Moving!

As of today, I've moved blogs! I can now be found at A Farther Room, so if you want to keep up with my JET preparation and upcoming Japan adventures, it's time to update your links and bookmarks (or however you keep track of the blogs you follow) accordingly. This summer it might be a little spotty, since I want to keep the blog Japan-centric, but I've done a first post and I will be recording my progression towards JET-dom.

New Developments

First: I graduated yesterday! It was actually pretty fantastic, as far as commencements go, and I'm happy to have my diploma in hand. Well, it's on my parents' dining room table now, along with my cap, but I definitely have it. So now, after four years, I have my Bachelor of Arts in English and am done with undergrad! I don't have any pictures, because I personally didn't take any, but my mum did and I'll get some from her to show off later.

Leaving Salem was a little bittersweet and I cried in the car because I'm leaving a lot of people I love. But it's all okay because I'm off to Japan in two months (plus a week), which brings me to development the second: my JET placement!

I did not get what I requested at all, which seems to be more or less the norm for JET, and I was a little thrown off at first because it's so far from my sphere of familiarity, but I will be living in Matsuyama City, Ehime Prefecture. That would be on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four islands. Matsuyama (I've learned since looking it up about an hour ago) is the capital of Ehime and the biggest city on the island, a ferry ride away from Hiroshima (and a longer ferry ride from Kobe, apparently). I'm pretty psyched I got a major city, rather than a tiny town way out in the inaka, but I'm a little disappointed that I'm so far from Saitama where I know people. I'll visit, though, and people should definitely come visit me. You know you want to check out Shikoku.

So it'll be cool. Based on pictures, it's prettier than Saitama (not that Saitama's all that picturesque, but still) and very green, and there's actually a decent amount of stuff in the city. Like a castle!

JET is seeming a lot more in my reach now that I know where I'm going. And I'll be switching to my new blog soon, so keep an eye out for that.

More Thoughts on Academia

I sent out graduation announcements today finally. Spent about $6 on postage sending a stack domestically, two to Canada (for my mum's side of the family), and one to Japan (my former host family). I included a note in the one to my host family because they don't speak English and I also wanted to let them know that I'm going to be back in Japan soon. I'm definitely visiting them ASAP because they're wonderful. My homestay experience was awesome.

Anyway, I've been totally finished since Tuesday, when my final paper for Apocalyptic Lit was due, so now I have more free time than I know what to do with. It's kind of weird. So I've been thinking about my college experience and, because I'm a list-y person, I'm going to mention the classes that have been the most influential (or just the best). Not going to do a bunch of explanation, but over the course of the last four years I took 30 classes on the Willamette campus and three at TIU. A couple of them sucked (I'm looking at you, intro to literary theory, AKA hell on earth), but some were fantastic.

So, without further ado, my top 5 Willamette courses. In no particular order.

1. Japanese. [All of them, but particularly during JSP and with Fujiwara-sensei]
2. Literature and Sexuality.
3. Shakespeare: The Comedies.
4. Avant Garde as Critical Tradition. [This was a film studies course, if you can't tell]
5. History, Sexuality & Power.

And then there were the classes at the other end of the spectrum. Like the aforementioned lit theory. It was English 202 and the nightmare of my English career. It serves a valuable function because it's the class that, as the name suggests, introduces all potential English majors to the theorists who will stalk you for the rest of your time in the discipline. It was in lit theory that I first read Derrida, Saussure, Lacan, de Man, Butler... it was the kind of course that covered a lot very quickly, so we'd be better prepared to read this stuff later. I've actually got my lit theory book with me and I know most of these names now. Clearly, I learned something here.

I do have to say, though, literary criticism/philosophy is frustratingly male-dominated. There are 47 essays in this book and only 12 of them are by women. All but two of those are feminist theory. So this book, which is widely considered an excellent intro to lit theory, only recognises two women who write about something other than gender. One of them is bell hooks with an essay called "Postmodern Blackness" and the other is Martha Nussbaum with something about literature and philosophy. I'm not knocking feminist and gender theory at all (I'm really into it, myself), but the fact that only two women managed to make it into this book with something else is pathetic.

There's also no queer theory. The Foucault they picked is about structuralism, they have Butler's feminist theory, and they left out Eve Sedgwick and Adrienne Rich (not to mention other, less well-known, theorists) entirely. I need to stop looking at this book, it's starting to annoy me.

So, on that note, I think I'm going to call it a blog entry. I want to go sell a book back and if I don't get moving I'll never get around to it.

Morbid and creepifying

First of all: Books of 2010, as of 1 May:

1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
5. Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
9. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
10. Paradise Lost - John Milton
11. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
12. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
13. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
14. White Noise - Don DeLillo
15. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
16. Japanese Lessons - Gail Benjamin

Yeah, it's been awhile since the last time I updated that list. I also re-read parts of Lost Japan by Alex Kerr, but since I only flipped through it while eating dinner one night I'm not counting it. It's a good book, by the way, if you're interested in Japan. He owns property on Shikoku and in Kyoto and the book is kind of a critique of modern Japan. He's really legit.

In other news, I finished my thesis! Annie and I marathoned Firefly while she worked on her art project and I worked on my thesis and now I've finished it. Unfortunately, it made me sad again that Firefly got canceled. I mean, I do like Serenity and I'm glad they made a film to give some closure, but I still really wish there had been more of the show. So many things never got explained and I love the characters.

