¡Sarah!

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Why I do believe that would be athena_crikey, who sat, as I recall, two seats down from me during the three months of fifth grade that I had here after we moved. (I have a couple classmates from the city before that friended on Facebook, but we talk so rarely and so superficially that they hardly count as friends anymore, sigh.) Athena's constant quest to move farther and farther away complicates that second question a bit, but, true to what I wrote on my NaNo author profile, I do tend to e-mail her approximately five times every day. :D

I was going to answer the third question by saying that I've had the same group of friends since grade eleven, but then I realized that that's a total lie. So I guess a better answer would be that my group of friends evolves, but at such a pace that I hardly notice, hahaha! Fun fact: I've known the_wykydtron since grade six, but we didn't become friends until the first year of university (second semester, as I recall!), when we had to take the same bus to school in the morning. This BLOWS MY MIND every time I think of it! I love how little random events can totally change the course of your life.

~ lol at how poorly I've been keeping up with my own LJ this past week. ^^;

~ Today I forced the_wykydtron to watch The Neverending Story and in return she pointed out all the plot holes I'd never noticed. Which kind of pained me, because when I was a kid I thought that movie was so brilliant. In related news, the Nostalgia Critic's review is hilarious. xD

~ My test voucher for the JLPT arrived today, and I discovered that the Level 2 test is being held at nine in the morning. D: And the friend I'm probably staying with doesn't live particularly close to the test location, so that'll be a fun morning. Anyway, inspired by the arrival of the voucher, I did some grammar practice ... and got a score of 3/8. Horrendous!!

~ My future husband interviewed Michael J. Fox today! I'm not particularly a fan of his acting work (well, with the exception of the "A, My Name is Alex" episodes of Family Ties and also that episode of Scrubs where he played the doctor suffering from OCD), but I heart him so much for all the work he's been doing to fight Parkinson's disease. And I HATE that he's been accused of exaggerating his symptoms. I don't know what it's like for you guys to watch him, but for ten years I lived with my grandmother as she was suffering from this disease, and in my mind there is no way he is acting. Watching this interview tonight, there were so many times where, for a split second, I felt like I was watching my grandma. And I really heart Michael J. Fox for going out there and doing all these public appearances where it's really obvious he can't control his movements, because on her bad days I'm pretty sure Grandma didn't even really want to be seen by her family members. So yeah, just for all that he's probably one of my favourite celebs, not gonna lie.

(My future husband also did a 2008 interview with Lee Thomas in which they discussed MJ's vitiligo. They reaired it recently and it was an awesome change of pace from all the tabloid trash~)

~ Speaking of awesome Canadians, I've definitely had "Canadian, Please" stuck in my head all day. xD

lol, I just saw my manager's Facebook status:

[Manager] loves that Sarah [last name] sponsored me for the BC Dream Walk and Run 2009. You should too!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Please?! Come on!!!!!! You know you wanna!!!!!!

Two of my managers are doing this walk for charity and I gave them each ten bucks for it and they are making the hugest deal out of it, hahaha. Yesterday at work the other manager was all, "You gave me money so I can't be mean to you today!" hahaha, guys, calm down, pretty sure my head is big enough already. xD; I do hope I inspire some of my co-workers to give to this too, though, because if we raise enough money, the managers are going to do the walk in drag. xD

In other news, today is my only day off this week and I had intended to spend it running errands ... until I woke up this morning and discovered that walking is a challenge, sitting down must be done carefully and stairs present a serious obstacle. Holy crow, paintball! My co-workers want to go paintballing once a month but I'm pretty sure these old bones wouldn't be able to handle that, lolz.

So I'd totally forgotten that I once forced my mom to listen to BoA's Best of Soul for like a month straight until she came home from work yesterday all "Someone on my bus was talking about BoA!" hahaha awesome!! Today I lent her my copy of BoA's English album and she said she's going to put some of the songs on her iPod. brb, turning my mom into a J-pop fan! xD (Uh, because somehow BoA's English album counts as J-pop in my head?)

