Procrastination, Shoes, and Summer Camp

Hello World! こんにちは世界、it’s me again.

I am actually pretty proud that I got my act together, sat down and wrote another blog post. I am actually up to par with my weekly blogging schedule.

Playing around with my new camera effects... And new hairstyle :P

           I have really exciting news! So last blog I kind of went off on a tangent about 森の池(my Japanese immersion camp), and how I hoped I could go back this year. (Okay, I didn’t KIND OF go off on a tangent, I just plain went off on a tangent.) Well… I am officially registered for session JD32 of Mori no Ike for 2013!! Two more weeks of paradise! (Yeah, I wanted to be a four week student this year, but finances and stuff weren’t in my favor.) Speaking of which I need to get writing on an essay for a scholarship, but I figured you guys wanted to hear from me first. I procrastinate too much…

SPEAKING OF PROCRASTINATION: Half my neighborhood still has their Halloween decorations up. Really? Really people? It’s almost the Christmas season, I mean a couple popular stations are already playing Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and you still have your jack-o-lanterns. In Minnesota, there seems to be a rule that no holiday ends until the next one is half over, and then you get planning for the next one. It’s like our lives revolve around them. But people’s birthdays are over and gone in one day.

My Halloween costume was a last minute shamble of everything black I had in the house and some vampire fangs. This was me, pre-makeup before I went to school.

I had such a lisp with fangs, so I sounded like Sollux whenever I talked. Homestuck reference: Sorry.

 Things I've been into lately...

• Drawing Manga
• Cooking
• Watching Hana Kimi again
• Translating songs into Japanese, especially the christmas songs. Speaking of drawing manga...

My latest masterpiece, it's supposed to be me. Or an ideal of what I wish I looked like turned into manga form, more or less. I use SketchbookExpress for MacBook

Well, I went shopping today because yesterday was Black Friday and I was scared to leave the house for fear of being trampled. I wouldn’t have gone shopping today either, except for the undeniable fact that I required shoes, since my only nice black dress shoes are high heels that murder my feet. I wore them to my school band concert last Thursday, and while I was trying to oh-so-gracefully walk off stage, I tripped and oh-so-clumsily crashed into a bunch of guys from school who gave me weird looks.

Long Girly Tangent About Shoes: sorry. But anyhoo I needed shoes, so I bought some. Although I think the cash register lady hated me, since the shoe rack was right next to her and I kept dropping shoes all over the place. She kept adjusting her putrid orange scarf and giving me pointed looks as if to say “When is this girl going to LEAVE already?” Nevertheless, I left with two pairs of wonderful shoes. Enough about footwear, for gosh sakes. No seriously though, don’ t you just hate shopping around Christmas? Everybody’s in a foul mood at you just because they’re in a hurry.

Behold... THE SHOES

         I’m getting ready for a very busy holiday season, people. Besides the fact that there are 830 of my youtube subscribers who require Japanese lessons, I have some selfish plans of my own…

Part of these plans involve getting up at 4 in the morning to depart for Maine, traveling al Aeroplane. If I’m wide awake enough to sit up straight, I’ll vlog from the airport in 日本語. I always get a kick out of vlogging in actual PLACES, not just my bedroom. So, when I get to Maine, I’ll be spending the week of Christmas with my grandmother, and most likely eat a lot of seafood. Only in Maine is Lobster a popular Christmas dish. But hey, I’m not gonna complain.

         My wonderful awesome fantabulicious best friend has a birthday coming up soon on December first, so happy birthday, Rachel! (Although I’m not quite sure if Fantabulicious is a word…) I would tell you what I’m getting her, but under the slight chance she might read this, I have decided against it. I’ll give you a hint. POCKYPOCKYPOCKY. I… kind of… have too much of that. :P

If you haven't tried this, you haven't lived. :)

My best friend!!

Later Aligators! I promise I’ll have a blog with more actual stuff to write about soon, and less tangents, but this week was… well, uneventful. So leave your comments and please check out my youtube channel if you haven’t already at youtube.com/ranabvideo

見て見てくださいね〜

よろしく

Peace!

じゃね、

The Midori Neko signing off (for now)

こんにちは、世界。Hello World! It’s me here, Abby. How have you been? About a year ago, when I decided to make a blog to just share with my friends, I wrote my first two posts on wordpress, which you may have or may not have seen. But now I figure it's time to share my blog with the world, so from now on, I will be blogging regularly. Yay! So to start, just a little 自己紹介(self intro) to get to know each other, shall we?

THERE ARE MANY THINGS YOU COULD ASK ABOUT ME. First, why I want to blog. The reason I want to blog more, is so that I, a hopelessly unaverage teenage Japanophile, can write about my life. Who's going to read this? I don't know. But let's get started.

 My major interest is languages. I am bilingual, soon to be more than trilingual. I speak 日本語(Japanese) and English. I study languages because I want to travel the world, and learn about different cultures. At the moment, I am just a middle school girl who has never left the good old USA, but that is soon to change. I plan to go do homestay in Japan when I'm in high school, and live there when I'm older. I got my interest in Japan because of a Japanese friend in elementary school, and my interest grew to the traditional culture, pop culture, and language. I enjoy everything from tea cerimonies to anime, from kawaii culture to kimonos, from the technology to the sushi. I don't just enjoy one part of the culture. That's what sets me apart from many teenage Japanophiles in America. I am not OBSESSED with Japan, it is just my main foreign culture of interest.

The other languages that I study include Korean, Chinese, Spanish, and French. I speak a little Russian as well, due to knowing many people who speak it at my school.

