¡Sarah!

"I don't know if anyone is still around, but here is an update" seems to be a common theme in my friends list these days, so - I don't know if anyone is still around, but here is an update.

The last time I posted (in December 2015!), I was working at an eikaiwa in Tokyo. In April 2016, I moved to a different department within the eikaiwa and taught for a year at a university in Tokyo. I returned to Canada in April 2017 and since September 2017 I have been working on my Master's degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. The readings and the discussions have been very interesting, but most of it has felt pretty distant from actual classroom situations, and I am pretty eager to get back there! I somehow managed to finish my coursework in three semesters, and now I am taking a semester to write my final project. Sad to say I have just as much internal motivation to write this essay as I usually do, which is to say that I have none. :) But I will do my best!

Earlier this year I started lifting weights (!!), last month I started trying to get back into sewing, and as always a large portion of my free time is spent studying Japanese, but honestly the main thing that's been occupying my thoughts these past few weeks is old movies! The combination of TCM, YouTube, the public library, and my university library's web site has provided me with an endless free supply. As usual I have been watching a lot of movies from the '30s, '40s, and '50s, but after I discovered Buster Keaton in 2016 I started watching a LOT more silent movies than I ever did previously and I am loving it! The most recently silent movie I watched was 1921's The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse which was really interesting and also made me cry. So clearly I am getting pretty into these things!

For various reasons I have greatly reduced my online presence over the past couple years, but I continue to update my Trojan War blog infrequently. The current top post is ALL MY THOUGHTS on this spring's Troy: Fall of a City miniseries, which was flawed but I LOVED it. I think that kind of super long post is not really sustainable now that I am turning into someone who doesn't want to spend all her free time on the computer, so I'm trying to figure out how I might change the way I've been writing my posts there, but rest assured I still enjoy exploring the world of Trojan War adaptations!

Also, today is Morning Musume's 21st anniversary, and I still love them too. <3

I hope all my LJ friends are doing well! Feel free to let me know if you read this. :)

So I am very pleased and a little embarrassed to report that all the negative feelings I've had towards Morning Musume recently evaporated pretty much as soon as they stepped onstage today. lol why do I even bother whining about the changes in this group when clearly I am destined to be a fan forever. xD Today they performed in Morioka, a mere hour by local train from my town! And I didn't realize this while looking at the map yesterday, but the concert hall they performed in is right across the street from Aiina, a very nice building with a stupid pun for a name, but more importantly it is where we had our mid-year conference! I spent so many years pining to go to a MoMusu concert that to think that today I saw one an hour from my house across the street from a building where I gave a presentation is MIND-BLOWINGLY AWESOME.

Some more quick and random thoughts: ( Read more... )

I guess if I'm sitting here wasting time I might as well write a post, even if it's random and totally useless. :) The return of my favourite meme~~!

List seven songs you are into right now, no matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs.

( 男なんてなんて信じない )

Okay, now to spend the rest of this lovely day off studying!! :D I feel like I keep forgetting my intention to attempt the JLPT at the end of this year, whoops.

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Oh LJ, surely we know each other well enough now that you don't need to ask me this question! Sarah/pop music OTP!

I will now return to listening to The Fame Monster on repeat, as I've been doing for the past four days. This album is way too addictive!! :B Although I continue to be a little weirded out by the guy's part in "Monster": I love that girl / Wanna talk to her, she's hot as hell. O RLY.

Unrelated (well, related to pop music, but unrelated to Lady Gaga x) ): Hello! Project is once again spending more than five dollars to make their music videos, and I am down with that!



(Wow, new YouTube is actually cooperating with me today! I guess I can hate it a little less now, thank goodness.)

I'm late, but today was Elvis Presley's 75th birthday! My mom is a fan of Elvis and, as a result, he's the topic of several anecdotes from my childhood. Way back when, January 8th was actually the date I was due to be born, leading my parents to refer to me as "Elvis." Or, if I am to be completely honest, "Elvis Arnold." Whenever I heard this story as a kid, I always assumed Arnold was Elvis' middle name. It wasn't until we got a channel that showed reruns of Green Acres that I learned that the "Arnold" in my nickname actually came from a fictional pig. :| I ... don't even know, lol.

Anyway, so yes, that's my connection with Elvis - until I was born, I was named after him. xD Oh, and if you had asked four-year-old me what my favourite song was, I do believe I would have said "All Shook Up." xD That plus "Beat It" plus some Sharon, Lois and Bram ... yeah, that's pretty much all the music I listened to as a preschooler, lol. xD

( ~*~SURVEY~*~ )

51. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), 2000
I can count this as a movie if I want to count it as a movie, haha. I heard about this play when the_wykydtron went to a local production (without me!! HOW DARE SHE), and so intrigued was I by her report that I looked to see if I could find a version of it on YouTube. Lo and behold, I found the entire thing! I finally finished watching it last night, and, while it was a little more ridiculous than I'd been expecting, overall I really enjoyed it! They actually manage to include pretty much all of Shakespeare's work, including my beloved but much-ignored "Troilus and Cressida," which is awesome! As a wannabe Shakespeare fan I was definitely laughing through the whole thing (except for the occasional serious moments, which were also very good), and I'll probably be looking into the Reduced Shakespeare Company's other productions in the future. xD

In other news, last night trumpydoesmagic and I watched The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which was most excellent, and then I had a dream that Lady Gaga featured Morning Musume's Reina Tanaka in one of her songs. Uhm. Awesome?

