Nine o' Clock Coffee

Every single class at Ohio State is offered at 10:30 in the morning. All of them. Sure, most of them are offered at other times too, but if you're lazy or forgetful like me, what you'll notice is that ten thirty seems to be the last slot open for everything, which is especially odd, since it does seem as though that is the prime class-taking time. It frustrates me so that the ONE class that I have to take for my major this quarter is offered at, what a shock, ten thirty. Distressing.
On another note, I love the word distressing. Also, the word ridiculous. Those are two great words. I think I started using distressing to replace depressing, which is odd because they're not the same meaning.
In other news (which is different from "on another note" because news references television, while notes reference music), Christmas is coming, guys! Tomorrow is December. December may be my favorite month of the year, fo' realz. Anyone who hasn't already needs to go start streaming the Radio U Christmas Channel (radiou.com, you'll find it). It makes for such a cheery morning, being able to get up and turn it on on my brand new tiny laptop with amazing battery and just carry it around from room to room. I did all of my dishes this morning. Actually, let me tell you about these supposed dishes. See, I planned on getting to work at 10:15. So I was going to leave home at 9:30, because I always assume it takes me forty five minutes to get to work. I think this may, in fact, be a vicious, vicious lie. Why, you ask? It was 9:30 when I finally made it downstairs this morning. Then I decided that I needed to do all of my dishes from the last two or three days. It was only after that that I thought to make my (mom) coffee and cream cheese my cinnamon bread. Then I had to wait for my coffee to cool down. I feel sure that this must have taken about fifteen minutes at least. Then I still needed to drink my coffee. I did all this, stood for a while at the bus stop, and got to work. Know what time it was when I was entering the Library? 10:10. WHUT. This is crazies. Ridiculous. Distressing. How, I ask how, does this happen? Did I just add an extra hour between nine and ten this morning? I feel like a member of the new midnighters, but we'll have to name ourselves the nineoclockers. That doesn't sound as cool. It just doesn't.

