"What could trump the dumpster?"

Right now, the choral department here at Willamette is doing a photo scavenger hunt contest. Each choir is its own competition, pitting the sections against each other. Today, Team Alto 2 (also known as the Alto Liberation Front) went out for a second round of photo-taking. Basically, we wandered around downtown Salem for an hour and forty minutes, trying to take creative photos to fit kind of lame prompts. The best one, though, was for the prompt "least likely place to be found."

We climbed in a dumpster.

Okay, it was less disgusting than it sounds - the dumpster is strictly for collapsed cardboard boxes - but it's in the sketchy alley next to a restaurant called Pita Pit (where Frieda, our section leader, works) under a set of metal stairs. We got her boss to take the photo for us. It was pretty epic. If another section gets more points than us for that prompt, I'll be pissed. Because, seriously, what could trump the dumpster?

Another pretty good one was us on a carousel. There's this old carousel down by the river and we got the teenage boy working it to take a photo of us on some of the horses while the ride was stopped (for "ride something"). I have a feeling our being college women was what convinced him to let us get on the ride for a photo without paying the $1.50 charge. He looked like he was maybe 15, and we smiled and were very nice about asking - working sexism to our advantage.

In other school-related news, I submitted a Japan photo to this campus study abroad publication thing, as the last bit of my "Maximizing Your Study Abroad Experience" course, and they sent me an email today telling me that they really want to use my photo, but my caption is too short. Now, me, I think a long caption about what the photo means to me and why I took it is kind of awkward and boring. So I originally gave them something pithy and interesting. It identified the place and gave a reason it's awesome - something about Shinto and Buddhism peacefully coexisting, if I remember correctly - but that's apparently not good enough. So now I'm trying to make up something that's still clever and well-written, but also includes crap about why the image is significant to me and my study abroad experience.

I hate things like this. Just saying.

Also, I have finished more books in my quest to read 50 in 2009. So now the list is:

1. Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil - Inga Muscio
2. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
3. Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman

All of the above come highly recommended. I am not counting The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall because, well, it's for a class. It is, however, a novel.

And, to finish this up, I leave you with more Takarazuka. This time you get Miruku (Milk), in which Lucceni (the Italian who assassinates the Empress Elisabeth) is selling milk, but there's not enough, so Der Tod comes through and 'whispers' suggestions into the crowd of hungry Austrians to push them towards a riot. I have to say that, while Mizu Natsuki is always my favourite, Otozuki Kei (Lucceni, with the striped shirt) is pretty hot.

Something has come to my attention

I suck.

Yeah, that whole blogging while living back in the good old US of A? So far kind of a fail. I could go off here on a long and ultimately pointless and slightly whiny explanation of why I suck, involving minor breakdowns and insomnia and migraines, but... let's just sum all that up with the following: I'm not really rocking the whole life-as-a-college-student thing right now.

Putting that aside, because I doubt anyone really wants to read about how tragic my life is at my affluent overpriced white school, the one thing I am being awesome at is talking to Japanese people. Yes, friends, the 2009 TIUA students (all 147 of them) are here at Willamette and I am doing surprisingly well at reaching out and being friendly and likable. I also seem to be very memorable, possibly because I've fallen back on the lame pun you can make out of my name in Japanese (Lexi becomes Rekushi, which sounds like rekishi, which means history - I've probably explained this before). It seems to have spread, because now TIUA students are telling their friends, after I've said my polite "I'm called Lexi" bit, that in Japanese my name sounds like history. I'm not sure if this is really a good thing or not, but it is what it is and they think it's funny. Lexi as a nickname seems to subsequently be spreading to my fellow Willamette students, as well. I'm taking this in stride.

More to the positive, we also are having success at spreading "daijoubs" to the TIUA students. Daijoubs is a nonsensical word we JSP students started using in Japan - daijoubu means okay/all right/fine and somewhere along the way it got slangified by the Americans into daijoubs. The TIUA students are very amused by this and have started using it when talking to us. Score one for Team Gaijin? Corrupting our foreign language of choice on two continents.

I don't actually have all that much to write about, as it turns out. We're reading The Well of Loneliness in my Literature and Sexuality class, which is pretty fun, and my philosophy class has moved onto Freud and parapraxes. In Shakespeare, we're reading Much Ado about Nothing, which is one of my favourite comedies, so I'm good with that. For some reason, my Literature and Sexuality class was missing exactly half its students today (there were eight of us), but the discussion was really interesting and pretty much everyone had something to contribute. So those other eight people totally missed out.

And... today I'm going up to Seattle. I'm seeing The Lion King with my mum and sister, getting some rest away from the demands of Willamette, and doing my FAFSA. Unfortunately, there apparently isn't internet in my house at the moment, so I'll be doing FAFSA from Starbucks with their wi-fi. And copious amounts of coffee, to keep me in a good mood.

As an ending note to this scattered and not particularly exciting entry, I will leave you with a youtube video. I've mentioned my love of Takarazuka (the all-female Japanese musical theatre company) before, at least in my Japan blog, so I feel like I should spread the love farther with a clip from the 2007 Snow Troupe production of Elisabeth. With Mizu Natsuki as Der Tod. I have such a massive crush on Mizu Natsuki, you don't even know, and any opportunity to watch her be awesome ought to be taken advantage of.

Why yes, this is a typical Sunday

You know you're an upperclassman English/philosophy student when your Sunday consists of reading a book called Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach, three acts of The Taming of the Shrew, and then the first 25 pages of The German Ideology. That last one would be by Marx, by the way, if you're not up on your nineteenth century continental works. Which I recommend y'all should work on, if you're not.

I'm actually not super keen on Marx, for a few reasons, not the least of which being that his journals (The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, specifically) are kind of a pain to read because there's a lot about Hegel and I don't know Hegel very well. But I've read the Manifesto and the EPM and now I'm on to The German Ideology and soon I'll be rounding out my basic introduction to Marxist theory with Capital. I'm either going to start hating him soon, or become a Communist. Only time will tell.

I am liking Gender, though. I didn't so much at first because I was distracted and the first chapter was all about defining terms, but once I got into the second chapter I started getting into it. The second chapter was all about Berdache - individuals in Native tribes (not all, because each nation is very different, but many) who were born one gender, but for any number of reasons became another. It was mostly focusing on the fact that the people in the tribes often treated Berdache as their own gender, using words that don't have an English equivalent because we don't think in those terms. If you translate them, they work out to be, like, 'is and is not male and female' and the like. It's really interesting because we do, in the western tradition, treat gender as dichotomous, and then act like that's The Way It Is, when all sorts of other cultures have at the very least a third option and determine gender by standards other than genitalia.

The book also spends some time criticising old school anthropology, which is always fun to read.

In other news, Annie and I are challenging ourselves to write/draw more (write in my case, draw in hers) by doing a 200 theme challenge. We found a few different theme challenges on the internet, pulled out the stupid ones (like 'love' and 'sorrow') and combined the awesome ones (like 'syringe' and 'as near as snow') into a big list to try to trigger more creativity. So far I've done Viridian and Insomnia. Viridian got a better piece, in my opinion, a bit of vaguely dystopian sci-fi, but at least I feel productive.

And, as a final non-sequitur, my left wrist has hurt off and on for a few weeks now. I think I might finally suck it up and go to the campus clinic because it's driving me crazy.