But, yeah, thesis is off the list! I'm giving it a final read-through to catch any little errors or weird things, but at 24 pages I can comfortably say that it is, indeed, done. I still have my final paper for apocalyptic lit to write, but that's only 7 to 10 pages and it's not due till Tuesday. And then I will be clear to graduate and, in a little under three months, I'm off to Japan!

Maybe I should start a JET countdown, with a ticker or something that I can keep on my blog. As of today it is... 85 days till departure. That's really soon. Craziness.

My College Experience: A List

My friend Ashalyn did something like this and I decided to do it, too, because it's an awesome idea. So, here is my list of things I did in college (that are noteworthy, anyway), in no particular order.

1. Held Full-Time Jobs. Three of them, in fact: Macys in summer 07, King County Jail Health in summer 08, and King County Public Health in summer 09. I will probably be back at public health for part of this summer, too.

2. Studied Abroad in Japan. I spent four months of 2008 in Kawagoe, Saitama going to TIU for my study abroad. Clearly, I loved it because I'm going back to Japan in July.

3. Lived with roommates. I lived with the same roommate for two years, then went abroad, and I've lived with Annie ever since.

4. Wrote a thesis. Okay, so I'm still working on this. But a week from today I will definitely have successfully written my senior thesis.

5. Had a boyfriend.

6. Made friends.

7. Voted from a foreign country. I was in Japan during the 08 presidential election, voted by mail, and hung out in the second-floor lounge at TIU with their wireless internet to get the election results.

8. Had my wisdom teeth removed. It sucked.

9. Got detained at customs. This also sucked. Fortunately, it was only for about 15 minutes, but I didn't enjoy it.

10. Got into reading feminist and critical race theory. This is an on-going process. I still have a lot of books to read.

11. Went to a couple of anime conventions.

12. Went to a funeral. For my friend Yasu, last fall. It was a tough time, in a lot of ways, but I'm glad I went to the funeral.

13. Got H1N1. Another of those things that I probably could have done without.

14. Sang with the women's choir here at WU every semester.

15. Completed NaNoWriMo. So, I successfully wrote 50,000 words of original fiction in November. The novel needs some hardcore work before I would even consider showing it to anyone, though.

16. Went out drinking. I suppose you could count karaoke in Japan along with more domestic happenings.

17. Got into the JET Program. My next adventure!

I'm sure I could think of more, if I really wanted to, but this seems like a pretty good list. So I'll leave it at that. This was a good four years, I'm happy with what I did with them.

I'm Blogging A Lot Lately

I think this can be attributed to my thesis and other "important" things. The more I have to do, the more likely I am to distract myself with the internet. I haven't updated my blog very consistently this year, anyway, so I'm sort of making up for it.

Anyway, today I got some kind of bad news from home. Apparently, my family's dog, Max, has developed a degenerative retinal condition, so he's losing his sight. It's not something that can be treated and it's just one of those things that happens sometimes to older dogs. The vet said that it's not preventable and it isn't due to anything we did, so it's not anyone's fault. He also said that it could stop at any time, which means Max might be left with weak vision, or it could continue until he's completely blind. So that was hard to hear. It could be worse, like cancer or something, but it's still sad.

So I'm finding things to do that don't involve brooding over things that can't be helped. Like reading for fun and studying kanji. Exciting stuff, I know.

Actually, on the kanji front, I said I was going to try Heisig's method, yeah? Well, after hearing a few times about my friend Katherine's success with it, I really did get his book Remembering the Kanji 1 off Amazon and I'm pleasantly surprised. I admit, I was a little sceptical at first because it's a kanji book with no Japanese at all aside from the kanji themselves (no readings or use explanations or anything), but it's a really good method. His idea is that you should first learn how to write all the characters, with their meanings (so all English), and then learn the readings afterward to apply them to what you already know. It sounds kind of weird, because it's totally different from every Japanese class ever, but I'm doing really well at it so far. Each kanji has a little story (sometimes silly) attached to use as a mnemonic device, based on what the character looks like. The kanji for "old," for example, looks like a tombstone (it's a box with a cross on top, basically), so that's how you can remember it.

I don't know if it works this well for everyone, but I at least am already retaining more than I did by the traditional method of learning the stroke order, meaning, and readings all together. When I finish the book I'll get the follow-up to work on the readings. So, if you, like me, struggle with internalising kanji, check out Heisig.

Thesis Time

I mailed off my JET acceptance today. Along with my criminal records check and an IRS form related to my upcoming foreign residency. On Thursday, I have my physical and then, as soon as I get that form filled out, I'll send it off to JET and be all set for getting placement! I could know in as little as three weeks what my placement is, which is just enough time for me to be reduced to a ball of nerves. Again.

Anyway, in the meantime I'm trying to finish my thesis and it's... going. I'm on page 12, of a required 20-25, and that isn't including an introduction because I haven't written one yet. I'll make at least 20 pages easily, so that's not a concern, it's just that I still have to write them. I also have to seriously edit the first 10 pages that I wrote because there are a lot of problems. My thesis adviser pointed out that I kind of don't really have a central focus. I mean, I am arguing something, but there's no strong "so what" yet. Instead, I've been sort of toying with three or four possible reasons for even writing this paper. Aside from, you know, my intense desire to graduate on the 16th. So, when I get the whole thing written, I'm going to have to go back through it and edit, reorder some parts, break a few paragraphs up and shift the content around, because I shouldn't structure them the way I did, and refine it all to fit a more central idea. That I don't quite have yet. It'll happen.

