Happiness

There's a joy you experience with your family, a joy with your friends, a joy in life... So many types of joy in the world. I've finally found some semblances of joy here in UW. Unfortuantely, I'm also hypersensitive, so these sorts of joys tend to be short-lived. But I think that there's a certain joy that I've found by being with a certain someone that won't be as short-lived as the rest. At the same time, I'm usually really bad at predicting these sorts of things.
I'm NOT going to go into what I think love is, or what love means to me. Because there are plenty of other people in the world who do that already. But I will say that I've finally found someone outside of highschool who shares a great many interests and certain ideals. Joy... Beauty. Eternity isn't the only beauty in the world. In saying thus, I think that even though I'm unable to remain friends with everybody forever, those small windows of time in which we shared amicability are small gems in the otherwise dull scheme of my life. Bigger isn't always better. Sometimes the friendship was beautiful because it was short. (not to say that I go around trying to cut short my relationships. ) Just that I don't try to make all my relationships last when clearly some of them aren't meant to.
Feelings cloud judgement, but they give such flavour to life. Finding the balance is the real trick... ...and now I'm ranting. Gotta get up early tomorrow for Toronto...

Damnation

Just discovered that comments here either require you to be a blogger member, or no ID whatsoever. Grr!! I hate this anonymous posting. A pox on thee, blogger! You may as well have merged with xanga. Grrr... So erm, dear friends, please be so kind as to leave your name at the end of your comments. Thank you. =)

Der Neu Anfang

New layout. w00t. Is it any better than the old modified Jellyfish layout? Hrrmm... Only time will tell. hehe. Though I must confess that this current layout certainly more aptly reflects my preferences in stationary and design. What do you think?

Snowflake~

Snowflake came over last night. We watched Raising Helen. It was a pretty interesting movie. It wasn't bad at all. =) Sister was there too; we chatted for a bit afterwards. Throughout the entire movie, we were shocked at the number of ppl who were also in Princess Diaries until we realized that it was because it was the same director!
Thanks for the doritos, snowflake! =3

Wilde, Shakespeare, Blake

Monday was so much fun. And yes, it's wednesday morning now. School = busyyyyyyyyyyy.
Anyways... On Monday we had Language Exchange(LE) and this week's theme was poetry! Yey! So we introduced both English and Japanese poetry and literature to the students, as it was a fairly even mix between the English and Japanese students. After the short introduction (including a brief history of the inception of the Japanese Haiku into North American culture), we broke off into small groups to look over a few poems (hand outs) and explain them to our partners (we paired off exchange students with English-speaking students). Which would work, except...
The brilliant mind who made these handouts (knowing that the audience would be Japanese exchange students), brought the works of such poets as Oscar Wilde and William Blake. I mean, Shakespeare is so much easier to understand than Wilde! (well, Shakespeare's sonnet nr. 18 and 138 are so much easier to understand than what else they had)
Now, I know I'm slightly enamoured by the Engish language and all that it contains, but I'm still far from being an English expert. Even so, maybe because most of the English kids there were in CS or Math, I found that many of them either couldn't, or gave very poor explainations which just ruined the beauty of these poems. In Wilde's case, it's sorta understandable, since his was loaded with words that most people wouldn't know (e.g. empery), and allusions of whom I can only take to be figures from Greek myth.
But despite my having to constantly jump back and forth between groups to help translate the English poems to the Japanese, I still had a lot of fun. I rarely get to do poetry anymore, now that school's getting all crazy and chaotic.
OATUS (on a totally unrelated subject), this house is always FREEZING. And our gas bill is still fairly high. I think we need to look into some better insulation for our windows. And there are no guys here in UW who're fun to play with. Booh... they're either boring or brutish. Some of them are both! yey. Thankfully, I'm going back to Toronto this weekend. Then I'll get to girltalk the entire weekend. =D

大英帝国

A while ago, someone insisted on trying to define me as being either republican or conservative (as if those are the only two types of people in the world).
Having recovered from the shock since then, I've found that if anything I'm imperialist. Yes, I know it wasn't a perfect system, French revolution, blahblahblah, but I think in some important senses it has the potential to work better than our current goverments of trend.
And why? Because power was centralized. Because only one individual had the authority to make things happen. (of course, the next step would be making sure that this one person did make the right things happen). Unlike now. Decisions made by far too many people. The problem with that is that the majority aren't informed about everything and therefore aren't really in a position to make the best decisions regarding the governing of any given nation.
I'd make this more essay-ish, but I just woke up and I'm listening to french music right now.. (weird, I know.) It's uhh.... L'amitié by François Hardy. ...at least, that's what it says in my mp3 info. yey. Go parisian French.
Speaking of which, so many languages to learn, and so little mental capacity....
m'eh. As long as I'm having fun, right?

Ert

"That's all very well and good but what does 'inert' mean?"
"...well, um... just simply that it's not... ert."
Ah, British comedy, how we miss thee. Going on to blog about idiots. Because although I can't stand them, apparently I'm one myself. This blog is totally worthless. Anything I want to say I usually like a response ... ...may as well call up sby and chat instead of writing it all here, huh. Hurrah for idiocy! Too bad I'm nothing like Dostoevsky's Myshkin.

情

愛情と友情の違いどころは何処だろう。僕は人の目にどううつっているだろう。表面はどうだろう。我が将来はどうになるだろう。人々は僕が嫌いだろう。もっと早くてトロントへ帰ったほうがよさそう。

Der Alptraum

. . .You know that feeling of futile resistence? No matter how hard you try, you just can't fight off those probing digits or offensive caresses. Either my roommate just molested me in my sleep or a spider crawled by my neck and face, cuz I woke up with the feeling that I was trying to move something from my epidermis that was persistent. But I didn't wake up in a cold sweat or anything; I can still feel the moisturizer I put on before going to bed.
. . .And since I've only gotten a few hours' sleep, I think I should rest up... ... in the afternoon. Kinda hungry now.

New Beginnings

. . .Roomies! I'm not going to type anything negative partly because it's just the beginning of the term so I haven't really gotten to know them yet, and partly because it's just stupid to set oneself up for bad housemate dynamics by publicizing negative feelings on the 'net.
. . .So I just spent about 3 hours chatting with the roomie who's living in the basement with me. Really cool guy, easy to get along with. Although I did more of the talking. I probably irritated the heck out of the poor soul. :( I'm not good with reading people anymore. Or maybe I just stopped deluding myself into thinking that I was any good in the first place. Or maybe general fatigue just has my brain on the fritz.
. . .My courses seem promising so far... the math is forcing me to think logically again, the german is forcing me to study lots and the contemporary Japanese society course forces me to increase my stamina (solid 3 hr night class... in the winter!!) So hopefully some structure will come into my life and help me catch up with all my other projects which so deperately need completion.
. . .I think I should sleep now... Gotta wake up bright and early tomorrow... @_@ Lots to do, people to see, etc... I don't think my body is fully adjusted to this time zone yet... and my lips are killing me; I need chapstick almost as much as I need oxygen!

EDIT 7:00am
. . .In German they gave me a tablet PC to play with for the term. It's really cool, but having to hand-write everything sorta defeats the purpose of having a PC in the first place. But it's still fun to use, and just imagine how much easier it'd be to be running Adobe PhotoShop or illustrator on this thing. When I turn the screen around andflip it so that it's folded and facing up, it automatically becomes portrait! So now I can use portrait type pics for my BG.