Bringing back an old meme to update people on what's going on with me. In case you still care. I wouldn't be upset if you don't, since I know I haven't been around...

You know how sometimes people on your friendslist post about stuff going on in their life, and all of a sudden you think "Wait a minute? Since when were they working THERE? Since when were they dating HIM/HER? Since when???" And then you wonder how you could have missed all that seemingly pretty standard information, but somehow you feel too ashamed to ask for clarification because it seems like info you should already know? It happens to all of us sometimes.

Please copy the topics below, erase my answers and put yours in their place, and then post it in your journal! Please elaborate on the questions that would benefit from elaboration. One-Word-Answers seldom help anyone out.

( I'll spare you the first part which is probably tl;dr...Collapse )

3-5 THINGS GOING ON IN MY LIFE:

1. Grad school, obviously. It eats up my time, but I absolutely love it. I'm doing exactly what I wanted to do for the past 4 years in undergrad but never really found a community for. It helps that my program is crazy and unconventional and we get to do a lot of things you'd never think people would get to do in an academic setting and get away with it, but somehow we do. For example, I'm taking a class called "Big Games", for which we've had to play World of Warcraft. And this week we're playing Assassin, water guns and all. And I'm doing a presentation on LJ roleplaying and campfuckudie. I'm having the time of my life, and it's awesome. ♥
2. Did I mention that we had to play World of Warcraft for class? I may have put just a liiittle more time into that than was necessary for the class. But it helps that one of my best friends, Robin, and her husband both play. Although she roped me into the Refer-a-Friend scam program and I upgraded my trial to a paid membership and now I feel obligated to keep playing even though it's no longer required for class. (But only until Dragon Age 2 comes out; then my gaming schedule will be occupied for a while. ;p)
3. 2010 was the year of sci-fi TV shows, but 2011 is turning out to be the year of historical k-dramas. It helps that so many of them are on Hulu now, I guess. As somebody said, though, they really are like crack... once you start a show, you just can't stop watching. So far I've watched 성균관 스캔들, 선덕여왕, 추노 and IRIS. Okay, IRIS wasn't a historical drama but the reviews were so good I wanted to know what it was all about. And they were right! So good!
4. On a more serious note, a month ago today, I fractured my elbow slipping on an icy sidewalk in Manhattan. I was in a splint for a week, and since then I've been wearing this badass looking brace (although the novelty of the "robot arm" and "bionic woman" comments has kind of worn off and is becoming annoying). It's locked so I can't move my elbow at all, which, you can imagine, has made my life rather complicated and inconvenient and simple things can be quite difficult. I'm starting physical therapy today, which I heard will suck, but it's definitely necessary.
5. ...I dunno, being single and living in New York? Life is good. I really can't complain. ♥

♥ How are you all?

I'm tired and frustrated. It's been a long week so far -- and it's only Tuesday. -_-

And it was supposed to be such a good week! Yesterday, I had the day off work, and now we have state testing Tuesday through Friday, which means half-days for Seniors, who don't have to test anymore. *win* We only have two classes each day, so Friday I'm just skipping entirely, because I don't have a 1st Period, and I'm not coming to school just for an hour of my VarTech class.

However, so far, I haven't been able to enjoy it much. I spent my entire day off yesterday doing schedules for my ShiokazeCon volunteers. I finally finished them and sent out the e-mails before work this afternoon, and now a bunch of bitchy whiny kids are e-mailing back saying that they're not okay with the shift(s) I have assigned them after all. I am sorely tempted to go, "SHUT UP AND DEAL WITH IT! THIS IS A DICTATORSHIP, NOT A DEMOCRACY!"

At work today, I was training Christina, a new hostess who Paul hired only last week and who has had no real training yet. So anyway, I was teaching her to do to-go's today. She took care of three orders, and all of them she made mistakes, but she got ridiculously good tips on each of them, including one $10 on a $66 order. I took care of five orders PERFECTLY, and I got $1, $2, 20 cents, no tip, and no tip. What the ef. The worst part was that one of no-tips was from my REALLY HOT NEIGHBOR BOY's girlfriend, who was hanging all over him all gross-like the entire time she was ordering. :<

I only got through it by reminding myself that karma says that if I continue to do a good job and being friendly despite people's shittiness, I should randomly get a $1000 tip someday.

I did have a little time to play Suikoden Tactics before class this morning. I'm still determined to finish it before I get too far into SuikoV, but ugh, Rhapsodia is so damn time-consuming. ~_~ Addictive, but time-consuming. At this point in my life, I don't exactly have time to spend an average of 30 minutes on a battle, plus sometimes sitting through 10-minute cutscenes. WOE.

I just want school to be over so I can just alternate between work and fun stuff. This combination of work and school just isn't working out for me.