Practice Practice Practice *Headdesk*

I like to consider myself a writer. I also like to consider myself an artist. I'm entirely amateur in both of these aspects, but I like to think that over time I'll be able to work myself up to a respectable level with both.
Whenever I see a great writer or artist asked for advice about how to improve, no matter what they respond with, it always ends or begins with "practice."
Practice is answer to the questions of "life, the universe, and everything." It's always what people need, whether they are willing to admit it or not. I've tried to avoid this thesis for many years of my life, but whether I like it or not, that's what the answer is.
I have never been able to look back on something I wrote and say "that was a good work." I love the concepts of what I write, but rarely can I reread what I wrote. It grates my ears; it's neither eloquent not graceful, and rarely do I feel as though I can portray the right emotion. When writing commentum (fiction), I used to put too much detail into describing my characters, and none of the surroundings. Now I put too much detail into my surroundings, and none into my characters. When I write dialogue, it gets choppy at best and my use of pronouns is never where it should be, as I just forget to use them altogether when I'm writing because it takes so long that I forget who is saying what, and have to write the name to remind myself. My chapters are only a page or two long, which I cannot explain except to say that my writing is so bare-bones that I leave 80% of the details that I should be putting in. To be succinct, I hate it. I'll write for the experience of writing, and because I feel as though I have all these ideas in my head that I don't want to forget, but I don't have the skill to really record them the way they should be recorded, and for that I feel slightly shameful.
It was for this very reason, that I can see every flaw in my writing, that for long stretches of time I don't write. I'll create a dialogue or narrative in my head of everything I can think of, because I so desperately want to consider myself a writer, but I don't have the guts to put anything down on paper (virtual or otherwise). Thus, improvement has not so much been an option. Lately, I've taken on a different stance. I know that for a long time yet I'll probably still hate my writing, but if I don't write, I will never surpass my current state and God knows that would be depressing. So I'm ignoring my writing and I'm just going to keep barreling through it whether I like it or not.
On the other hand, there's my drawings. As opposed to my writing, I've always been especially proud of my drawings and paintings when I think I've done a good one. When I finish something, I'm proud of it and I like to show it off. I know in the back of my mind that I need plenty of improvement on that front too, though, for two main reasons. One is, of course, that the artists that I follow on various sites have been better than me since I discovered them, and I have been able to watch their abilities grow and explode overtime, much more than mine have, leaving me farther behind. The other is that I keep record of my drawings, and when I look back at something that I previously considered my best and most inspiring piece of work, I can now point out so many flaws and problems and it looks unbalanced and askew and I'm sure that if I flipped the image it would look as sideways as if I had taken opposite corners and stretched it out, if you know what I'm saying. My main problem with improvement on my artwork is that I have found that I really have to work to find something to make into a full-scale drawing. I don't know for certain, but I feel as though if I were to just doodle whatever came to mind for hours, I would get the same basic headshot and positioning with a bajillion slightly different faces and hair styles. Whenever I draw, I feel as though I can come out with one very good drawing, and then everything else is bland and forgettable and not even worth coloring. It's depressing really, as I'm afraid that I'm losing my imagination, day by day.
Really though, deep down I'm pretty sure that's not true. I get the feeling that it's really that I simply cant draw as well as I would like to, I want to be able to draw so many dozens of different poses that I know right now I wouldn't be able to accomplish. I want to be able to lay out my drawings in such a way that there's not just one person standing in a normal face-forward arms-at-her-sides persons standing slightly left of center. I have been neglecting drawing anything for month, though, because I've feared that everything would come out the exact same way. Practice cant make that much of a difference when every picture is the exact same, right?
Well I've decided that I need to change that. It's harder than with writing because I want to make an instant digital archive (see: blog) of everything that I draw, so I need to actually hook up my scanner (no idea how that works) or use my tablet (which I only want to use with photoshop, which then limits me to a cold lonely study unless I want to drag my desktop down a flight of stairs). I'll get it working somehow. Maybe.

Liverpool!

Totally and extremely relevant to my last post, I just went to the most fantastic Linguistics seminar today. The speaker (oh my goodness she was from New Zealand) was giving a talk today titled Football vs. Football. To summarize, she and one of her friends went to Fados and saw that the soccer fans there, although American, would gain a British accent when cheering for their team. So the two of them conducted an experiment that was all about how when fans of a team take on a sort of identity from that team, they can affect a similar accent.
In other words, if I start watching British soccer, I'm going to adopt a British accent.
Yes.

Really, that's all I had to say on that topic. I just wanted to let you know my future plans to infiltrate the land of Great Britain with a soccer accent. Now I just need to find a team to cheer for.

Sometimes

Sometimes I just need to write. Honestly, though, those are often the times that I can't think of a THING to write ABOUT. I think it's because normally when I want to write, it's because I'm just so darn excited about something that I want to share it with the world, you know? But the thing is, it's really probably not that interesting to OTHER people, when I really think about it. Like right now. Do you know what I'm excited about right now? British things. British things are really not that interesting on their own. It's like a sentence with a noun and no verb, there's really not much point to it. Like, hey guys, guess what? And you guys are all like, what? And I'm like, BRITAIN. Now, is that supposed to be interesting? Because clearly, it isn't. I need a plot for my post. I can't just be like, let me list everything I love about Britain because, well, I would start to consider myself incredibly shallow and then I would get depressed and wonder why I'm just sitting here switching between watching Merlin and Doctor Who (although this point is no longer valid now, because we are now watching Enchanted). Speaking of Merlin and Doctor Who, the main character of Merlin (you know, Merlin) was in an episode of Doctor Who! And I found this out because for a second it occurred to me that the guy who plays Arthur in Merlin might be the guy from the Narnia series, Peter (which I thought because I saw a commercial for Narnia on the Enchanted DVD). So I looked him up and he clearly wasn't but then I went back to see who the actor who plays Merlin had also played in and it said Doctor Who and I was like HEY, and then I realized that he in fact played a character that I had looked up a while ago because I thought he was the guy who played Edmund in Narnia. Long story short? I think that everyone in Britain was at one point a character in Narnia. Maybe I should be worried about this. Also, Narnia is in our refrigerator. I'm sure of it.
So anyway. I want to read some British books. Were the shoes books British? Are fairy tale books British? Oh good, my roommates just got home.

