Back in Salem!

Yes, I have made my return to Salem, which means I've moved into my apartment! If you don't know, I'm living with Annie in Haseldorf, which is one of the university apartment buildings. So, I pay everything through my tuition/room and board and don't have to worry about monthly bills. However, despite it being university housing, Haseldorf is pretty sweet. It was an apartment building in the 20s that the university bought some number of years ago, so it has really cool architecture and high ceilings and hardwood floors. Unfortunately, it also has some problems, what with the age. Today, for example, we had no hot water. And I was not pleased.

Anyway, to your left, you have a picture of half my room, and below to the right is the other half. I have the smaller room, which doesn't have built-in closets, so I also have the huge closet in the hall. Because this apartment used to be issued to four people (even though the bedroom I'm in is not big enough for two people to share comfortably), each bedroom has two beds. I was annoyed by this initially, but then just decided to get a cheap comforter and turn the second bed into a makeshift couch. So it has a big pillow and a couple of blankets and is actually kind of nice to have. Annie, in the bigger room, pushed the two beds together and got a mattress topper to make a king size bed.

The one really weird thing about this apartment is the hall light that doesn't work. Well, that's a little unfair to the light, which might very well work. The problem is that there's no switch. At all. A bit of exploration and investigation led me and Nikki to the conclusion that this apartment is actually the combination of a one-bedroom apartment (101) and half of apartment 102 (the other half of which was merged into apartment 103). So, apparently, sometime in the past, the light switch was lost. This also explains why Annie's room is so freaking huge - it was probably a living room once upon a time.

In other news, classes have started, along with my job as a Writing Center consultant. I am the consultant for one freshman colloquium (this Willamette thing that freshmen have, a class that eases them into college). The one I'm working for is about interpreting visual culture, with a fairly new professor. So, I have 14 freshmen to work with on their three papers. They're required to meet with me three times each, so that's a decent bit of money. Otherwise, I have two regular WC hours a week. It's a small job, but a little bit of extra income is still pretty cool.

This semester, I'm taking math, biology, Victorian poetry and (hopefully) Japanese 430. Annie and I almost went to the first day of Japanese 430 hung-over, but then the class was canceled, so we went back to bed instead. Probably for the best, that. But, as evidenced by Facebook, we hosted the greatest unplanned party ever, so it was totally worth it.

Tomorrow I'll find out if I can take 430 or not. I really hope so, because it would make me very sad not to have any Japanese this year. Fingers crossed.

立ち上がれ！

Silly title is silly. It reads tachiagare, which basically is like shouting 'rise up!' and has no significance whatsoever to this entry. Well, actually, it kind of does because I'm going to be talking about Takarazuka again and they shout that a lot in Elisabeth, particularly in the parts that take place in Hungary.

Before I dive into fangirl land again (come on, y'all had to know this was going to happen again at some point), I'm just going to say that I am so glad term's out. I got all my crap turned in on time and I got a B on my Japanese exam, which is acceptable. You can really see what I'm good at if you look at this test: speaking and listening got perfect scores, reading and writing demonstrated high-end mediocrity. I'm not bad at anything, really, even the kanji was okay, but it's so obvious what aspects of this language really click in my brain.

As for my papers, the best one was probably for Shakespeare (Foucauldian bio-power in Measure for Measure), the final philosophy one (critiquing an aspect of History of Sexuality) was the worst because I didn't care anymore by that point and, if it sucks, it'll be dropped out of my grade, anyway.

Now I'm chilling for a couple of weeks, then I'll try finding a job. I really crashed at the end of the semester, or I'd get on the job thing a little quicker. I need a break. So I'll watch things, and read things, and do more cleaning of my room, and it'll work out. I cleaned out my clothes today and have a big bag of things to donate because I will never wear them again. And a slightly smaller bag of things to throw out because they aren't in good enough shape to give away in good conscience. What I really learned from this is that I own a lot of clothes. I felt really good about my closet/dresser after putting together the discard piles... then I put the clothes that I had in Salem away and it filled up again. I think I just hold on to things for way too long and forget about them. But I do feel good about how much I'm giving away. The clothes are still pretty nice and I know other people will be happy to discover them in Good Will (or wherever I decide to take my donation).

Anyway, time for me to be a fangirl again because I've been watching Silver Rose Chronicle. It's a Yukigumi production about vampires/vampire hunters/vampire romance that I'm now kind of in love with. It doesn't have my beloved Mizu Natsuki (it ran in a secondary venue, not the Grand Theatre), but Ouki Kaname (aka Teru) is the vampire Christopher and she's one of my babies. Speaking of which, I'm really unhappy that she's been transferred to Hoshigumi, because I don't follow Hoshigumi at all, but it is a promotion and she deserves the recognition. Takarazuka fandom, for the record, is hella complicated. Everyone, and I'm definitely no exception, has that one troupe that they love and follow. For me it's all about Yukigumi, which is not the most popular troupe among foreign fans, and I was so upset when I found out that, yes, Teru really is being transferred.