My physical appearance: I'm fairly short, american, strawberry blonde, and can be seen wearing a pair of purple spectacles... When I'm not trying to avoid wearing them. I have braces too. I am in the 8th grade at a Jr. High in Minnesota which shall remain unnamed because of you creepy people out there who want to eat me. :P You can often find me wearing odd hats, knee high socks with skirts, graphic tee shirts, and too many bracelets. I enjoy pigtails and hair extensions, so my hair can drastically vary from day to day. Most of my class at school finds me a bit... odd, but I don’t care. I guess the only way to really describe me other than that is to attach a photograph thingy.

I can imagine you guys still have some more QUESTIONS, so I am going to to try to be a mind reader and answer what I think you will ask me… before you actually ask me. Phew, that was confusing.

1). What are your daily passtimes/hobbies BESIDES languages? You are very likely to find me with my nose in a book, writing fanfiction, going shopping or doodling some kind of sketch in my notebook. Other than those lazy sitting-around type of hobbies, I run cross country, and go swimming as much as I possibly can. I do know how to cross country ski, but from doing that a couple times I can tell that it is definitely not my sport, and ended up with snow up my nose. :P  

2) Do you like Anime??? I do like ANIME. HOWEVER, I am not OBSESSED, an OTAKU, a WEABOO, or anything of the like. Let me just make that crystal clear right now. I have only cosplayed once. Just because I like cosplay does not make me any of those things… haha. All that stuff being said, I am a big fan of anime, so here are my favorites. (I won’t spend too much time on this for those of you who don’t like anime, I just want to introduce my top 5… or 6.)

-Kimi ni Todoke

-Lovely Complex

-Itazura na Kiss

-Hetalia

-Bokura ga Ita

-Clannad

Lovely Complex

Kimi ni Todoke

3) Do you like J or K dramas? Yes, I am also a fan of J-drama and K-drama, so here are my reccomendations for those of you who are interested in THAT.

-   Hana Kimi

-   Proposal Daisakusen

-   My Darling is a Foreigner

-   Ouran High School Host Club (yes, I am aware that that is also an anime)

-   Koizora (Super sad… but good)

Hana Kimi

Daarin wa Gaikokujin

As you’ve probably figured out by now, I’m a fan of romcoms <3

4) Do you even like AMERICAN pop culture? As for American movies and TV shows, I like those too. I am known to watch Big Bang Theory marathons on Sunday, much to the chagrin of my dear mother’s boyfriend, who quite enjoys football. Honestly, I would marry Sheldon Cooper. Of course, this being IF Sheldon Cooper weren’t so… well… against marrying people lol.  Among my favorite movies are Avatar, Titanic, the Avengers, Harry Potter, and the Golden Compass.

5) Do I have any pets? I have an 80 pound black Labrador Retriever who is at the moment slobbering all over my foot as I type… gross. Not the dog, just the foot licking. I used to have a Siamese cat who meowed loud enough to wake up the entire neighborhood. Not quite an exaggeration.I actually quite enjoy dogs, along with practically every other animal alive, as long as it’s not venomous. Although this rule does not apply to centipede-kind, as I will go all ninja on those nasty little things… If I do not run and scream first. Anyway… Yes, I have a pet. (tangent much? Haha)

6) Why the heck am I writing a blog? I don’t know… I guess just to have a fun outlet for writing about stuff… and to share some of my thoughts with you guys. Whenever anyting blog-worthy comes up… I guess I’ll blog about it!

7) What is your favorite t-shirt? At the moment, I am wearing my t-shirt from summer camp, which is my current favorite because it has so many MEMORIES and stuff. Other than that, I recently ordered a Rose Lalonde shirt online. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t read Homestuck, and you need to look it up RIGHT NOW. It will completely confuse your thinkpan at first, but if you can get through the weird terminology and complex plot layers, IT IS THE MOST FREAKING EPIC WEBCOMIC ON THE INTERWEBS.

How did you spend your SUMMER? Oh boy… this is gonna need a whole ‘nother blog. I went to Japanese Immersion camp in northern Minnesota. It was the whole Concordia Language Villages program ‘Mori no Ike’, a.k.a the best place EVER. In short, it’s a summer camp for teens who want to learn Japanese. You live there for either one week, two weeks or four weeks in a cabin with other people of your age and gender. The counselors speak all Japanese to you, and you do fun activities and classes throughout the day, such as Origami, dance club, kendo club, song time, morning dance excersise, skits, campfire, singing, and lots of dancing. Did I mention the dancing? We got Japanese names, mine was Midori （みどり）meaning “green”. The food is mostly Japanese, which is delicious, as long as you aren’t opposed to having rice 3 meals a day. You get to spend lots of time with your cabinmates and make friends, including free time, which for me involved going to the お店(store) and buying tons of pocky, then heading down to the lake to go swimming. Besides all that, you end up making best friends that end up being more like sisters, and you don’t want to leave. I can’t even express how much those people became my family… Before I blab myself into oblivion and nostalgia about this (too late…), I’m going to stop here, and promise to post more photos and stories in another blog entry, another day… But here’s just a few…

After that I went to Penumbra Summer Institute, which is like acting camp on steroids. Basically we got a month to learn how to be Activist Artists, a.k.a learn how to use art to promote social change. (Anti racism and discrimination, etcetera) We put on a stellar performance at the end of the month to a full audience from the public. Again, more on that later.

So yeah… you might be starting to see why I kind of lapsed off on the whole blogging thing… So busy.

So now that you know about me… let’s start this blogging thing!

I’ll try to update daily, but knowing me you can probably put your money on weekly. I’m such a 怠け者 (lazy person)

But please tell me what you think, I’m new to this whole blogging business.

Please feel free to comment!

ABBY