¡Sarah!

I would post about this on Facebook, where it might be seen by more people, except that I deleted my Facebook last month, making LiveJournal the only social media account I still have. Well, I have been gripped by the need to post something about this somewhere, so LiveJournal it is.

As you may know, child sexual abuse allegations against Michael Jackson have been making headlines again, mostly due to the recent airing of the "documentary" Leaving Neverland. I've talked about MJ in a number of LiveJournal entries, but I don't think I've ever come right out and said what I think about the allegations. This is mainly because back in 2009 when I wrote that long entry about him, I honestly wasn't sure what I thought. I didn't really feel that the allegations were true, and I knew he had been acquitted in court, but I didn't know much about the 1993 allegations and during the 2005 trial I had been too busy with school to seek out any information beyond what was being reported on the news every night. Well, since June 2009 I have spent I don't even know how many hours reading up on the allegations, and I can now say that I am very confident in my belief that Michael Jackson is innocent. Once you start reading beyond the salacious headlines, what you find is honestly ridiculous. Allegations that keep changing, stories full of inconsistencies, stories that contradict the stories of other accusers, stories that are obviously based on fictional adaptations of the stories of previous accusers, timelines that don't make sense - adult accusers and parents of accusers who have strong financial motivations and histories of extorting businesses and celebrities - prosecution witnesses who crumble under cross-examination - prosecution witnesses who don't even have anything negative to say about Jackson - a number of credible defense witnesses who testified that they never witnessed anything inappropriate - and multiple thorough and lengthy searches and investigations conducted by multiple agencies (including the FBI) that spanned a decade and found absolutely nothing.

Nevertheless, even though ten years ago this summer blogs and newspapers and magazines were full to bursting with articles lamenting the fact that we had this artistic genius and we treated him like garbage, here's that same garbage back again. It's infuriating and it's exhausting, but I am very impressed with the effort MJ's family and fans (and non-fans!) have been putting into defending him over the past few months. They haven't been allowed much airtime in the mainstream media, but on Twitter and YouTube and their own web sites they've been going strong and not giving up at all. Here are links to only a small portion of the work that's been done (with a warning that some of these sources are very specific about the alleged acts):

· The Michael Jackson Allegations: This site looks at all of the allegations very thoroughly and with tons of citations so you always know where the information comes from. The site is being updated frequently and the site creators have also started to produce YouTube videos, one of which is Leaving Neverland: Echoes of a Pedophilia Apologist, which looks at the creepily pro-pedophilia comments the director of Leaving Neverland has been making in interviews. Another gross layer on this disgusting tale.

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One last thought. Part of the response to Leaving Neverland has been discussions about whether or not it's still okay to listen to MJ, whether or not his music should be played on the radio, whether or not he should be included in museums, whether or not this will be the end of his legacy. I hate every one of these discussions because they are based in emotional reactions to a manipulative movie, not in the actual facts of the cases. But I also find them kind of funny. The fact that Michael Jackson changed popular music and dance is indisputable. He smashed records, he broke through racial barriers. He's a part of the soundtrack of multiple generations the whole world over. Last year he was, once again, the highest-earning dead celebrity, earning ten times more than Elvis Presley, who came in second. Just last month his Super Bowl performance was being shared all over the Internet under titles like The best Super Bowl halftime ever, by the greatest performer of all time and A friendly reminder of that time Michael made Super Bowl history. I have once or twice stumbled across the theory that without Michael Jackson, there would never have been President Obama. Take MJ off the radio if you want, but his legacy is so deeply embedded in music and culture and history that it's inextricable. He's alive and he's here forever.

HEY GUYS, I was going to write a proper intro for this entry but then I realized it doesn't deserve it. Long story short, here is the original Star Wars trilogy as told by someone who has never watched the original Star Wars trilogy, i.e. me.

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One last post before we return to our regularly schedule programming - here is a list of the plays in the Shakespeare canon, roughly ordered based on how much I like them (although they are alphabetical within each category because otherwise I would be here all day). This list is more for future!Sarah to look back and laugh at, because I am 100% sure that at least some of the plays will move up or down in my esteem as I read them/rewatch them/learn more about them. The first time I read Macbeth I thought it was boring and the first time I read Romeo and Juliet I thought it was stupid, and now both of them are among my favourite plays of all time. So anything can happen really!

For me, the plays in the first three categories really made the Shakespeareathon worth doing. Can I just reiterate how happy I am to have discovered Richard II?

( Sell when you can: you are not for all markets. )

Apologies to those of you with no interest in these entries! I am a mere seven plays from the end, at which point we will return to our regularly scheduled programming of Sarah and her boring life.

