I am not dead. I am just applying to graduate school. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes, I know.
Anyway.
Friday night I went with a group from my dorm to a cafe that sells the largest parfaits you have ever seen in your life.
They are PERTURBINGLY LARGE. "Perturbingly" isn't even a word, but it has to be used to describe how large these parfaits are. The waitress was staggering as she carried it to the table.
Also, all the (absurdly long) spoons have bells on the end. I DUNNO.
Anyway, one of those enormous parfaits was supposed to serve 5-8 people, but we ordered 2 for our group of 20 and didn't finish them. Yeah. Apparently some people in the dorm have not learned the age old lesson, There Is Such a Thing as Too Much Ice Cream, and its brother, Actually, If You Eat That Much Ice Cream You Will Make Yourself Physically Ill. One of the guys was trying SO HARD to finish it that he started crying. Yeah... He then tried to convince the girl sitting next to me that if she didn't help him finish it she was declaring him the victor of the duel to finish the parfait, to which she responded, "Okay. You win." (It later turned out that he might not have been crying at all in the first place, because he had eye drops which he was later using to convince someone else to finish the parfait.)
It was another Exciting Glimpse into the College Student Mind!
Saturday I went over to the Takigawa Elementary School Parent-Child Connectedness Festa, which was kind of like a cross between a craft fair, a flea market, and a county fair combined. There were a bunch of booths set up by various organizations like the police department, the fire department, the local hospital, and the SDF.* There were also some craft stations and fair games and a couple of people selling random used clothes. There was also a sort-the-garbage game, which I played and got all but one thing right.** Basically, you were given a basket full of random objects and you had to place them on the placard with the name of the type of garbage they were. I messed up on the aerosol can, 'cause I thought it was a can and then I thought it was unburnable garbage, but it turned out to be SUPER DUPER DANGEROUS GARBAGE.*** Of course, I didn't know this, since we don't have SUPER DUPER DANGEROUS GARBAGE in our dorm. Anyway, the people running the game were exceedingly impressed that I got any of them right. And I did better than the boy in front of me, who looked to be about five. I can put this on my resume: Better at Sorting Garbage Than a Japanese Five Year Old.
On a somewhat random note, the exceedingly unfortunate thing about being distracted by graduate school applications is that when I am distracted I am INCREDIBLY DISTRACTED. That would be why today I managed to drop a plate of curry on the floor. The plate broke and the curry spattered, so I then got to clean up shards of broken ceramic and curry...on carpeting. It was great. And by great I mean horrible. Then I realized that there was some weird, reddish substance on my keyboard. After some investigation, I discovered it was blood; I had managed to gash my finger open while cleaning up the broken plate. (I didn't actually notice, probably because I was distracted by the curry and also because I have high pain tolerance.) So then I realized that I didn't have any band-aids (I'm sure I packed some, but I don't remember where they went), so I just wrapped a tissue around it until it stopped gushing all over the place. Then, somehow, I managed to forget my glasses when I went to the 100 yen store to buy a new plate, and instead of turning around to get them, I figured that it wouldn't be that bad walking to the store and back with no glasses. That was kind of a mistake, since I forgot how bad the vision in my right eye is getting, which means that after about five minutes I started getting a splitting headache, and every time I tried to look at anything in the distance, it was like looking through heat waves or something. Also, my depth perception was shot. So, being the brilliant person I am, I figured I'd just close my right eye (since my vision is perfect in my left eye) and walk around like that. It worked, but everybody probably thought I was insane. Plus then my depth perception was super shot. WHOO. I'm thinking that maybe I should just glue my glasses to my face, 'cause then I can't forget them.
And then, when I was going down to the dorm meeting this evening, I put my shoes on the wrong feet.
SUCH A PRO.
On a final note, last night I decided to take a sanity break and translate "Rolling Girl," which is one of the few Hatsune Miku songs that I prefer the Vocaloid**** version to the human version.***** If you feel like listening to a song that may or may not be about committing suicide or, alternatively, if you want to see how bad I am at translating songs, my translation is here.
Okay, time to sleep so I don't go insane. G'night!
*The SDF (Self-Defense Force) is the Japanese equivalent of the army. Which they're not supposed to have, according to their constitution. It's all very confusing, and actually one of the other Fulbrighters is working on exactly this topic.
It was really weird to see a military-type booth at an elementary school fair. Would that even be allowed in the States?
**Sorting garbage in Japan is a SERIOUS BUSINESS. No matter how strict your garbage disposal laws are, JAPAN'S ARE MORE INTENSE. They even have GARBAGE POLICE. No, I am not making this up.
***Not the real name, but close enough.
****For those of you not in the know, Vocaloids are computer generated singers. They are INSANELY POPULAR in Japan. Hatsune Miku is the first and most popular of them.
*****The only other Vocaloid song where I prefer the Vocaloid version to the human version is 「人柱アリス」("Human Sacrifice Alice"), an UTTERLY UNNERVING SONG you probably should not listen to if you are alone in a dark room. The human version is less unnerving.
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