I'm just burned out and bored, honestly. I'm so close to being finished, and so close to going back to Japan, and so close to doing something I've dreamed of for a long time that it's hard to maintain enthusiasm for my thesis. Or anything else I have left to do to attain my degree.

I'm down to my thesis, a final 7-10 page paper for Apocalyptic Lit (that I haven't started - it's on the agenda after I make more thesis progress), and a group presentation for art history. And all of that will be turned in and completed by 4 May. Then I'll chill for a week and a half, graduate, and head back up to Washington until 24 July when I peace out to Japan. That's it. I'm thisclose.

Also, I will definitely be moving blogs. I made an account over at Wordpress and am planning to migrate over there this summer, probably in July a little before I leave the country. Blogspot has served me well for the past two years, but I'm due for a change of scene and I like some things Wordpress has to offer.

And that's about it. I don't have a lot happening, just a few things that are kind of big. My only other news is maybe that I decided to get James Heisig's book Remembering the Kanji to try his method. I'll let you know how that goes for me.

Busy Busy Busy

Here, have a JET to-do list:

• Get a chest x-ray
• Get a physical
• Get fingerprints taken
• Request an FBI criminal records check (cost $18)
  
• Send reply form, proof of criminal records request, and medical stuff to Seattle (by 4/23)
  
• Fill out a tax thing (cost $36)

And that's just the preliminary stuff that has to be done ASAP! It's partially because it's a government job and partially because Japan is really worried about TB and whatnot and requires extensive medical screenings in order to get a visa. I got up way too early this morning to walk over to Salem Hospital and get my chest x-ray, I'm getting the fingerprints done this afternoon at a place that is really far out of the way (thanks for that, City of Salem, I appreciate it), and I have the physical next Thursday because it was the soonest I could get in to be seen. I've already emailed the JET person in Seattle to tell her that my medical stuff will be a couple of days late, because I was just a little too late to get an appointment for this week, or even the very beginning of next week.

But my packet got here today! My mother had to overnight it to me because JET stuff goes to our permanent addresses. This means I can actually read the instructions myself, rather than have them relayed to me over the phone. I will do this as soon as I go to the mail center and pick the damn thing up.

I'm also thesising and trying to finish up my last two-ish weeks of undergrad, so I can graduate. I am so ready. Also really psyched about Japan and getting a little twitchy about getting my acceptance stuff in so I can find out what my placement is and start preparing for departure.

Oh, and I depart on 24 July, which is sooner than I'd expected. I'll let y'all know when I find out where I'm going to be living. Keep your fingers crossed and send good thoughts for me to get somewhere in Saitama or Gunma (my top two requests).

JET ゲットだぜ！

So, I changed up my blog layout. Except that's not important right now because I'M GOING BACK TO JAPAN. Yes, you read that right, I made the shortlist for JET, which means I have a post-graduation job as soon as I accept the contract. Which I will do as soon as I get the paperwork. There are about 890432 things I have to do before I go (like graduate and get an FBI criminal record check), but I made it through the interviews and life is awesome. I won't find out where my placement is until sometime after I accept the contract, but I will be letting everyone know as soon as I do.

It was kind of ridiculous when I got the email this afternoon. I flailed and got this massive adrenaline rush and may or may not have shouted "yes!" really loudly in my empty apartment. I was actually shaking a little bit when I called my family to tell them.

Anyway, the thing I was going to blog about before I got the best news of the year is that I decided to make a header with my almost non-existent graphics skills (it's a stock fashion photo, I did very little to it aside from add text), but am probably going to make a new blog sometime after graduation. Since I'll be moving on to Japan and things that aren't being an undergraduate student, a fresh start will be good. I'll be sure to properly notify everyone.

Other than that, I'm just working on my thesis and trying to get everything done in time. Graduation is 16 May - we're getting really close now.

Spring Break!

And I am happier for it, let me tell you. As I put it in my Facebook status: 勉強に飽きた, or, "I'm fed up with studying." 飽きる (akiru: to be tired of/fed up with) is a newish addition to my vocabulary - I've renewed my efforts to not lose all my language skills, which in practice means I'm trying to learn more kanji and I'm sort of working on memorising more verbs. I have a book that has the 600 most common Japanese verbs and I took it to work the other day to study a little bit in between appointments. Akiru is one of the words I managed to memorise and learn to write.

Anyway, my spring break is very low key so far. I need to work on my thesis, but I haven't done that yet, and tomorrow I'm planning to get my hair cut and pick through sale racks at the mall (I was in Forever 21 for about 5 minutes on Saturday and the entire back half of the store is sale stuff - I am all over that) . I'm thinking I'm going to grow my hair out a bit again, so I want to get the ends evened up before it starts looking ragged. And I might get bangs of some sort, for something different while I get some length back. I'll ask the stylist what she thinks.