I'd share a clip of SRC, but Youtube sucks and doesn't have any of the really good ones. The best they've got are focused on Elliot, which makes sense given that he's the protagonist, but I like Teru better than Ayabuki Mao. Anyway, if you read my blog regularly, you've seen Teru before. She was Rudolf in Elisabeth, so that one video I posted awhile back that has Der Tod dancing with Rudolf, Yami ga Hirogaru? Yeah, that's her.

I am, however, going to post a different Takarazuka-related video. You don't have to watch the whole thing, 'cause it's kinda long and full of talking, just watch the first minute or so. It's a clip from a TV thing (the title reads Takarazuka Kageki Tokushuu, which means Takarazuka Theatre Special) and the first part, after some guy talks, is Mizu Natsuki getting up and winking at a girl on the panel, who is basically a walking Japanese stereotype, as a demonstration of the sexy power of otokoyaku (or... something). I don't know what the real point is, but it's funny because the girl just melts. Which would probably be my reaction to Mizu Natsuki winking at me like that, but it's really funny because she doesn't seem to know what to do with herself.



I'm picking up tips on how to be a sexy, slick drag king from my fangirling Zuka, true fact.

One down, three to go

As of 9:40PM, I've officially finished one of my four final papers. This leaves me with 18 to 20 pages to write by next Sunday, in three different subjects. And a Japanese final, but I'm overlooking that for the moment in favour of enjoying the sense of accomplishment that comes with having finished a paper more than 12 hours before it's due.

So, the finals week list stands as follows:

.Paper on Beauvoir's The Second Sex
.Paper on Measure for Measure
.Paper on Foucault's History of Sexuality, Part 1
.Currently undefined paper for Literature and Sexuality
.Japanese Final

The finished paper is due Tuesday, and I have to have four pages of the eight-page Shakespeare paper for peer edit the same day. This will leave me, then, with 14-ish pages to write for Sunday. And that Japanese exam, which I really should study for.

But this is definitely manageable. I just have to be smart about it and work all week, rather than leave it all for Friday and Saturday. In which case I will be up all night and probably fail Saturday's exam. And that would suck, so I'm going to write half of the Shakespeare tomorrow (it requires outside sources, which is time-consuming) and divide the rest up over the course of the week. If I actually put some thought into this, I can save myself unnecessary stress and woe and still get everything done.

I don't feel particularly wonderful about the Beauvoir paper (though I did go off on a minor, but satisfying, tangent about how Women's History Month is lame), but it doesn't really matter, unless I suck at the Foucault. And I'm bound to do better at that one because I had to read the damn text twice in the last month. The class those two papers are for only counts the best three scores, so if one of them really sucks, it's okay. My Marx and Freud papers were decent - I just need to make sure at least one of my last two works out to be set.

It feels good to be so close to the end of a term. I mean, then I have to job-hunt and that's going to be just delightful, but it's nice to finish something. Although, the fact that I'm going to be a senior next year is terrifying. Seriously, where did the last three years go? It does not feel like I've been in college that long. Nikki has secured an apartment with Josh, Annie and I will be living in Haseldorf, and in a few months I'm going to have to start figuring out what I'm going to do with myself post-graduation.

Craziness.

The term's winding down

First of all, I have today's Frann quote, from my literature and sexuality class. She's one of my favourite English professors, seriously, super badass.

"There are a lot of men who have sex with other men, but don't identify as homosexual. And not all of them are well-known ministers and senators."

In other news, I got my job as a writing center consultant next term. I felt good about the interview, and I'm way more qualified than half the losers who already work there (it's not arrogance if it's true), so I wasn't all that surprised to be sent the contract. But it's still good news, even though it's only $8.45 an hour and I'm only guaranteed four hours a week. But $130-ish a month isn't bad for marginally interesting part-time work - I'll be able to keep food in my apartment and go out for Indian occasionally. And that's what really matters.

Oh man, now I want paneer. Why did I think of Indian food?

I'm all thrown off this week because half my classes are missing. Choir is done, since we had our last concert on Sunday and Christine doesn't make us have rehearsal for the last week, and I don't have Japanese again till Monday (where we'll be watching a currently unspecified Japanese film), so I only have my afternoon classes. I slept till eleven today, it was great. I do have this lame presentation to do in my Shakespeare class tomorrow, but judging by how bad most of the presentations yesterday were, I'm not too stressed. I'm just going to show a couple of clips from the 1993 film of Much Ado About Nothing, talk about how those clips demonstrate the use of background characters to give the film the play's sense of being about gossip, and call it good. I have to submit a 2-3 page double-spaced write-up explaining the presentation, but that won't take long to write.

