japanese needs more circles

on friday, i didnt fall asleep ONCE all morning, and thats saying a lot. my commute from the tanakas was a horrendous 90 minutes. there was no point in trying to stay awake. if i didnt fall asleep on train, then id fall asleep during chapel. it was a losing battle.

i spent 1st and 2nd hour working on a self-introduction assignment that was assigned a week before for japanese. id forgotten all about it up until the night before. every year morimoto-sensei puts together a "scrapbook" of all the compositions written by that years exchange students, so it wasnt the kind of assignment i could half-ass. that friday rough drafts were due.

in english grammar class the girls learned about countables and uncountables. i actually had to look up "countable" in my electronic translator (it has an english dictionary built in). i half-participated in the lesson (english was 2nd hour, so i was still busy with my self-intro) since it looks like i never learned about it in the first place, though its not really the kind of thing that needs to be taught to anyone who isnt planning on becoming an english major. anyway, each person got a noun that they had to write on the board under "countables" or "uncountables," along with its japanaese translation. the trick was, electronic dictionaries were off-limits. as a result a lot of the girls got stuck because they didnt know what their noun meant.

i was late to calligraphy. hyemi and susan were like 10 minutes later than i was. both of them were wearing their gym uniforms.

we practiced the kanji for umi (sea), one of my favorites. it has 2 radicals - "water" and "every" (like "every day," "every week," etc. things that have to do with repetition. not "everything" or "everywhere"), like the tides. i finally got it OKd after like 2 hours. in comparison, i think it took hyemi like 2 tries. she said shes been doing calligraphy since elementary school, plus one of her parents teaches calligraphy or something. she did some korean calligraphy for me.

i love korean. grammatically, korean looks a lot like japanese. but they dont use kanji anymore (because its "TOO HARD!" hah!), and i guess the alphabet is extremely logical. like, if you know one letter the rest of the alphabet makes sense. dont ask me how thats supposed to work.

hyemi always had a notebook on her at all times that she filled with letters, pictures, drawings, and song lyrics. i think she went through 3 or 4 of them. after she finished one shed send it to her boyfriend in korea, so she called them "love diaries," which i found almost unbearably cute. i loved looking at them. i loved looking at the korean. japanese really needs more circles.

hyemi and susan forgot about the self-introduction assignment, too.

after calligraphy the 3 of us, plus ashley, who caught up with us later, went to the "canteen." thats what hyemi and susan called the school bakery (theyre attending school in australia so they say things like "canteen" and "holiday" instead of vacation), and it grew on me.

i leant susan some money for lunch.

i put the finishing touches on my self-introduction over lunch. at one point midori (not "green". a different midori) asked me to explain what "this" meant, and THREW THE WESTSIDE GANG SIGN. i couldnt stop laughing for like 5 minutes. i wish i had gotten a picture, because theres no way to articulate in words what its like to see a well-off japanese schoolgirl throwing gang signs. but she didnt just pull the westside gang sign out of her ass. i was throwing gang signs at chapel the day before, but i didnt have my dictionary on me so i couldnt explain.

so i told her about gangs. that theyre usually made up of young people that come from minority families below the poverty line. or majority families below the poverty line, for that matter. and that throwing gang signs from a gang you dont belong to can get you shot or whatever. i told her that when pat was in middle school he couldnt wear red or blue because of gangs. finally, i explained that my friends and i sometimes throw gang signs as a joke, because were middle-class crackers living in suburbia.

it turned out i was the only person that finished the self-intro assignment. hyemi and susan forgot all about it, and ashley was in bed sick the day before. anyway, morimoto-sensei went through my essay and made some corrections, and said i was all set to go to copy my self-intro onto genkoyoshi (japanese composition paper. heres a picture).

after class hyemi, susan, ashley and i made plans to go shopping in umeda (hep5, baby) on monday the following week. we traded phone numbers and agreed on a time and place.

ashley was still feeling under the weather, so she skipped tea ceremony club.

susan practically begged me to walk her to the station because the mountain is scary at night. she went with me to the calligraphy room to find moegi. all the lights were out. she was so freaked out.

once i got home i worked on copying my self-intro onto genkoyoshi. i messed up 3 times and ended up running out of paper. my host father printed a few sheets out for me. they were too small to turn in, so i used them for practice.

there was an email waiting from me from my mom. reiko loved the thank-you gift i sent. my mom said she asked for my email and mailing address. the japanese are big on reciprocating gifts. they consider it necessary to maintain the balance of the relationship.

saturday, may 15, 2004

on saturday, i did a few loads of laundry, bought genkoyoshi at coop, went through 3 more sheets trying to get my self-intro right, and watched a tv show over dinner about a group of japanese teenage kids restoring railroad tracks.