Driving lesson tomorrow. After this one, I'll only have two left. Ugh, I'm still so bad though. D: And I still don't enjoy it. the_wykydtron is on a quest to find the one thing that will spark in me a love for driving but I don't have high hopes. I do kind of get a kick out of picturing me driving my friends around and in this way forcing them to listen to my favourite music, haha, but still. That's not quite enough to keep me motivated here. :/

Anyway! I'm sure a lot of you have seen this already, but just in case, I am posting it again. I feel confident saying that this video is pretty awesome even if you aren't a fan of Michael Jackson. A one-man a capella group who manages to layer like six songs on top of each other without it turning into a huge mess? This will always and forever be one of my favourite YouTube vids, hahaha. <3

In the middle of a lolarious conversation about a certain manager who likes to move everyone around to different tills for reasons no one else understands--

Co-worker 1: "And so by the end I was looking around and all I could think was, 'This is not where I belong!'"
Co-worker 2: "'Not where you belong'? You sound like a Disney movie."

Ahaha. x) I continue to adore my co-workers despite the fact that I seriously need a new job. On Wednesday we Slytherins got our prize of mini-golf and dinner. The mini-golf was really not exciting but the free dinner was so worth it. I definitely ordered more expensive things than I would've if I'd had to pay for it. >xD And now we're about a week away from paintball! I'M ACTUALLY GOING THIS TIME, unlike last time when I decided sleeping in was the preferable option. I've already made a financial commitment to this round, so. xD;

Anyway, I guess it's time for me to answer the questions from this post! (Which you are still allowed to contribute to, if you'd like!) ( Read more... )

Quick! Two fun facts!!

One! Now that it's past midnight -- today is my mom's birthday! :) Why yes she is indeed one day younger than the King of Pop. I think I always remember this fun fact so well only because it is perhaps the only semi-positive thing she has ever said to me about MJ. ^^;

Two! The first time I heard any of the songs on Pink's Funhouse album was on my flight home from Tokyo. That whole flight felt like such a neverending visit to a strange parallel universe that when I was flipping channels the other day and caught the music video for the title song, my first reaction was surprise, like This song exists here, too??

Wow I have no energy today. -_-;

Books!

11. Night Comes to the Cretaceous: Comets, Craters, Controversy, and the Last Days of the Dinosaurs, James Lawrence Powell
I confess I didn't read all of this book; as there is only so much I can read about rocks, I admit I skipped a couple pages here and there. But even so, this is a really interesting book about the Alvarez theory (that the extinction of the dinosaurs was caused by a comet or an asteroid) and the scientists who attempted to corroborate or disprove it. There's actually surprisingly little in this book about dinosaurs -- it's mostly about the scientific community --, but it's written really well and at a really comfortable level for people like me who have no knowledge of science. :3 I would recommend it.

As an added bonus, I am now quite convinced that it was a comet or an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (and Powell's description of what that must have looked like was pretty awesome, in a crazy action movie sort of way). Fun fact: all through elementary school I was taught that it was an ice age that killed the dinosaurs, despite the fact that the Alvarez theory had been out for over a decade! Did anyone else have this experience, or was it just me? :X

12. Making Money, Terry Pratchett
FICTION?!?!?!! aha, I actually only started reading this because I was feeling sick and wanted to read something light enough that it would distract me from how gross I was feeling. I didn't have any books of my own that fit the description so I went over to my mom's bookshelf and grabbed the first thing I saw. :X While it made for a very good distraction, it was apparently not quite good enough to break me out of my non-fiction phase. >xD;

Movie!