Spring break non-plans aside, I'm getting really edgy waiting to hear back from JET. Apparently, according to my mother, my sister recently said something to the effect of: "If Alexis doesn't get hired, I don't know who will." So, hey, at least someone has faith in me and my abilities to get a damn job. I'm trying to be sort of neutral about it, you know? I really want to get accepted as a short list candidate (it would be quite possibly the best news of my life, from where I'm standing right now), but I'm trying to be prepared for the possibility of rejection. I've been considering my contingency plans, and I do have a few, but I would vastly prefer not to have to go there. And the fact that it's almost April is wreaking havoc on my nerves. They're going to be in shreds by the time I get that letter, you don't even know.

I know my blog is really boring right now, sorry. I don't have a lot of different things going on, but what I do have is big and taking up a lot of space in my mind. I have my thesis to finish, JET should be contacting me sometime in the next two to three weeks, graduation is 16 May... this is a weird time in my life. It feels really up in the air, sort of like I'm just waiting for things to happen. I'm working and active, obviously, because that thesis is not going to write itself, but everything is heavy with anticipation. It's not bad or unpleasant, but it's definitely strange.

General Life Update

Have I updated my blog with anything of substance lately? Why no, no I haven't. So, I guess you can think of this as the general State of the Alexis post, to cover the various things that have happened/have failed to happened/will be happening soon in my life.

Anyway, on 17 February I had my JET interview at the Japanese consul in Seattle. It went pretty well, I think, though a couple of things kind of threw me and my one Japanese language moment wasn't exactly flawless. I had an answer to every question, though, and I think those answers were decent. I was consistent, at least, and I smiled a lot and tried to make it clear that I'm really very flexible - while there are obviously some things I would prefer to others, anything is awesome. I find out sometime in early to mid-April whether or not I've got a job and then, if I am a short list candidate, I'll wait until sometime between the beginning of May and the end of June (as far as I can tell) to find out my placement. It all varies by consul, so there are no specific dates for when candidates get new information. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I'm also thesis-ing, which is interesting, but also somewhat maddening. My thesis is about Eve in "Paradise Lost." I'm arguing that she has greater power and agency than Adam and that Adam is actually the follower at the critical point in the text (the Fall of Man). I'm also partially refuting the claim that Milton was a hardcore misogynist. There is some definite misogyny in that poem, that's undeniable, but the traditional reading of Milton as a misogynist writer is partly based in some historical misconceptions and not completely accurate. And I'm going about the whole thing from a New Historicist perspective. So I'm doing a lot of reading about women in early modern England.

Other than that... Powwow is this weekend, so I'll be really busy helping run that. But it's my last Willamette powwow and it's my favourite school-related event of the year, so the exhaustion is totally worth it.

And, since I have to go to work in about 10 minutes, I think I'll just update the book list and leave it at that. This wasn't the greatest blog post ever, but it's proof of my continued existence. Or something like that.

Books of 2010, as of 9 March:

1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
5. Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
9. Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon
10. "Paradise Lost" - John Milton
11. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

Books!

Thanks to Ashalyn, it has come to my attention that I am woefully behind on keeping my books of 2010 list updated. I'm also shamelessly steeling her idea to review books, so that you might read them (or at least look them up).

So, first of all, Books of 2010, as of 18 February:

1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence
5. Love in the Ruins - Walker Percy
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
7. The Hound of the Baskervilles - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon

And, yes, I am aware of the fact that the list is over half Sherlock Holmes. I've been working through the canon off and on since New Year's Eve and I'm not going to bother going through them in any sort of review. You've all heard of Sherlock Holmes and, if you've never read any, you ought to. The individual short stories aren't long, there are just a lot of them. The other books are for Apocalyptic Lit and I'm going to talk about two of them.

1. Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy
This is a great example of '70s southern existentialism. It takes place at an unspecified point in time in the south and is about a psychologist (a self-identified bad Catholic) named Thomas More. Tom has been mentally ill himself, and he's invented a device to diagnose maladies of the soul and one day, if he ever perfects it, to treat them. The whole story happens over the course of a few days and it's not linear - a good portion of the novel is Tom recalling what happened after the fact, as he lays under a tree at what he believes to be the end of the world. There's a lot of the Book of Revelation throughout and I won't spoil the ending, but it's a pretty good read.

2. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon is weird. In fact, Pynchon is very weird, and this novel is evidence of that. It's about a woman named Oedipa Maas, who is named co-executor of a recently-deceased ex's estate and, while she's trying to deal with that, maybe stumbles upon a centuries old conflict between two mail delivery companies and the secret society that seems to surround the one that no longer exists. But really, when you get past the plot (Oedipa gets obsessed with this simple drawing of a muted horn that she starts seeing everywhere and spends days chasing after what seems to be a huge plot, but might in fact just be her imagination, or a practical joke, or something else entirely), it's about entropy. It's very '60s, very postmodern, and I loved it. It also makes me want to start drawing the Trystero horn in random places, to join the maybe-conspiracy.

But I've heard this book referred to as one of the most grating, incomprehensible novels ever written and feel like it's one of those things you'll either love or hate. So you might not have my reaction to it.