Tomorrow should be good because we're going to IHOP before class, which I've been looking forward to. On the bad side, I don't have a day off work again until Sunday. Sigh.

And then I have major exams starting two weeks from today. UGHHHHH.

And all the while, I really just want to drown myself in fandom and RP and fun fangirly things, but I HAVE NO TIME, EVER. -____-

Now that I've gotten paid, I want to spend money on fun happy things for myself, but I don't know exactly what. I need to resist the urge and start saving, though. Sigh.

I did finish SHiB the other day, and, umm, damn. That really was pretty much the shittiest ending ever. It seriously almost ruined the entire show for me. I was depressed about it for a whole day, and I only got over it by pretending that ending basically never happened. It was terrible. </3

In fact, just thinking about it is starting to depress me again. ;_;

Someone link me to some good fanfiction? I need some cute happy fluffy stuff in my life.

[cloned from Aeon Blue Apocalypse]

So when friends at school asked my what my plans for Spring Break were, I told them, half-jokingly, "Sleeping."

LITTLE DID I KNOW how right I would be.

Saturday I was gone all day and didn't end up turning in until after midnight. Sunday morning, I slept until about 10 AM, woke up, had breakfast, took a shower, worked on ignipotent's birthday picture until about 2 PM. Decided after that that I was worn out from being such a perfectionist and ended up taking almost an eight-hour nap. Woke up at almost 10 PM, updated a few RP things, started reading a fic a friend had sent me to beta, then got tired again and went to bed around midnight.

Today, I woke up at 10 AM, had breakfast, showered, and decided that I really wanted a slow, relaxed morning before settling down and playing catch-up on a bunch of things I owe people and the like. Sooo I sat down to watch SHiB in mom's room. Watched the first two episodes, and ended up feeling very melancholy (even though it's not even THAT depressing yet). Decided that I didn't want to watch the rest of it by myself. So I just lay there awhile ruminating on the events in SHiB... and fell asleep. Didn't wake up until about 4 PM, when mom started bitching at me that I still hadn't called my boss or cleaned the bathroom.

Seriously. Even I know that this much sleeping is ridiculous. I didn't even think I was *that* worn out but uhh, I guess I was wrong. >_>

---

Well, now that I hopefully won't have to sleep again for the rest of Spring Break (hahaha), here are my plans:

- Get some friends together to watch more of SHiB.
- Play Suikoden Tactics (probably won't have enough time to finish, but I can at least get pretty far along).
- Try and figure out this emulator so I can maybe play Suiko2 at some point.
- Write lots and lots of fic. I'm serious. I need more practice.
- RP. Lots. Hopefully Albie can finally manage to seduce Jacques? >3 Ahahaha.
- Work on scrapbook.
- Get a new (real) Social Security number, and various other errands.
- Get caught up on Shiokazecon business. (So many e-mails... ugh...)
- Get caught up on Bleach. o_o

I have to go to work tomorrow... ugh. Don't get me wrong, I'm excited about this job, but there's at least three things I'd rather do over my Spring Break. Paul also said something about working a lunch shift sometime this week. Hopefully those will be the only two times I have to go work, because... Yeah. There'll be plenty of time for work once classes start again. But this is my hard-earned, well-deserved "me" time. I really don't want any more obligations than necessary.

I also need to burn a couple of mix CDs for dad, to seal this "truce" of sorts that we have going. Probably almost two years ago now, I started burning him mix CDs of Asian music for in his car, because he's always trying to get into the music I like, and as true Dutch people, we like Asian pop because a lot of it is technoey [Dutch people x Techno music = OTP]. It started off with "Best of Japan" and was soon followed by "Best of Korea". After a while, those were joined by "Best of China". Then came "Best of Japan II", and a little later on "Best of Korea II". Now I'm thinking about making "Best of China II" and "Best of Japan III". I can't find the tracklistings for the old ones though, and I make it a point not to use a song twice. Darnit. I hope I can find them. >[

---

Speaking of Asian entertainment. Important question for my friends/readers/lurkers~ I'm VP and co-founder of my school's International Club, and next month we're putting on our annual International Film Festival, where we get together on a Friday night and show two movies in a language other than English (with subtitles, of course); cultural immersement and all that. (Last year we watched Shaolin Soccer and Life is Beautiful.) Anyway, at our last meeting, we nominated and voted on movies we wanted to watch. People looked to me to suggest an (East) Asian movie to watch, so I suggested House of Flying Daggers (Shi Mian Mai Fu). After I gave a short synoposis, HoFD got the overwhelming majority of the votes from the club members. That following weekend, Deborah (President) and Sealia (President-Elect) got together and rented HoFD, and they came back on Monday and said that they felt it wasn't appropriate to show in school. (I could argue and start a whole rant, but I'll just keep my mouth shut. ~_~ I have enough drama with Deborah and other people at school as it is.) However, they decided that they still want to show an Asian movie for one of the two films, since HoFD won with such an overwhelming majority of the votes, and they looked to me to find another. (Apparently they think I own every Chinese movie ever made.) I have a couple of ideas already, but the problem is finding something that is:

