About a month ago, on a Saturday night, R and I noticed his cat behaving rather strangely. His eyes were fixed onto the ceiling with a predatory intensity. His ears twitched and he paced around R’s bed.
We shrugged the behavior off, spent the night watching TV and snacking as usual.
The next day I […]

This conversation:

Also:
- packing for a week long trip in Maine
- found out that the woman who writes my birth control prescriptions may root for incredibly-anti-choice Sarah Palin, which boggles my mind on many different levels
- rooting for Yuriko Koike for the next Japanese Prime Minister
The weather is getting colder, faster.

…And all I have to offer is this music video inspired by Bollywood movies sung in Spanish featuring Natalie Portman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPU1dtqrtho

I came back to America at the beginning of June and I have to say that I still feel like I’m adjusting to being back home. I am not sure why I have been absent […]

Came across this piece in the Japan Times. It is an interview with Hiroko Mito, who is celebrating the 10th anniversary of her bar in Shibuya. It’s an interesting summation of what life is like for a working woman in Japan raising children with a less-than-ideal husband. One point she makes is something that hits […]

Yuri Kochiyama
For my senior thesis, I am preparing to write a paper on the roles of women as portrayed by popular Japanese authors, both female and male. Reading the biography of one famous literary author, Tanizaki Junichiro, I was a little disturbed to read this passage from one of his essays:
One of the things […]

I was talking to R (who seems to have caught a “buy plastic toys” fever since coming to Japan) about which toys I would ideally put on my desk to reflect who I am. (We have weird conversations.) As such, I came up with these four characters from various Japanese manga, because well, […]

Photo by miss_pupik

I mentioned in my post on Zen cooking how the kitchen here in the dorm is being abused by people who don’t appreciate what they’ve been given. They leave the kitchen in a disgusting disarray, with mystery substances everywhere and the sinks full of pots and pans with what can only be […]

This month’s Kansai Scene has three interesting articles on moving abroad. Not just limited to Japan, the articles cover reasons why one might choose to live abroad, and the resulting impact:
The expatriate becomes hung between two states, never quite of the place she or he lives, and separate from the culture of the home […]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7lj916sP9E

Trailer for Undeclared, a prematurely canceled show about college life
Earlier today I was venting to R about certain classmates that complain about, well, everything. They moan at the thought of a vocab test, complain to the teacher about receiving worksheets, and make sarcastic remarks and gestures to emphasize their less-than enthusiastic desire to […]

A keychain I received from my Japanese teacher for attending every single class
If you can’t tell by reading most of the content on this blog, I love learning. Anything and everything. I try to teach myself because I firmly believe that it’s up to you to better yourself, and not anyone else’s responsibility.
In […]