And now I'm reading Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon, which is great. I love the film adaptation (starring Michael Douglas, Toby Maguire, and Robert Downey Jr), so I felt like it was time to read the novel. It's about writers and writing and failing to write, and is both darkly funny and true to life. Maybe not for people who don't write, but for those of us who do. I'm currently about a third of the way through, but since I've seen the film a few times I know the general shape of the plot. As tends to be the case, the book is even better than the film, and it's a good film, so I'm very happy.

Sundry Friday Items

Someone linked this to me, so I'm passing it on because it's pretty good. It's a video from a comedian, Elon James, giving 13 Black Truths (it's part of a web comedy show he does, called This Week in Blackness). In the video, he brings up stuff like ignorant people saying "you don't talk like a Black person!" And the accompanying short essay about his mom is great. It's not long, so if you've got a couple minutes, you should check it out.

Now I'm re-reading some of bell hooks' Killing Rage. I'm ahead of some white people (since I'm, you know, actually trying), but I still have a hell of a long way to go in reeducating myself so I won't be one of the racist, ignorant dumbasses. Also, she's badass and amazing and deserves to be re-read. Or read the first time, if you haven't. WU friends, I'm looking at you. Seriously. bell hooks and Inga Muscio - I have some of their books right here in Salem and you should read them.

In other news, Hell's own chest cold, which I contracted last Friday, is finally starting to go away. Really, I feel fine, but I'm still coughing like I have tuberculosis. Even the nasty cherry Nyquil (they were out of green flavour) I forced myself to drink last night didn't do much about it. It didn't even knock me out, I just felt woozy and light-headed when I got up to get a drink of water about an hour after going to bed. What the hell, Nyquil? You're supposed to ease up my cough and make me sleep - fail on both counts.

So I'm really sleep-deprived. I haven't slept more than four or five hours a night all week because I'm keeping myself awake coughing. I'll give the Nyquil another shot tonight, before succumbing to despair. All I want is some uninterrupted sleep. Is that really so much to ask for?

And, finally, on the school front, I'm reading Love in the Ruins, by Walker Percy, for Apocalyptic Lit, which is good in a 70s southern existentialism sort of way (it does a lot of things you're not supposed to do - first person, present tense, lack of linear structure...), and I have to go talk to Allison (seminar professor) in about a half-hour about where I might want to take my "Paradise Lost" thesis. I'm thinking I want to focus on something to do with Eve. But that will probably require my reading a bunch of Lacan, which I kind of don't want to do. The Mirror Stage and all that. This may be a bit of a Dilemma.

Oh, and I got an A on my first art history quiz, which kind of reminds me of AP Art History back in high school. I definitely got a 5 on the exam even though I barely studied and went to great lengths to do as little work as possible all year. That class was not as fun as I'd been hoping. AP Euro History was a million times better.

Things are happening

First of all, I got a JET interview! In case you've forgotten, JET is the Japan Exchange and Teaching program, which I applied for back in November. Yesterday, I received email notification that I am one of the people who made the cut (a lot of people, including some people I know, didn't), so I have an interview at the consul in Seattle in about three weeks. I'll have to miss a couple of days of class for it, but I'm pretty sure that won't be a problem given that it's, you know, a massively important part of my attempt to have something to do after I graduate. JET is really competitive, so clearly I'm doing something right. Wish me luck with the interview - it's a panel thing and I've been told they can ask some pretty difficult questions. Fortunately, I actually own proper business attire now, so I'll be able to go in looking like a serious candidate.

Suddenly, I feel way closer to graduation. Since I'm not applying for grad school, I've been in a weird sort of liminal space for awhile. Most of the people around me are rushing around trying to get stuff done and turned in, and I've just been chilling because there's not a lot I can do yet. Securing my first interview for something post-graduation was like a reminder that, yeah, I really do graduate in May. And I am definitely ready, let me tell you.

But my classes this semester are pretty awesome. I've got my senior seminar on Milton's "Paradise Lost" (for which I'll be writing a thesis, just one related to the course rather than an independent body of research), Apocalyptic Lit (best class ever), and Baroque and Neoclassical Visual Culture (most entertaining professor I've ever had). Oddly, they all kind of interrelate, which was completely unintentional.

So I'm enjoying my last term, I really am. I love Apocalyptic Lit like you wouldn't believe - Strelow is a spectacular professor who is very tangential and incredibly quotable. Yesterday's soundbite, while talking about Puritans back in the seventeenth century: "We've got the instruction manual, the Bible, so we can just flip through it and find out what we're supposed to do. Neighbors drinking beer on Sundays? Let's go to church and pray for them, and then go beat 'em up. Which is exactly what they did."

Another good quote from that lecture was: "You'll find that Nietzsche is Emerson on steroids."

For that class, we first read the Book of Revelation and D.H. Lawrence's Apocalypse (a very short, scathing little book - I loved it), and now we're working with Eliot's "The Waste Land" and a couple of Blake poems. Then we're moving onto novels: Love in the Ruins (Percy), White Noise (DeLillo), Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut), The Handmaid's Tale (Atwood), The Crying of Lot 49 (Pynchon), and The Road (McCarthy). Isn't that a great reading list? I've read Slaughterhouse Five and White Noise before, but the rest of it's new. I'm psyched.