"Wakarimas ka, Collins-San?"

I've started my first year of college, which means I have also started my epic and amazing first quarter of Japanese. It's a scary class, with 45 minutes of recitation (not resuscitation) class each day, and 45 minutes of lecture every Thursday and Tuesday. Among the other incredible changes to how I learn a language, in our daily recitation class (also called ACT class), there is no English allowed. Once roll call starts being called ("Adams-San!" "Hei!" "Brown-San!" "Hei!"), the only English that comes out is when explaining the surroundings of whatever scenario we are discussing. Even then, it's all in simple phrases such as when the Sensei points to a picture of a building on a power point and saying "Tookyo University, new exchange student" but even then, the words are dutifully performed with a Japanese accent, rendering them almost unintelligible if one is not paying attention.
We have six different Senseis (teachers) that cycle in and out of the classroom. Three of which are Japanese (Kuwai-Sensei, Fuse-Sensei, Tsuchiya-Sensei), and three American (Mason-Sensei, Christenson-Sensei, Curtin-Sensei). After a few weeks of class (five weeks? Has it really been five weeks?), their individual affect on the class has become incredibly apparent, and incredibly unique from one another. The three prime examples that I have are Kuwai-Sensei, Tsuchiya-Sensei, and Christenson-Sensei.
Kuwai-Sensei is an older Japanese lady. She seems genuinely excited about the class, her fragile frame bursting with energy as she asks us whether we want to eat, drink, or play a game (in Japanese, of course). However, the air in the room when she walks in is tensed with nerves. As happy as she is, Kuwai-Sensei strikes fear into the hears of everyone in the classroom. Her snap decisions to point to... you! "Kiree zya nai desu ne?" will end in a few seconds of stammering before she swirls to another person, your score for the day having dropped at least 20% in those five seconds of nerves. When Kuwai-Sensei is in the classroom, there is silence by everyone except those whom she is addressing, and when she makes a joke, people genuinely want to laugh, but even the giggles are infused with the nerves of hoping she doesn't hone in on the one who is laughing to ask the next question. At the end of class, when Kuwai-Sensei exclaims "otsukare samadesita!" everyone lets out a sigh of relief that it's over.
Tsuchiya-Sensei is a young Japanese man, in his late twenties if I would guess, with a wedding ring on his finger. He's excited to do his job as a teacher, excited and happy to interact with us and invent new ways to convey the material. When he walked into the classroom this week, he turned to the class and informed us "I had a powah-point for class, but I thought this would be more fun" and proceeded to spend the class drawing horribly inaccurate pictures on the board with crazy gestures and using his own cell phone for conversations with us (Sidner-San! Odenwa desu!). On days when we're taught by Tsuchiya-Sensei, our class is lively, holding side conversations that are surprisingly relevant to whatever he is saying. No one is ever afraid to answer his question because he rarely brings around his clipboard (forever the symbol of being graded) while he's conversing with us. Those are the classes we always look forward to the most.
Christenson-Sensei (I'm really not quite sure if that is how his name is spelled) is quiet. When he walks into the classroom, people don't always notice at first. Maybe though, it's not even that he's quiet. Everyone can certainly hear him when he starts roll call, but we all feel as though we have to be quiet ourselves, to catch every word he's saying. When Christenson-Sensei is teaching, anyone could hear a pin drop - in the class next door. No one talks unless specifically spoken to, copying his minimalistic airs. He speaks with emotion, as any good teacher does, but even his emotion is exuded quietly. We don't have nearly as much of a fear of grading with him, because his normal style is to take the clipboard and go around the room once, asking us our CCs (core conversations, basic vocabulary), and seemingly grading us on that one encounter, which by then we will all have practiced quite a bit. I'm fairly sure at this point that he grades us at other times and we simply don't notice, but it takes the pressure off, none the less. His classes do seem a bit more drawn out, however, because we are rarely passing the time talking. Still, a longer class is preferable to a more stressful class.
Honestly, I love class with any of my teachers. Even Kuwai-Sensei has earned the nickname (unknowingly) in one class "Kawaii Kuwai," meaning cute Kuwai, because even as scary as she is, she's still adorable. This has been, so far, an amazing year.