33. God Grew Tired of Us, 2006
Augh, I never have the words to write about documentaries. :X This one follows three Sudanese men who fled as children from the civil war in their home country. After something like a decade of living in a refugee camp, they are given the chance to move to the U.S. So there is definitely a sequence showing the men as they try to adjust to the various different technologies that can be found even just within their new apartment. Actually, sequences like that were kind of the highlight of the movie for me. Seeing (North) American culture through the eyes of these men who come from somewhere so different is both really interesting and at times amusing -- I liked when one of the men, all excited, exclaimed, "We have this drink in Africa, but there it's called Coca-Cola and here it's called Pepsi!" haha, cute. ^^;

But for the most part it's a pretty serious but really interesting documentary and I actually kind of wished it was longer, because near the end they started skipping entire years and I didn't care for that. Aaaaand you should just go watch it for yourself, because I have no idea how to talk about it right now. :X

All right, time to eat and then go to work! I definitely do not have the energy to work today, but at least it is a short shift. I have been back at the movie theatre for a full month now (three and a half months left of my promise to stay through the summer xD; ) and so far I am not hating it yet -- yay!! Well I think it definitely helps that I have been making better use of my time off than I was at this time last year. :) For example, on Friday the_wykydtron and I went to the British Museum exhibit that's currently at the local museum, and omg I LOVED IT. <3

So my friend A invited me to go with her to see Twilight last night.

Sarah: "My mom says I should admit that I've seen it already."
A: "Oh, yeah - I've seen it twice."
Sarah: "Me too, but I wasn't going to admit that far!"

... and this is why we're friends. xD;

Also, despite the fact that this movie has been out for three months now, and despite the fact that we were at the university theatre which I always imagine to have classier audiences, the audience we found ourselves in last night was the sort of audience that screamed when Carlisle appeared. But more amazing than that, they laughed at all sorts of lines that are funny only unintentionally! They laughed at the face Edward makes during the pivotal blood-sucking scene!! It was like watching Twilight the sitcom and oh, how I loved it. xD

OH I forgot to mention the most important part of this, which is that on the day The Daily Show declared to be Emergency Christmas, I actually did give a Christmas present. SUCH A DEDICATED FAN--! xD

Off to Toronto tomorrow for zoo and interviewy goodness! To everyone who has wished me good luck, my nerves and I thank you. <3 I even very unexpectedly received a good luck phone call today from someone who is famous enough to have his own Wikipedia page, although if I were to actually tell you who he is I guarantee you'd be even less impressed than you are now. xD

Anyway, I've just finished watching Amadeus which was an even better distraction from my nerves than I had hoped! And since athena_crikey's most recent entry is a fangirly entry, I have found the courage so that mine will be, too. xD

Query: is Salieri an unreliable narrator??

Believe it or not, I had never considered this idea before today. Here are my three main reasons as to why perhaps he is:

1) I noticed this a long while ago and never thought much of it because it's not that uncommon in fiction, but there are a fair number of scenes that Salieri didn't witness and couldn't have heard about that are still included in this movie, and so, we assume, in the story as he tells it to the priest. Basically, everything that happens in the Mozarts' home during the times when Lorl isn't working there, Salieri has no way of knowing about.

2) Wolfie says he'll sleep and then they'll start work on the Lacrimosa. They never do get to work on it, but nevertheless it plays in its entirety over the funeral scene. Is this the movie trying again to push the idea that Wolfie's music was all already finished in his head? Or is this a hint that Salieri has been lying to us a little bit? (hahaha of course when talking about this movie I always ignore historical fact. Yesterday I finished reading Piero Melograni's biography of Mozart and wow, there's actually way more factual issues with the Requiem arc of Amadeus than I realized! I mean obviously the entire movie is fictionalized and I totally accept that, but still I find it really interesting to compare it with what we believe actually happened.)

3) Man you guys, I have seen this movie so many times and I still don't know what to make of the ending. (By which I mean the very end, when we're back in the asylum and Salieri has taken it upon himself to absolve everyone he sees.) Maybe it's just me, I dunno, but I'm always so confused by it. But to fit in with my hypothesis of Salieri the unreliable narrator, maybe the ending is supposed to clue us in that he's crazier than we would have previously thought? And so maybe we can't believe a word he's said and maybe nothing he claims happened actually did? ... ?