As for the rest, my seminar is pretty sweet. The professor is amazing and chill and there are only 10 of us (one girl dropped), so it's really informal and relaxed. We also only meet regularly through the first week of March - after that, it's individual meetings as needed until we have to start presenting portions of our theses to the collective. My plan right now is to go meet with the professor on Friday, actually, to start brainstorming. PL is a huge work and I feel like, if I don't pick an angle early on, I'm going to feel really overwhelmed later when I have to find a focus for a 25-30 page paper.

And, finally, the art history class is just fun to attend. It's taught by de Mambro Santos, who is Brazilian and has come to us by way of Rome (he used to teach at the University of Rome and has written some books about art in Italian and it's kind of crazy that he settled here). His accent is very odd and his lectures are manic in the best possible way. He's also pretty quotable, making comments about art like, "Look at this guy! He's not only old, he's disgustingly old! He's about to fall over and be corrupted by worms!" That was in reference to a detail in Rafael's Transfiguration of Christ.

And that's about it for me. I've had a lot of insomnia, but overall things are going well. I'm working three hours a week in Ye Olde Writing Center (one hour on Tuesdays and two on Thursdays), which means I'll make more money than I did last semester, and so far this is a good semester for me. As well it should be, considering how much I've put up with to get here.

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Books of 2010, as of 27 January
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
3. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Apocalypse - D.H. Lawrence

My name is Alexis and I am a bibliophile

Today I was moderately productive! I went to the transit centre to acquire an Orca card (they're bus cards that you put money on, so you don't have to use cash, kind of like Japanese train cards), then I spent almost two hours in Barnes & Noble. I didn't buy anything because everything I wanted was outrageously expensive and I refuse to spend $15 on a paperback, but I spent part of that time in the cafe with coffee and my Moleskine, scribbling writing notes for when I conquer my listlessness enough to actually sit down and write something marginally coherent. And, anyway, time spent in a bookstore is never time wasted.

Then I came home, took a look at my books (which, for the record, are kept in... 7 different places because they don't fit properly), and decided to go through them and pull out ones I can do without. So now I have a bag full of books that I'm going to take to Half-Price books and attempt to sell. Someone else will have more use for Red Star Over China than I will at this point, I'm sure. The bag contains a mix of fantasy novels I'm not keen on anymore, books I inexplicably have two copies of, books I never really liked to begin with, and school-related books I didn't sell back for whatever reason.

I also discovered, in the process of going through my bookcase, shelves, and drawers full of books, that I have a lot of philosophy and poetry. And a good 15-20 books I've never read. I think I just compulsively buy them, then get an emotional attachment and agonize over whether I can bear to part with them, whether I've read them or not. It's like this voice in the back of my mind goes, "But you might want to read them later and then where will you be?" Absolutely ridiculous. Which is why I'm forcing myself to part with about two dozen.

Anyway, at the end of my book-sorting adventure, I discovered that I will be returning to Salem with more books than I brought with me. To begin with, I can't very well leave The Complete Sherlock Holmes because I'm only a third of the way through, but I also can't leave the two books I brought and haven't finished. Then there's Slaughterhouse-5, which I know I'll be reading for my Apocalyptic lit class and don't want to have to buy again, and Catch-22, which I've been half-way through for the last eternity. I also need to bring my literary theory book from sophomore year because I know I'll need it for my English classes. I did last semester, anyway, and didn't have it. I intend to avoid that issue this time around.

In conclusion? Maybe I should read the books I already have before buying more. It would save money and cut down on my owning books I don't even remember buying to begin with.

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Books of 2010, as of 6 January
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
2. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

The start of a new year

I entered 2010 in a pretty quiet, low-key sort of way. I went into the International District during the day with my friend Ashalyn, to go to the Asian American History Museum and eat good food and generally just hang, then I spent the rest of the night at home. The weather is typical for Seattle in January - rain and fog and general ick - and I've been spending a lot of time wrapped up in a blanket reading Sherlock Holmes (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell is on hold). After seeing the new film (which I enjoyed mostly for Robert Downey Jr, who should play scruffy, disheveled Victorians more often, the Holmes and Watson dynamic, and the music) I decided to revisit the canon. So my 2010 reading is off to a good start. I'm planning to keep a list again and, where 2009 capped with 28 books (I read A Study in Scarlet before the year ended), I think I can hit 30 at least in 2010. I also think I will count school books for one class this semester, since I'm taking Apocalyptic Literature and will be reading novels.

But, yes, Holmes. I'd forgotten how much I love these stories (and just how much I love the character Sherlock Holmes). At Half-Price Books today I found the complete canon (all four novels and 56 short stories in one hard-back book) for $8.00 and I'm making a decent dent in it. I also found two volumes of James Bond for $4.00 each, so now I have six of the original 14 Fleming novels (little known fact: I love James Bond - it's kind of a guilty pleasure, except I'll freely admit to it). It was just one of those days at the bookstore where what I wanted was actually there.

So, really, 2010 is off to a good start. I'm reading a lot, catching up on my sleep, getting together with old friends, and taking a well-deserved break before diving into my final semester as an undergraduate student. I've applied for JET and am waiting to find out if I got an interview, I have another possible Japan job that I want more than JET waiting to be applied for, and things are going pretty well. I don't do the resolutions thing, but I do intend to read more and try to actually update that media blog I started every once in awhile. And to enjoy my life, that's definitely key.