And I'm almost done with Foucault! I stand by what I've said about everyone needing to read History of Sexuality, but that doesn't mean I'm not overdosing on the damn thing. I've read it twice in a month, for two different classes. I'm getting to the point where if someone says "you know that part where he talks about power coming from below?" I can say "oh yeah, it's from the first couple of pages of Method, chapter two of part four." And that's kind of sad.

That example, by the way? Actually happened in class yesterday.

Current school things aside, I've come up with a goal for my summer Japanese studies. I am going to learn all 1,945 practical kanji. I know about a sixth of them currently, there are websites that lay them out by grade level, and I'm just going to start at the first grade kanji and work forward, skipping over the ones I already know.

I will be able to read Japanese by fall, just watch me.

College Experiences?

At about eleven o'clock tonight, I helped heat up a kitchen fork with a borrowed Zippo lighter in order to get a tick off the back of someone's neck.

It was not my favourite thing ever.

Unfortunately, Josh does not have health insurance, so he refused to go to the ER to get his neck looked at properly. We're 97% sure we got the tick out whole and everything's fine, but he can't afford proper medical care, so that slight possibility of a problem is sort of looming in the shadows. This, to me, screams a need for universal health care. Because, when someone can't afford to go look into the (however remote) possibility of Lyme Disease or some other nasty shit, you know there's something wrong with the system.

Our health care is so beyond broken.

Putting that aside, today I went to Uwajimaya (the big Seattle-based Japanese grocery store) and bought things like Kirin Lemon (a soda) and plum wine and yakisoba-making supplies. The Uwajimaya in the International District up in Seattle is nicer than the Portland one - much bigger, with a great food court and a two-storey Kinokuniya Bookstore - but it was still really nice to get some Japanese things I'd missed. I'm definitely hitting up the Uwajimaya in Seattle at spring break, though. For the Kinokuniya, if nothing else.

I wish there was a Book-Off in this area, but the closest one is in Vancouver, BC. If we had one in Washington or Oregon, I'd be all over it. Or, equally, Book-Off's counterpart Hard-Off. Hard-Off, despite the really funny name, is a used electronics store. Why they called it Hard-Off, the world may never know.

And... now I really need to get some sleep. Sleep is good.

But, I have another Zuka clip to post! This time, the Epilogue to Elisabeth. I'm gonna have to start seriously searching Youtube for new stuff - I can't let you guys down on the video posting front.

Well, this sucks

I can't help but feel that having to write two papers due within two days of each other right after a weekend that wasn't really a weekend because I was busy the entire time is not quite fair. Even less so considering that my Sunday was taken up predominantly by seeing Merchant of Venice with my Shakespeare class, for which I have to write one of the aforementioned papers.

Merchant, though, was pretty awesome. It was in this little black box theatre in Portland that we had trouble finding because Portland is impossible to navigate unless you've lived there. It never fails - every time I go into Portland for anything, I get lost. This time, we ended up on the wrong side of the river after somehow getting back on south-bound 5, like we were going back to Salem. No, we're not sure what happened there, either, but we eventually found the Hawthorne Bridge and got over to the Shoebox Theatre with ten minutes till the play was due to start.

A brief note on Merchant - I actually don't like it very much, and find most of the characters boring, but this production was really well-done. Shylock was fantastic, really sympathetic and compelling. There was this one moment where he hugged Jessica and then paused before leaving to look back and smile at her really lovingly, and it was just heartbreaking because that's right before she steals a bunch of money and runs away with her boyfriend, totally betraying him. It was great.

I wish I could say more for the woman playing Antonio, but she wasn't very compelling. She had a couple of moments where she really stood out, but overall was just sort of eh. This may be because Antonio is an eh character no matter how you play him, but her performance didn't wow me.

And that's really all I have to say there. If it had been a play I really love, I'd probably have more commentary. As things are, it was enjoyable, but nothing spectacular. I never walk into plays like Merchant with many expectations, because I don't care about the piece enough to have a favourite performance to hold new productions against. Now, Much Ado About Nothing or Julius Caesar or something like that? Then you'd better be awesome because I do have That One Production to hold up in comparison.

I'm funny with theatre - I'm either very particular, or anything's good. Like with my recent fad of adding a Zuka clip to the end of each post - I love Elisabeth in general (though I haven't seen the original Austrian musical for comparison), but I'm only posting clips from the 2007 Snow Troupe production because Mizu is my Der Tod. Some of the other top stars are considered better than her for varying reasons, but Mizu's portrayal is the one that really clicks with me. Her Der Tod is a little more sinister than the Takarazuka norm, which I really like. Because, come on, the character is Death. This is a dark little story, despite all the glitter and sequins.

