east of omaha

I basically want to read Ultimate Spiderman again just because the thought of Peter Parker, Johnny Storm, and Bobby Drake all being roommates apparently is just awesome and hilarious to me. Unfortunately after Ultimatum I want to cross myself when encountering anything from that entire line.

Yesterday was graduation day! I don't really know a lot of people graduating so I didn't go to the ceremony, but we did go afterwards and take pictures and stuff. This one guy I sort of know got his PhD. Whenever somebody tells me they're getting/have gotten their PhD my first reaction is always, "Wow, I can't believe anybody would voluntarily go to school for that long, but here you are!" Which is a reaction I suppress, as that is probably not what they what to hear.

fromtheflag made me watch the newest South Park and omg.

I keep getting minor panic attacks and I have no idea why. They don't even upset me exactly (unless I immediately find something to attach my upset to, which I will try, IT IS SO BACKWARDS) because I am pretty aware that they are not caused by anything actually happening to me, but it's like holy crap it's all the physiological symptoms of panic ALL OF THEM. This like, three times a day. Four times, today, if you count the actual panic where I stepped off the steps leading up to my bed and onto nothing at all. IT WAS LIKE I WAS FLYING. Except for the part where that's probably fun.

I need a haircut so badly I'm tempted to take the scissors into my own hands, operating on the premise that it couldn't possibly look any worse. But that's not true. That's never true.

This was supposed to be a short entry IF YOU MADE IT TO THE END YOU ARE REWARDED WITH THIS LINK. This is a cover of 王光良's "童話"—if you can't read that, just know it's like, a super famous song over here. Except this cover is in English! And then they play the violin! And then the trumpet! Or something! To be honest the original version is good for a laugh if you're interested, too. (Note: this is not the intended reaction. But apparently I'm not the only one that thought so.) It's a good cover, but you'll be pretty surprised to learn that the lyrics sound even more insipid in Mandarin, I am pretty sure.

❡ Since it's three_weeks_for_dw, I am actively looking for people to add! Hurrah. Unfortunately that's a bit harder to do here than it would be on, say, Tumblr. On Tumblr you can just add anybody you think is interesting but on DW I never know if people will be creeped.

❡ Tomorrow me and roommates are taking a spontaneous trip to Tainan!

❡ Spent the day in bed listening to and watching various podcasts. Surprised myself by chosing Mundo de Microbios and a bunch of random shit in Japanese. Also discovered I can pretty well understand Slow Chinese despite the Beijing accent—which incidentally is a podcast I'd recommend to intermediate students of Mandarin. It's talks about stuff like Marco Polo and Chinese history and stuff.

❡ The Foreign Service Institute courses (used to train diplomats and members of the Peace Corps) are larely available for free online. Naturally they are dry as fuck and probably require a working knoweldge of how languages and language learning work to use, but resources for languages like Thai or Vietnamese or Yoruba are not exactly overwhelming as it is, so they are nice in this way.

❡ Scored two CDs full of Mandopop by ~various artists~ many of whom I already know (Jay Chou, Rainie Yang, Wang Leehom) but many I don't! I EXPECT TO ENJOY NEW AND GLORIOUS ARTISTS.

So when I'm not obsessively Googling my new celebrity boyfriend (sorry, JGL, I feel we had a good, if short, run) and bitching about the Korean robots from space sent to destroy me, I'm pretty intensely involved in having a life basically, which is a shock to me and maybe everyone else, I don't know. People are amazingly willing to forgive my loud and bumbling way of socializing—suspiciously so. For instance, I went to see a hilarious and bizarre play last night, which honestly was a production that probably deserves its own entry, and afterwards one of the performers came up to me and said we actually knew each other already. "Uh," I said. "真的嗎..." And then she invited me to go out clubbing with her next week. Students get in free!

Yeah idk. Not even.

Thursdays are my long days. Like Wednesday. And Friday. At the end of all of them, I'm a zoned out zombie who speaks in a fucked up language all my own, usually along the lines of: "Oh god, 為什麼我的 fucking I don't know christ I want to sleep 可是不可以, 我有作業作業 always the fucking 作業, 我不喜歡那個課, 不喜歡大學, I don't even like being alive, 殺我."

My extremely difficult life, let me show you it. Oh, and hi new friends from the friending meme, what is up.

This afternoon I was IMing unicorn and thor and I put my head down on my keyboard, and when I picked it up again it was an hour and a half later and after I worked out the what the fuck happened? where the hell am I? I had to go to German. Which is, by the way, Taiwan's one opportunity for me to feel superior, since as much as its grammar might kick my ass on a regular basis, in my class I am the only person who's a native speaker of a Germanic language—except, maybe, the professor, I don't know where she's from—plus English has a vocabulary overlap with German of like, sixty percent. Basically I know more than everyone else in the classroom by doing nothing, studying nothing, just by existing. This makes me feel super smart even though I did nothing to earn it.

In all other circumstances I am an illiterate idiot. One who can segment Chinese, though. Even if I can't understand it any better than I could when I got here three weeks ago, which is frustrating, I know my subconscious is up to something because word boundaries are super obvious to me now, I can recognize other non-native Chinese speakers by their accent, and really the whole language sounds a lot different than it did before.

And writing in English gets harder all the time. This entry? It took me forever, and I know the wording in places is awkward as hell. It's probably because I haven't had an actual face-to-face conversation with another native English speaker in days, but goddamnit, I have been here for three weeks. THREE WEEKS. It's like my brain is all, fuck this, DIVERT RESOURCES, SHE DOESN'T EVEN USE ENGLISH ANYMORE ANYWAY.

Edit: BEHOLD, A FANDOM LINK, "Hey, Inception Fandom. Let's talk about Yusuf for a minute." by effex. Yes, lets. Includes a bunch of fic recs I'll probably check out tomorrow, because tbh he's one of the few characters in that movie with a distinct voice at all. So far I've only really read fic about him actually.

I told you guys, lawnmower strapped to a cart. My dad said they used to have these back in the States, before they came to their senses.

Every morning I wake up to the garbage truck, which sings like an ice-cream truck except with fewer notes and it parks outside my building. For half an hour at a time. The first time it shows I'm usually too dead to notice, since that's around the six am mark, but around eight when it shows up again, jesus. I rolled over and tried to cover my face with the pillow but since it's like eighty-five degrees in my room on most mornings sleep is precarious anyway and yeah, the pillow isn't cutting it. So I start most mornings out with hate in my soul.

Follow that up with my failure this morning to realize that the water fountain display said "100" because it was dispensing water that was in fact 100º Celsius, and even as an idiot American I really should've figured that out, y'know? "Is that steam? Really? Ohcrap." This is an excellent way to start my first day of school—which technically doesn't start until eight tonight, but, you know, whatever. Whateveeeeeeeer.

My friend K. is taking courses in Chinese, which I think is completely nuts even though I plan on doing exactly the same thing next semester. Looking at her course material though, looks like I'm going to have to fucking study man. Because, well, shit. The reading alone looks like enough to make me weep. Weep, because in five months that's me.