明けましておめでとうございます！

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Books of 2010, as of 1 January:
1. The Sign of Four - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Things to read

First off:

Books of 2009, as of 27 December
1. Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil - Inga Muscio
2. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
3. Anansi Boys - Neil Gaiman
4. The Zombie Survival Guide - Max Brooks
5. Neuromancer - William Gibson
6. The Opposite of Fate - Amy Tan
7. The Joy-Luck Club - Amy Tan
8. The Bonesetter's Daughter - Amy Tan
9. Takarazuka (Sexual Politics and Popular Culture in Modern Japan) - Jennifer Robertson
10. The Hundred Secret Senses - Amy Tan
11. The Kitchen God's Wife - Amy Tan
12. Cunt - Inga Muscio
13. Beyond Heaving Bosoms (The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels) - Sarah Wendell, Candy Tan
14. Killing Rage - bell hooks
15. Fragile Things - Neil Gaiman
16. Polite Lies - Kyoko Mori
17. Looking for the Lost (Journeys Through a Vanishing Japan) - Alan Booth
18. Lost Japan - Alex Kerr
19. Geisha: A Life - Mineko Iwasaki
20. Women of the Pleasure Quarters - Lesley Downer
21. The Faded Sun Trilogy - C.J. Cherryh [it's an omnibus, so I'm counting it as one]
22. The Loved Dead - H.P. Lovecraft
23. Idoru - William Gibson
24. Looking for Jake - China Mieville [a volume of short fiction]
25. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
26. Dune - Frank Herbert
27. World War Z - Max Brooks

Now I'm on to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norell by Susanna Clark. It's a long book, so I'll probably be at it for a week at least. It's sort of alternate history meets fantasy, which I love: 19th century England with magic, more or less. I've only just started, so I don't have an opinion yet, but I think it'll be a fun read. And, if you like zombies at all, read World War Z because it's awesome. It's written as an oral history of the zombie apocalypse - interviews with and first hand accounts from people who survived it (soldiers, politicians, normal people, etc.). Brilliant stuff.

Outside of the realm of books, but still related, I've fallen deeply, passionately in love with two web comics. I wasn't into web comics for a long time, to be perfectly honest, but recently I stumbled across a couple and started reading and am now completely engrossed and waiting for them to pick back up now that Christmas is past.

The first one is Trying Human. It's a sci-fi romance predominantly about a woman who gets abducted by aliens (who look sort of like stereotypical UFOs) and eventually falls in love with one of them. Then there are subplots, mostly about other attempts at inter-species romance. The title comes from this thing the second alien species in the comic (reptilian) have, the Trying Human circuit, which lets the alien wearing it take on the appearance of a human. So, if you like sci-fi, it updates every Monday and Thursday.

The second one is Beauty and the Beast. As I'm sure you've guessed by the title, it's a retelling of the fairy tale, with a somewhat unusual take on the story and great art (very distinctive and nothing like the Disney film). The Beauty character is a little too perfect, but considering the nature of the story, it's forgivable. This one updates 5 days a week.

Yes, it's Christmas break, which means it's time to catch up on my reading.

Almost Done

First of all: I will be back in Seattle December 20 (that's next Sunday, for the record). Actually, I might be back Saturday night, but I'm getting a ride from Alex like usual, so it depends on whether he wants to leave after his last final on Saturday, or wait till Sunday morning. I'll be around till mid-January (like, the 16th or 17th), so if you want to hang out (and why wouldn't you? I mean, seriously), we can definitely work that out.

I'm also getting my wisdom teeth extracted at some point, because one of them has been actually causing on and off pain since, oh, October, but awesomeness needs to go down around my first ever experience with dental surgery.

Actually, speaking of my wisdom teeth and pain, how lame is it that I don't have dental coverage outside of the state of Washington? I was so mad when I learned that a couple months ago. I am in pain (minor and not all the time, but still) and I can't deal with it until I leave Oregon for more than a couple of days.

Putting all that aside, it is cold in Salem. And I don't mean cold like 'maybe I should wear an extra sweater today,' I mean cold, like 'oh, wow, my arm just snapped off and shattered like an icicle on the floor.' We're reaching such blistering high temperatures as 28 degrees during the day and it's getting down to the low teens at night (it's 18 degrees right now). Salem is almost never this cold. The stream running through campus actually froze last night. To make matters worse, my apartment has 1920s windows with no insulation, so there is a constant draft. And, just to add insult to injury, it's really dry, so I'm getting little annoying nosebleeds about 5 times a day and there's not even any snow to make up for the suffering.

So:

Dear Oregon Weather Gods,

If you're going to subject me to painful cold, the least you could do is throw in some snow to make me feel better. This whole dry cold thing? Yeah, I don't approve.

No love,
Me

And, just to close up another of my habitual all-over-the-place blog entries, tomorrow and Friday are Christmas in Hudson Hall (the big Christmas program the choir department does every year - readings and carols and... stuff), classes end on Friday, my only finals are next Thursday and Friday, which means I have plenty of study time should I need it, Annie and I are hosting a Christmas party on Saturday, and I am all but counting the hours until this term ends. So burned out. So ready for Christmas and relaxing for a few weeks.

Actually, I'm ready for it to be May. Graduation is looking pretty good right now.

