Nothing really new today. i had
curry rice (reheated) for lunch and used up the last of the cold rice in my fridge. I went for 6 meals on five cups of
rice, which is a pretty good rate of use, so I shouldn't have to worry too much about exhausting my supplies anytime soon. Originally I had feared that I would run out of food too quickly but I am actually doing ok. I think I will have
instant noodle with an
egg and pickled
bamboo shoots in it for breakfast tomorrow.
My Japanese class is interesting. It is a mixture of people from my class last semester, the intensive japanese 1 class, and a bunch of Anime experts from the non-intensive class. Today in class we were talking about our favorite expression in Japanese (mine was "naruhodo") one guy sitting in the back in the class said something from Rurouni Kenshin (not sure about the spelling, I am not the anime authority in the class). I have never seen such a reaction as this word (I can't even remember what it is) elicited from the "experts gallery". They were so happy, they kept repeating this word and laughing for about 5 minutes. The teacher, having not seen this cartoon, seemed a little frightened. This evening at floor meeting the point was raised again- my neighbor across the hall, who moved up to our floor from the "Japanese floor" (I live in a foreign-language dorm) to get a single, asked if there would be any inter-floor functions. He said that in his experience there were few of these functions, and wanted to know if it was because people on the other floors tended to avoid the kids on the second floor. For a moment all was silent. Then, rather reluctantly, one of my friends said that yes, this was pretty much the case, that people on the other floors in the building tend to avoid people on the second floor because "most of them are caucasian guys looking for asian women." It was a quality moment. Apparently this is a fairly recent development, as I have a friend who was in the Japanese floor five or six years ago and she said that conditions were different when she lived on the floor.
I have spent my whole afternoon doing my linguistics reading about the IPA and its particular application in Chinese linguistics as well as the sounds used in different dialects. I also started going back to my older nodes to add softlinks.
I wrote my friend a letter today basically detailing how mundane life is here today. It felt good to write using a pen and paper, although my handwriting is now atrocious. The improvement in my penmanship between the beginning and the end of the letter was quite noticeable. My roommate is watching "scare" on mtv. It is not quite as scary as advertised, but still fascinating in a creepy sort of way. He says "it's supposed to be real, but it's bullshit"
Ok whatever, I am a bit tired right now. On the board outside our room we were supposed to write out our goals for the semester- mine was "4.0". I have been studying all day. The odd thing is that since all of my friends from last semester have graduated and gone leaving only me and my roommate, ther is nothing to do around here except study. I should feel loss, sadness that my friends are gone. Why do I feel nothing?