Adventures in licorice

In case I haven't already pounded on your door in the middle of the night (sorry, Louki) and you haven't been notified by Tech House's vast and somewhat dizzying information network* and you haven't, I dunno, talked to my parents, I GOT INTO HARVARD.  It's pretty exciting!  So I'm going to be touring there during my crazy East Coast tour thing in two weeks.

Aside from that, I haven't really been up to anything terribly exciting.  On Tuesday I had lunch with Itou-san, which was really nice.  She's so cool, and, yes, I've said this a million times, but it's STILL TRUE.  Also on Tuesday, Louki and I cleaned our entire common space.  Yeah.  The entire thing.  I think it was the first time it had been cleaned in about a million years, from the amount of grime that had collected.  (Literally.  Hi-chan didn't know where some of the stuff we were throwing out had come from, and she's been living in this room for more than a year!)  We also wound up with about seven bags of trash.  Louki did most of the work, to be honest, because she is crazy intense, but I did most of the kitchen, which I think we can all agree was horrifying, because there was LIQUID SLUDGE IN THE STOVE BURNER.  I don't even have words.  There was a point, while I was scraping handfuls of oily sludge off of various objects, that I began to wonder whether it would be physically possible for our kitchen to be any more disgusting.  But it's cleaner now, so yay!
Also, Itou-san showed up at some point in the middle and gave us warabi mochi,** because she is so awesome and also she's taken a shining to the girls in my dorm.

Today I had penmanship class, and listened to a very long discussion about whether or not Gosha Shrine is actually being haunted by ghosts/angels.  It was pretty exciting.  (Also, the three-year-old son of one of the women, who normally just sits quietly and hangs on his mom's arm, became incredibly talkative when ghosts were mentioned, and informed us all gleefully that if you go into dark places ghosts will get you.)  I was also told that the reason I like research is because my parents' smartness is embedded in the DNA of my soul.  The more you know???***

In other news, Louki has discovered the joy of feeding Americans Dutch licorice.  If you have never had Dutch licorice, let me tell you, you are probably better off that way.  I am unsure why anyone believes it to be edible, let alone a sweet.  Louki takes great glee in coming to my door with a giant bag of licorice and watching all the color drain out of my face.  I have been very good, though, and tried everything she's given me, and I've only had to spit it out because I thought I was going to die once.  Salt + licorice = DEATH.
(However, I got revenge on Louki by making her eat death mangoes, which are actually dried mangoes dipped in chili powder.  She turned bright red and keeled over.  REVENGE.)

On a final note, it's currently White Day, also known as Valentine's Day Part Two, in which dudes who got chocolate from girls have to give white chocolate back to them.  It was baaaaaaaaaaaaasically a holiday invented by chocolate companies to sell more white chocolate, and it worked, except that some people thought it would be funnier to give panties in return 'cause those are also white.  Way to go, you guys.  I'm hoping that All the Chocolate goes on sale tomorrow, because that would be awesome.

*I have gotten the strangest set of emails from Tech Housers in the past 48 hours.  Some of them were normal congratulations and some of them were Tech House-style congratulations and some of them were expressing glee at the potential opportunity to insult me for living in Massachusetts.  You know who you are.

**If you've never had warabi mochi before, it's somewhat difficult to describe.  It's kind of like jelly crossed with mochi, covered in ground soybeans.  SO DELICIOUS.

***Also in the last 48 hours, I was told that I owed it to humanity to have children with Nick, because with our combined DNA, all of our children would go to Harvard.
UM.
I don't even know what to say to that except AWKWARD and also HETERONORMATIVE.
'kay, I feel like a Brown student now.