Sci-Fi Nerd Post Ahead

Okay, so it's no secret that I love science-fiction. The novel I'm still writing for NaNoWriMo¹ is sci-fi, my favourite TV show of all time is Babylon 5, my favourite novel is Dune, and I've watched at least some of every incarnation of Star Trek (my favourites are The Original Series and Deep Space Nine). It's probably safe to say, in fact, that sci-fi is my favourite genre. So, I want to take a moment to talk about Star Trek. Not the new movie, which I can enjoy as long as I pretend it has nothing to do with any other Star Trek and overlook the plot holes big enough to drive the Enterprise through, because I've already discussed my issues with it and more or less moved on. No, I want to talk about the fact that, in all these years, they still haven't had queer people and the few times they've come close, they've managed to cop-out at the last minute.

DS9 is an easy example of where they totally could have gone there... and didn't. You see, right at the very beginning of Season 1 the character Garak is introduced. He comes up to Doctor Bashir, introduces himself and proceeds to hit on him in a slightly sketchy way for the duration of their short conversation. It's totally there. In fact, it was supposed to be. Andrew Robinson, the actor who played Garak, has said so. However, the show's producers saw that first meeting and told him he was playing the character too gay and needed to knock it off. The hitting on Bashir thing doesn't totally go away, and Garak gets all the best lines, but it does lighten up and I'm pretty sure the fact that Garak and Bashir have fewer conversations as the show progresses is due largely to the fact that there was a lot of chemistry that could be easily interpreted as flirting. Then, because Andrew Robinson is awesome, he wrote a Garak novel (there are a lot of Star Trek novelisations, if you live under a rock without used bookstores and hadn't noticed) that says straight up that Garak is bisexual. Lovely man, Andrew Robinson.

They also almost went in the queer-friendly direction in Enterprise. Originally, one of the officers (I don't remember which one, I'm not a huge fan of this series) was supposed to be gay and there were going to be little nods to it like references to a past relationship and whatnot. It wasn't going to be a focus, or an issue within the show, just a positive inclusion of a queer character. Then they decided not to, gave him an ex-wife or something like that, and ditched the whole thing. And that annoys me so much. Just... fail. So much fail. Babylon 5 went there back in the mid-90s, with a lesbian sub-plot for part of the series, because JMS is bad ass and does things like that (the Pope is also a woman), but out of all the Star Trek series and films and novels (except Andrew Robinson's), no one will include a visible queer character anywhere.

I still love DS9 and TOS, and Voyager and TNG are also awesome (Enterprise is so-so), but it bothers me that they could pretty easily take that one step and just won't do it. I hold out hope, though, that one day they will.

Related, but on a different note, if I look half as fierce as Nichelle Nichols when I'm in my 70s, I'll be ecstatic. And, if you watch TOS, you'll notice that Uhura's legs are in the background of so many shots on the bridge. I'm pretty sure they framed shots specifically so her legs would be visible, even when she has nothing to do with the interaction in the foreground. I'm serious.

I'll just go back to rewatching B5 (albeit slightly out of order, because I wanted to watch The Corps is Mother, The Corps is Father and that's from season 5) and keep my fingers crossed that Star Trek will get with it.

But first, I need to go turn in my application to graduate. That'd be a smart thing to do.

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¹ National Novel Writing Month. I wrote 50,204 words between November 1 and 29, winning the challenge with one day to spare, but the novel is still only 2/3 of the way through. I'll get there eventually.

Almost registration time

As in, I can register for my final semester of classes tomorrow at 9:30PM. I met with the head of the department the other day (because I no longer have an adviser - long story) to discuss my classes and she ended up talking me into taking a full course load. I don't have to - I need exactly one class to graduate - but she told me that I shouldn't let myself graduate without taking a class with Ricardo de Mambro Santos, so I'm going to take one of his art history classes.

Anyway, this is the class breakdown for my last semester:

.Humanities 497: Paradise Lost Seminar
.English 456: Apocalyptic Literature
.Politics 374: Asia and the International System
.Art History 263: Baroque and Neoclassical

Paradise Lost is the equivalent of my thesis. Since I decided not to write an independent thesis (English majors here don't have to), I'm taking the humanities seminar instead. It's taught by Hobgood, one of my favourites, and I'm really looking forward to it. Actually, I'm really looking forward to all of them - Apocalyptic lit sounds amazing, I like international politics and the professor teaching that course, and de Mambro Santos is apparently one of the awesomest professors on campus. I'll also continue Voce, of course, which will mean I'll have been in a Willamette choir every semester I've been on campus. I just hope Christine comes back. I miss her.

And... yeah, a little less than six months till graduation. Craziness. My JET application was mailed off on Friday, I've decided to apply for an internship at the Carnegie Endowment in DC because it would be very cool (not getting my hopes up, but it can't hurt to apply, right?), and I've basically settled into a general plan of applying for whatever catches my interest because the worst that can happen is they say no.

Oh, and I'm supposed to take the GRE sometime this year, to get it out of the way. I'm excited about that, let me tell you.

I'm just glad this semester's almost over, really. I'm tired of math, tired of biology labs, and Victorian Poetry is not my favourite class ever. I am more than ready for my last semester, filled with classes I actually want to take. But it's almost Thanksgiving, which means home with my family and my dog, and then very soon after that it's Christmas. I've made it this far, I can definitely handle the last three and a half weeks.