( If one good deed in all my life I did, I do repent it from my very soul. )

I apparently haven't LJed about it since 2010, but rest assured that Amadeus, the not-a-biopic about Mozart and his fellow composer Salieri, remains one of my most very favourite movies. I've seen the movie (in both theatrical and director's cuts) a kajillion times, but I'm much less familiar with the play it's based on. I had read it and I had watched an amateur production that I found on YouTube, but (now to the point of this entry) it wasn't until last night that I finally got to see it live! Some thoughts:

( We are both poisoned, Amadeus. I with you: you with me. )

So now that we're almost a month into 2015, how about I post the rest of the books I read in 2014?

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So I fail to post all of December (and it's probably a good thing that I did, I was pretty grumpy for most of it), and upon my return I bring you a most useless entry: a list of the movies I watched (or rewatched) this year. It's organized by decade because the past few days I've been feeling really curious to know how many movies I watched from each decade. I'm actually not all that thrilled with the answer. Every year I think "I want to watch more older movies!" and I thought I'd done better this year but looking at this I'm not sure I did? How is the 2010s list the longest one? Did I really only watch four silents? And how did I fail so hard at the 1930s when I seriously love 1930s movies?? Well clearly I am just going to have to make sure my 2015 movie list looks rather different.

(I am pleased to report that I watched three Rosalind Russell movies this year though. Great actress or greatest actress?)

Also, this is just a list because I'm lazy, but you are more than welcome to ask for my thoughts on any of these!

( Sarah's 2014 Movies )

Also, in the summer I got it into my head that I was going to watch a whole bunch of old animated shorts, and in the end I kind of didn't, but if anyone is interested here are the fifteen that I did watch. Perhaps this is another list I will try to beat in 2015~

Special note, the 1953 "Tell-Tale Heart" is perhaps my favourite thing that I watched all year, you should totally watch it and let it creep you right out.

( Sarah's 2014 Cartoon Shorts )

I saw Big Hero 6 today, making today perhaps the first time I've seen an animated Disney movie on its opening day. I went into this movie knowing basically nothing about it. I had seen one commercial and knew it was a movie about a kid and a robot. I kept forgetting what it was called. I thought maybe it was set in Japan, since all the posters had that annoying ~Asian font~ on them. Since I tend to be kind of indifferent to recent Disney movies that don't follow the princess story formula, I didn't expect to like it very much. I was really surprised when it only took two scenes for me to get super into it. And from that second scene straight through to the end of the scene after the credits I really enjoyed it. My only thoughts upon leaving the theatre were "That movie was AWESOME!!! (And don't tell anyone but it made me cry a little bit.)" So I hope it is clear that I liked the movie a lot and do recommend it!

Having said that, I've been thinking about it for a few hours now and here are some thoughts I have had. ( Cut for minor spoilers and major rambling! )

So I recently joined italki, a language exchange site that so far I am really enjoying. It has basically all of the get-your-writing-corrected-by-native-speakers features that Lang-8 does, plus a bunch of other features geared towards helping you find language exchange partners that you can communicate with via chat or messages or Skype. Not that long ago I would've been weirded out by the idea of Skyping with random strangers but now it seems like a completely logical thing to do when you have no one to practice with offline. I've been taking Japanese classes online for very nearly a year now and I feel it has really opened up my mind to the possibilities of online learning. Perhaps a weird thing to say when I have spent way too much time online every day since I was like eleven.

In any event, the reason I am posting is that I just finished a half-hour Spanish chat with someone from italki, and holy guacamole. My Spanish is terrible. Like, I know that I've been focusing on Japanese for two years. I knew it wouldn't be great. I knew that my brain would go "Oh, we're speaking a language that isn't English? It must be Japanese! Here's the word you want in Japanese!!" and I would have to translate from Japanese into English into Spanish, but even accounting for that! It's TERRIBLE!!!! Clearly listening to a couple Spanish podcasts every weekend for a month did basically nothing hahaha. Seriously.

Anyway so now of course I am panicking that after I've been home for a while my Japanese is going to become this terrible, too. I seriously cannot let that happen.

... This experience is making me feel really really happy with my current level of Japanese. Which is kind of nice since I spent most of the past week beating myself up about it.

Man in other news did I ever tell you guys about that time at the board that me and M were speaking in Spanish just 'cause ...

(this was a while ago so my Spanish was not quite so disgustingly terrible)

... and M's Spanish sentences kept coming out in Japanese word order?

It was the most adorable.

So on top of the regular work week plus two-hour eikaiwa that I've been doing since I started JET, about a year(!!!) ago I started doing a second monthly kindergarten class. At first I was quite nervous about doing a kindergarten without my two fellow ALTs (this was back when they were still pretending to help me with the kindergarten class we share, I guess), but now I really enjoy it. I mean kindergarteners are adorable and etc. ( whoops this got long )