So, without further ado, have your Elisabeth clip of the day - Yami ga Hirogaru (the darkness is spreading). Der Tod and Rudolf, Elisabeth's son, with Der Tod first reminding Rudolf that Der Tod was his childhood friend, before going on to convince him to try to start a revolution and take the throne. Is that some homoerotic tension there? Why yes, yes, it is. And it's even thicker in some other scenes, which youtube doesn't have.

I want that black coat. That is all.

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.

Classes and Such

So I've totally failed at blogging so far this term, but I'm going to just pin that on people wanting to see me all the time because I was gone for months, and on my classes just diving right in to the heavy reading. But now it's really time for me to step it up. I can't have a neglected blog.

I could go on for a few paragraphs here about all my classes and what's what, but there are really only two classes at this point really worth talking about, so I'm gonna just kind of skip over Shakespeare and History, Sexuality and Power. That last one has the potential to be really awesome, when we get a little more into it, but right now it's stuck in the pretty good range. As for Shakespeare, there are a lot of little useless assignments and that's gonna drive me crazy.

Japanese, on the other hand, is actually somewhat noteworthy. Okay, really it's only noteworthy because I'm owning it, but still - I walked into class the first day and realised about halfway through that I understood everything Fujiwara-sensei was saying without having to think about or translate any of it. I'm able to just follow the Japanese lecture like I would a course conducted in English. It's beautiful.

But, putting all that aside, the course I'm really getting into is Literature and Sexuality. Because this class? Is amazing. Frann (the professor) is just badass. She's blunt and a little bit outrageous and more than a little radical. Basically, it's queer theory through the lens of text. Right now, actually, it's just queer theory because we're reading essays by people like Adrienne Rich and Eve Sedgwick.

And, oh, did Rich offend and bother the women in the class who strongly identify as heterosexual. They did not like "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" at all. The interpretation from three of the women was that it was an attack on female/male relationships in general - that Rich was saying that all relationships women have with men are inherently false. They took it very personally, which is interesting in itself because it begs the question of what they're so afraid of. Why did this essay from almost thirty years ago freak them out so much? I didn't ask because I try to pick my battles more carefully than that.

I actually interpreted the piece very differently and my issues with it are over Rich's desexualised treatment of lesbians. Because she does treat female bonds that way - it's all emotional and psychological, sex is a male thing. Frann actually said something about it that amused me enough to jot down:

"She does have this view that lesbians are all pink and cuddly and soft, and gay men are shallow and always going out to have sex with underage boys... and no. Lesbians are also all about the sex."

I am so glad I picked this class. The Joyce seminar just wouldn't have been as fun.

School and books - pretty much my life

Well, on Friday I'm heading down to Salem to move into my new room with Annie. Usually, I'd just be taking the train (or, more likely, getting a ride from Alex) back down with my suitcase and messenger bag, and everything would already be in my room the way I like it. This year, because of Japan, I'm doing my Massive Move of Doom in January.

Annie and I are pretty psyched about getting WISH 4, though, so even though I have to deal with dragging all my crap down to Oregon, at least we got our room.

Moving is still kind of a nightmare, though. Seriously, I don't even realise how much stuff I own until I have to move it. Clothes and books and whatnot aside, there are sheets, towels, laundry stuff... it's crazy. Since it's only four months, rather than the whole year, I'm going to be very good and limit the number of books and DVDs I take. Just the essentials, which is a bigger list than you might imagine.

Speaking of books, I've finished book one of my 50 books for 2009, so I'm going to get a running list started. Every time I have a book to add, I'll put the entire list, just to keep track (and remind you guys that there are brilliant books waiting to be read). If there's an asterisk, it means the book is extra awesome and you should read it.

1. Autobiography of a Blue-eyed Devil - Inga Muscio*

Actually, that book deserves, like, five asterisk, but for the sake of my organisation system, I'll stick to one. I'll write up some sort of proper review/recommendation later, for the media blog, but suffice it to say, everyone should read this book. She's so badass, I love her. For a couple of different reasons, I've started reeducating myself so I can do something to help take down the racist/sexist/imperialist/heteronormative institutions that have been hanging on way too long, and this was a recommendation from my high school friend Ashalyn. It really is a good start, if you want to try getting a little bit more aware of what's going on around you.

As a final note, take a look at my spring semester:

-Shakespeare: The Comedies
-Literature and Sexuality
-Gender, Sexuality and Power
-Intermediate Japanese 2
-Voce

I'm pretty excited, it's all going to be really interesting, but I'm also a little leery of the amount of reading that's going to get dropped on my head. Two literature classes and a philosophy, while also taking a foreign language. And nothing is below a 300-level. I'm anticipating that I'll hit March, maybe, and have a 'that's it, I can't take it anymore' moment. But I've always recovered from those in the past. It'll be fine.

Now if Willamette would just get me an accurate tuition invoice, everything would be cool. But that's it's own post, so I'll leave it for later. When I'm less irritated with student accounts and financial aid.