For some reason, lately I feel like writing a lot of random posts about music I shamelessly enjoy. Having said that ...

HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS AND HATERS TO THE LEFT

THIS IS A ~*~MAKI GOTO APPRECIATION POST~*~

( cut for a lotta youtube )

Uuuugh my sleeping habits are sooooooo gross right now. I had to FORCE myself out of bed at one in the afternoon today. I hate this. D:

But in other news, I just watched this unsubtitled Morning Musume interview and understood quite a large chunk of it, so yay! :) (And yay for Aichan talking about Disney Sea. xD )

Answers to yesterday's book meme:

1) The Elephant Vanishes, Haruki Murakami, and I'm kinda surprised no one guessed this just because I was under the impression that Murakami's so hot right now. I don't love his writing but I like it well enough; mainly I keep this book around because I find collections of short stories somehow really inspiring and motivating. x)

2) The Odyssey, Homer. I thought this would be slightly less obvious than if I had gone with The Iliad but perhaps I am incorrect in that assumption.

3) Full Frontal Feminism, Jessica Valenti, although the_wykydtron is correct, I ignored the fact that there's an introduction.

4) Notre-Dame de Paris, Victor Hugo. Guys, what's the point at which you recognized this one? I'm curious. xD

lol, one non-fiction and then three translated fiction. Actually I think most of the books I own these days are non-fiction, and a lot of those are language textbooks ... I don't think this meme would work very well with those. :|

In other news, it's Friday night and I hope This Is It sells out tonight because it still hasn't yet!! Meanwhile we have nine showings a day of A Christmas Carol, what is this madness.

~ Not gonna lie, probably my favourite thing about the Michael Jackson fandom is that there are so many people in it who go out and do good deeds! I mean, I've been in the Morning Musume fandom for years now, and Morning Musume has a couple songs that talk about environmental issues, but it seems those songs are only ever mentioned so that people can make fun of the Engrish in them. I love that MJ fans can make fun of the total lack of enunciation in "Man in the Mirror" while still taking its message to heart. <3 haha, so what I am trying to say here is I finally signed up to be a volunteer through my local rec centre, and today I went to a (very small! I was surprised) meeting in order to fill out the necessary paperwork to get a criminal records check and all that. They seem to only be looking for volunteers for one-day events (eg. a Hallowe'en party here, a Remembrance Day ceremony there), which is not my ideal kind of volunteering, but it should be fun and it'll definitely work until I find something more. :)

After the meeting, I was waiting at the bus stop to go home, and one of my co-workers drove by and offered me a ride! Aaaah so that was kind of the highlight of my day, hahaha. I love awesome surprises like that. xD

~ I signed up for a continuing studies class through my alma mater (lol, it's so weird saying that) today. If you want you may roll your eyes at the ridiculousness of me missing school as much as I am, but believe me, this class is relevant to my interests! In May I read Dr. Jonathan Shay's book Achilles in Vietnam, in which he compares the combat trauma experienced by American soldiers in Vietnam with the combat trauma portrayed in the Iliad. I am surprised there is not more fangirling in my review of it, because that was probably my favourite book of the summer. The class I signed up for is a two-hour class that will look at Euripides' play "Herakles" through the lens of Shay's work. SO I AM PRETTY EXCITED. There is very little these days that will get me up at eight-thirty in the morning, but hopefully combat trauma in Euripides is it! xD

(Uh ... for those of you not in the know? I am a Greek mythology FANGIRL.)

~ We have reached that time of October where I am OBSESSED with NaNoWriMo and I basically need November to get here NOW before I get sick of thinking about my novel. I'm so excited for this year, you guys. :D I am really excited about my story (I've actually used this story for NaNo before and lost; I think it needed a couple years of getting knocked about in my head), and I'm really excited to be NaNoing with so many new people! :D haha, and hopefully they don't get sick of me telling them that before it's even time to start writing. xD <3!

Woke up to the news that Koharu is graduating from MoMusu and from Hello! Project. This sucks!! I guess December 6 will mark the end of my favourite MoMusu line-up. :( Although anyone who points out that I should be grateful it lasted as long as it did is right. The group has been unusually stable lately, but I kind of liked it that way. :(

I booked off work today in order to go to the museum with one of my best friends. :D This'll be my third time through the British Museum temporary exhibit but that's fine with me, I loved it. And the second time I went I bought an annual pass, something I actually should've had all along, because I definitely go to the museum enough for it to be worth it. So yay for going to the museum for free~!

And a note for my Shamoners: last night I had a dream featuring Crazy Fountain Boy. Y'ALL ARE JEALOUS~~~~ xD