trying to "modernize" classics or make them "hip" for modern audiences, partially because I haven't been entirely impressed with what I've seen of the animation (big monsters = look cool. anything supposed to be human = dead and soul-less eyes.). But I think it's also possibly because I was so traumatized by learning Beowulf in high school English. See, I liked our teacher fine, but she was... flighty. She didn't always realize that we weren't psychic. And the highlight of our learning experience came with the Beowulf test, which included the following question:

Beowulf is a ____ and a ____ of a ____ .

( Seriously, WTF? )

I had the weirdest class today. I'm taking, as one of my courses, English 368, Mythologies (far easier than it even sounds). To open the class today, my teacher brought out a video. She taped the Lord of the Rings trailer that showed during Angel last night (she was ticked that she had to sit through all of Angel just to see the trailer). She claimed some sort of mythological relevance, which I could see, and then said, "Now when you watch this preview, I want you to watch for one thing." Okay, tying modern mythology into our class, very cool. "Liv Tylor." .....Okay, maybe she plays a character of mythological importance... "What the heck is she doing!? Okay, let's watch." And so, that was it. We watched the trailer twice, just because. The two deepest comments we recieved from the class were A) "That's one of the only movies I'm looking forward to. That and Harry Potter," and B) "C'mon, it's Liv Tylor in elf ears. I'm not complaining." Man, that class is weird.

I'm thinking aloud here, so if you're not interested in my college career, you might want to skip out now. [calculating quickly] If we theorize that I am indeed going to be a Linguistics major when I get back to the states, I think I can pull it off in two years. [thinking aloud again] For the major, with a language, culture and society concentration, I need 9 classes, basically: Ling 200, 300, 301, 402/416, 305/315, two of 205/313/406, and two "society/culture" classes. Considering that I've spent the last year in Japan, I should damn hope that at least two of my classes will be acceptable for that last requirement. That gets me down to 7 courses (I honestly think that Linguistics has to have fewer requirements than ANY other major ever created... 24 hours? give me a break...). So with my extra year that I was planning to spend at school anyway, that gives me a goal of about 2 courses within my major a semester to graduate "on time." Errrr... Wow, toughy. Of course, considering that next semester, there are only two courses from my list OFFERED... I have a feeling that Linguistics is lacking in the students department. Oh well. I really think it's the major for me. Other people might not care about the structure of Korean, but that's one of the tops of my "want to take" list. Seriously. AND it's a major where I can take Intro to Sanskrit and get feasable credit for that. Talk about useless knowledge, but C'MON. I'd know SANSKIRT. How damned cool is that!? So anyway, it looks like things'll be okay. I could even double it~! In fact, I'm almost positive that I will. I wish I could pull off a second language but that would put me at three more years just for technicalities (and while I don't care about that, my parents might have another thing to say about that...). But I mean, besides the language part, it would only add three courses to my total, which isn't bad, AND basically give me an automatic ESL teaching certificate. I might go ahead and get the ESL certificate, since that's only an extra 2 courses and seems fairly interesting. Well, depending on how things'll work with transferred credit, I just might be able to pull off Asian Studies major pretty darned easy. I've already taken the foundation course and just need 9 more classes. Seems like a lot until you consider that A) I've taken 5 classes in Japan, B) I can count 4 semesters of Japanese towards that as well, and C) I'm planning on taking the Structure of Korean class in any case. Now the problem is, of course, 15 hours of credit wouldn't be credit from my college, and they sometimes get picky about that. But since I was studying it in Asia, I don't see why it shouldn't count. I mean, that really don't get much more Asian Studies than that, right? [shrug] Well I can sorry about that later.

Right now I'm still busy worrying about whether or not the whole "Linguistics" major will stick or not. I desperately hope that it will. Not even because of time restraints or money or anything, but simply because if it doesn't work out, I have no idea what else I'd be interested in. I mean, I've figured out that sciences and engineering aren't my thing after all. Things like economics and english are tremendously easy for me but also make me want to shoot myself in the foot. I've often wondered how far you can go with something before it becomes apparent to people that your complete boredom with the subject means that you could care less about anything you're writing; but then again I look at my own AP English score and it becomes apparently that people really don't care what you feel about it if you can say something about it. I find special portions of many subjects like psychology, sociology, history, anthropology, etc. incredibly interesting, but I'd never be able to get past foundation courses that would make me want to rip my own head off (you'll find me dead in a gutter somewhere before you make me take an American History course or Psyc 101 for example). So far, I don't think I'll have any problems with linguistics yet; I've really grown to like sociolinguistic studies, but looking at structure is pretty nifty, too. If all else, maybe I can do a Make-Your-Own-Major. It'll be "Manga Translation" with a concentration in it's application on the internet. My big project will be translating something really long and obscure, let's go with Kusatta Kyoushi for now, and watching it spread on the internet. I'll write papers about the turmoils of writing my own HTML, or trying to figure out how the hell to make a working Kusatta skin for WinAmp 3.0. It'll be fun~!