- GOOD (and I'm a picky movie watcher.. I like artsy films)
- school appropriate (no gratuitous violence, no explicit sex scenes, and minimal foul language -- preferably no use of the F word)
- less than 2 hours in length

The violence/sex thing is the biggest problem. Anyway, was hoping maybe someone else has some suggestions for movies we could consider. Preferably something I could get at Hollywood Video (which has a pretty good foreign films section, but it's still a little limited), so I can rent & watch it this week and then rent it when the time comes for the film festival.

---

Uhh. There's other stuff I wanted to write about but I forgot. ;_; Umm. Fanfics from the suggested prompts in next post. Most of them are nothing more than drabblets, but. I tried. And I need the practice. I was hoping to write longer fics, but oh well. Spring Break isn't over yet? ^^; And dude, it totally figures that when I actually have time to write, I can't think of any good plots. ~_~ I'm sure that once class starts again, I'll suddenly be full of ideas. Go figure. Anyway, feel free to send more prompts my way if you've got some good ideas~ n_n

[cloned from Aeon Blue Apocalypse]

So I was talking to ignipotent about Kdramas -> Yoon Eunhye -> Baby V.O.X and DUDE. I was totally a BBV fangirl like two years ago only because I saw them on TV and thought they were *so* pretty. I was like stalkerish, downloading pictures and videos with them everywhere. And yes I am a (straight) girl and no I have no shame talking about women who I think are the prettiest. Anyway, this led to a conversation about pretty Asian celebs SO for my own reference mostly I decided to make a list.

Piru's Top 10 Asian Female Celebs Most Beautiful Women Alive
1. Zhang Ziyi (ASDKFJ;ASSDAGJFHKJ I fell in love with her the first time I saw her on the screen)
2. Jolin Tsai (mostly because she has such AMAZING HAIR! No matter what hairstyle she has, she always looks gorgeous. Even when she had the whole almost-fro thing going in "Xu Yuan Chi De Xi La Shao Nuu" and everything. T___T I totally admit to going to my hairdresser and handing her a picture of Jolin and asking her to make mine look like hers >_>;;)
3. Kan Miyoun (Baby V.O.X)
4. Kwon BoA (yes I know T___T)
5. Sung Yuri (finkl)
6. Zhao Wei (AKA Vicki Zhao)
7. Yoon Eunhye (Baby V.O.X)
8. Van Tomiko (Do As Infinity -- natural beauty FTW)
9. Namie Amuro (the whole Japanese/Italian thing is just SO SEXY)
10. Devon Aoki (in an odd way... but she just has this mysterious sensuality)

I probably forgot some people but anyway yes. #11 would probably be Utada Hikaru and strangely enough even though I've always been a much bigger Ayu than a Hikki fan, I've never thought that Ayu's really beautiful. Somehow her hairstyles just never really work well for her, or I dunno what it is. I like Jang Nara too (*cough* also because we have the same name *cough*) but she's more cute than beautiful. And it kinda depends on her hairstyle.

Also even though my Top 2 are Chinese, overall I would have to say that I think the most beautiful of all girls are Koreans. I don't know exactly what it is about them but I think they're so gorgeous. I'd give anything to be reincarnated as a Korean girl. T___T

This led to another conversation with ignipotent re:being the most unasian-looking half-Asians ever and she asked me for pics and I realized that you all probably have no idea what I look like. I don't have any decent recent pictures (although I promise to try to post some pics when my costume comes in hopefully later this week) but here's something to give you a general idea:

( cut because I feel silly!Collapse )

Yeah, enough self-conscious rambling. But yes. Re:ignipotent -- hurray for non-Asian looking half-Asians! x____x

Well, I'm leaving on vacation the day after tomorrow. I don't intend to post here tomorrow, nor while I am there. I won't be back until July 30th, either. >_> Don't miss me too much while I'm gone!!

In other news, on Friday I finally finished that Xenosaga game I'd started. I beat it about an hour faster than last time, and at slightly higher stats/levels. I didn't go through and finish the Segment file because I'd already done that in my other game. But thanks to the e-mail investments, I did get the AG-05. I finished the game with 27G left. ^_~

Thanks to that, I am pretty much done with my chaos shrine, and I also launched my Gaignun Kukai fanlisting.

For the past several weeks I've been hopelessly addicted to Mina's RE:TURN 2 MINA CD. It rocks. ^^

The International Channel is definitely the greatest. 천년지애 is most definitely my new favorite show.

...And that's about it. See you guys in a month and a couple of days!

[cloned from Aeon Blue Apocalypse]