From Apple Cider to Pumpkin Lattes

I really want to change my blog style again to match fall - this is why I kept the same blog background for so long, because I knew once I started changing it I would never be satisfied again.
At Christmas I'm definitely changing it to fit the mood.

The computer I'm typing on right now has an extremely outdated version of ie and nothing else, so none of the posting styles here are really... available to me. I'll have to wait until I get to my own computer if I ever want to do anything fancy...
Aaaaanyway - enough of those ellipses! On to the main course of action! Fall!
It's started this morning, I call it. I'm sure there's probably some warm days left (or maybe a lot, I don't care) but after the first day that I wake up and feel cold wearing a hoodie (an exceptionally warm hoodie) to work, I say fall has begun. The air was crisp this morning and the bus was beautifully warm on the inside. This week they started selling pumpkin lattes in the cafe downstairs of where I work, which definitely sounds like a fall kind of drink. Like a college fall kind of drink. (italics and parentheses are my thing today, apparently). Really, apple cider is always my fall drink (thanks for the mixes, Mom!), but for all those cool, cool college elites, it seems that pumpkin spice lattes are the way to go. It's odd to think that even how seasons are welcomed changes as we get older; fall still means the beginning of school to me, but it also means a search for textbooks and learning how to get around campus to classes. It still means cooler temperatures but it also means that I actually have to pay attention to the temperatures beforehand, instead of having my mom throw coats and hoodies at me as I walk out the door (I swear this text window I'm writing in keeps getting smaller). It means Halloween is coming soon (approximately), and hopefully some bonfires (given the landlord relents), and colorful changing leaves, and the most adorable cat in the world trying to adopt our house as a cozy place to sleep (sorry Batcat!), and walking into a warm house after work warming up with some good apple cider and a movie with my housemates - fall is a wonderful thing.
This is a horribly boring post, but simply writing it had brightened my spirits. Now I'm going to go brew some potions on Pottermore - go Ravenclaw!

