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.