"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.