And now I am totally reading through all these old e-mails I wrote to the_wykydtron like two years ago that are filled with analytical brilliance about Salieri's motivations (SPOILER WARNING FOR THE DIRECTOR'S CUT lulz if anybody cares): ( Read more... )

And although it's only midnight, I guess I should get some sleep ... I've been trying pretty well in vain to adjust to a much better schedule, considering the interviews on Tuesday start at six a.m. our time ... D:

Longer letter later~! :D

Edit a day later: ( Read more... )

ahahaha I love that this is an entry in whatwasthatone. My brother and I make reference to that exact scene ALL. THE. TIME. xD

Augh I am too tired to write a proper post right now. I shall only say that I am SO MUCH IN LOVE WITH SCHOOL right now that I kind of hate that it's already the weekend. You may remember how much I was in hate with school last semester? I have no idea what's going on here either but I won't worry myself about it too much if my enjoyment of school manages to last. :) I'm unnecessarily anxious about how much I should be working this semester, though. Right now I've given them two days a week but I can't decide whether or not to add a third. :/ But we have been so wonderfully slow at work this week (850 guests in our first evening set tonight; for a Friday night that number is PATHETIC) that I now magically have tomorrow night off! :D I NEVER get Fridays or Saturdays off you guys. This is EPIC.

Speaking of EPIC, the bulk of my reading this weekend is the first three books of The Iliad, so of course I am happy with that. xD; I feel like I'm cheating or something, because this is the exact same reading assignment I had my first weekend back in first year. And speaking of reading, OH MAN I BOUGHT MY BIOLOGY TEXTBOOK TODAY AND IT IS HUGE! And the study guide has as many pages as the textbook!! Have I been spoiled by Humanities study guides? Where they're only like a quarter as thick as the textbook? I cannot even get over this!!

I guess before I go to bed I should probably tell you what classes I am taking, haha. It is definitely a random semester, I just need three random classes of whatever at whatever level in order to graduate, so ... yeah. :p In alphabetical order I have:

Biology 150A - with one of my co-workers!! haha xD I'm not sure yet how much I'll like this class but I dropped a huge amount of money on the textbook and study guide so I guess I'm committed! Man it has been so long since I had a science class~ ...

Economics 111 - YES I have a class in ECONOMICS which means I actually have to learn how to pronounce it! (lol, athena_crikey and the_wykydtron may remember what I am talking about. ;) ) This is a class about the economy and its effects on the environment so it's pretty interesting and accessible for people like me who have no idea about anything having to do with economics. I feel like such a total poser in this class, though! Like I'm totally not supposed to be there. And MAN, it blows my mind that I have two classes for which there are no writing assignments. Are there seriously people who go through university not ever having to write a single essay?? Because that's just not fair! D:

GRS 300 - SORRY BUT I AM PROBABLY GOING TO TALK WAY TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS CLASS. I feel like a poser here, too, not because I know nothing about the subject but because I feel like a TOTAL FANGIRL in a classroom full of SERIOUS ACADEMICS. ahahaha I'm sure I'll still love it though. xD;

Sociology 100A - with the_wykydtron! Still not sure what I'm going to think of this class, we had what I guess was our first lecture today but it was very ... vague ...

And now I am distracted from this entry. The end! :D

(augh so as you can see, a bad thing about working is that I always forget to go to bed afterwards ... ahahaha hello there three a.m., haven't seen you for a couple days! :P )

Our times board at work broke itself again. First it started showing the wrong theatre numbers, then it started showing movies and times from seven months ago (haha it felt kind of nostalgic, in a way~), and then it just conked out entirely and went blank. This was at like seven thirty. I swear I had like five people ask, "Are you not showing any more movies tonight?" I'm pretty sure I got dumber every time I heard this question. :(

So we had a midnight showing of The Dark Knight and we had it in FOUR THEATRES. And it SOLD OUT. AT EIGHT O'CLOCK. And yet when guests bought tickets for tomorrow night and I told them to come at least two hours before showtime in order to get anything resembling good seats, they laughed at me. WE SHALL SEE WHO'S LAUGHING TOMORROW!!!!

Answer: not me, because I have to work 2:30-10:30, everybody's but especially my dreaded shift. ;_;

BUT I GOT TO SEE leaf_green TONIGHT!!! :DDD Aaaaaaaand I have nothing else to say in this entry. :)