It's an Odd Thing to Live in a Dream

When I was in second grade, we learned how to draw three-dimentionally in art class. We started out with drawing spheres (hokay, I didn't draw spheres, I drew circles), and then onto boxes (mine were terribly out of proportion), and then our assignment was to draw a room.
I fell in love with drawing rooms. Mine were, as always, terribly skewed out of proportion, but it was for years one of my favorite thing to draw. I still have that first drawing of a room that I did back in second grade; it's got a pink floor and orange walls, a canopy bed and a toy chest and bookshelves and a hampster and a plant that stretches up to the ceiling and cats. Cats are everywhere. Really, the worst part about the room is the fact that if it was a real room, it would probably be about twenty to thirty feet tall. But ignoring tha fact, it was my dream room.
Interestingly enough, that room also had one other thing; it had a trap door in the ceiling (with a cat looking out from it of course). That trap door drew me to the idea of creating a whole house. It was exciting, being able to connect so many rooms of my own creation.
The problem was, a whole house to myself was going to get lonely. I think it was when I realized this that the idea donned on me. The idea that I dreamed about for years and years and years after this point. So I scrapped (see: placed not-so-neatly in a pile with other drawings) my first picture of my room and started again.
This new bedroom that I drew had one major difference even at the start; instead of that wonderful glorious canopy bed, one whole wall had been replaced with eight or ten nooks, like giant shelves in a bookcase. These nooks all had blankets and pillows and a curtain to pull across and they belonged to me and my nine closest friends. The room was no longer my own room but a room shared with me by everyone I deemed important in my life (aka all the girls in my elementary school class). Suddenly the drawings of the whole house became much more lively. Dogs began to encounter the hundreds of cats living there. More bookcases and videogames were added. Cookies, so many cookies, were in the kitchen. There was a party in that house every night.
I loved this idea. I had always wanted a giant family (at the time when I drew this I didn't even have cousins), this seemed to be the pefect solution.
Over the years the scenario changed. The idea of the cubbyholes in the wall for beds stayed with me all the way through elementary school, but in middle school when my circle of friends grew, I found that I needed more space. We started to inhabit an old school, with two or three of the classrooms serving as bedrooms, and breakfast lunch and dinner in the gym (where we would dine on pancakes constantly, I believe). Sometimes we were all actually related (don't ask me how that worked), sometimes we were all orphans running our own orphanage (money wasn't a problem, we had all been left fortunes by our parents). I had an odd dream in early middle school where were were all living in our old elementary school and playing a giant, slightly deadly, game of capture the flag.
Middle school was also when I and a couple of my friends started getting into Neopets (we were always late to latch onto a fad), and we decided that we lived in a house together with our eight neopets (who were older than we were, don't ask me how that worked) in tow. That idea lasted for years and probably about a hundred comics were created from it.
Then when the idea of living with my friends began to wear off a little (because honestly, our lives simply werent all that interesting), I began to imagine other worlds. That was when I decided I wanted to be a writer, and the first major story I ever wrote was about a group of kids that looked and acted exactly like my friends and myself (but with different names, so they obviously weren't the same people) who had escaped from some sort of genetic mutation testing facility that conveniently gave them all super powers and were now living in a beautiful old three story house together (how did we afford the house? One of us was a computer hacker and managed to hack into the accounts of people that had recently died and that no one cared about and steal their money). That story lasted for years, and eventually ended up that there were a few houses like that full of people who had escaped all across the city (that lab had awful security). That was one of my favorite stories for a long time and involved a lot of people using the house forks to build a tower or "borrowing" someone's new Hummer/Jeep (which always belonged to my alter-ego) and taking it for a joy ride. In early high school the orphan idea came back into place when I came up with the theory that the United States had put a new law into effect that stated that no family could have more than two children. As a result of this law, the entire state of Ohio became the Orphan State, where all the abandoned children ran away to in order to stay alive and not be put into a work house, at least until they were eighteen and became legal. That story existed in many different forms, but always ended up with a group of children (myself included, in one form or another) living in an abandonded college dorm by the name of Stradly or an old church campus.
Late high school found me revisiting my neopets and finding that there were now six or seven between mine and my friends that were living in a house together, alwys getting in fights the way that people who live together normally do (welcome to my bout of starting to become realistic). At the same time came a story about an army (I think it was Russian) attacking and destroying the entire United States, resulting in a family of people coming together who had narrowly escaped the army.
I loved - and still love - the idea of having a house full of people. I didn't realize until I started looking back on my old stories and artwork how much I really in fact craved the idea of having a huge family. Don't get me wrong, I love the family I have, but there's only four of us and I found that at my parents' house I spent hours alone. I loved those hours though. Oddly enough, at the same time that I wanted so desperately to live in a house filled with all fifty of my closest friends, I spent the school days just waiting to get home and be on my own.
Yet see, this summer I moved out of my parents' house. It didn't occur to me at the time, but the house I was moving into was my dream house. Literally. I've daydreamed for so many years about living with the people that I've moved into a house with. I've now got two roommates and five housemates, and although it was hard to get used to having people in the house all the time, I've started to realize just how much of my own dream world I'm living in. Sans the part about us all being orphans or inheriting/stealing large sums of money for rent and food.
I think I'm in heaven.