Carbon Monoxide

posting on a saturday night says what about my social life?

thanks for the poke, Rait-o-kun.  Right-o.  Hey.
Rait-o-matic. haaaaaaahahah I have such a pathetic sense of humor. 8D

so I sort of died and disappeared off the face of the internet... yeah... that is true.
this might be a good time to resume my internet life anyway though, since
A)  the proper use of LJ has always been unclear to me, but I *think* I have recently come to understand it a bit more clearly.
B)  I need things to distract me lately...
C)  I am REALLY out of the J-everything loop.  I spend my days moping through class and not paying attention to any of the delightful pieces of virtual candy the internet has to offer... seriously.  It's gotten bad.

in other news, most likely dropping out taking next semester off university. :P I just really, really hate it.  I don't know what I'm doing, and so long as that's the case I'm wasting time & tuition.  I'm sure I'll go back, but I need to take a break.
exactly what/how/where I plan on being in the fall, not sure yet.  I'm sick as hell of Minnesota and its winters though, not kidding.  I am NOT staying in the upper midwest, I am done with that shit.

so anyway.  I live.  That's all I know. :D

why am i posting?

I'm not thrilled about politics of late, but Presidential Election Drinking Games are HILARIOUS. OMG.
We... didn't actually do the game bit and just had a few beers instead, but one of them was like,
"Every time someone mentions Sarah Palin, drink a White Russian.  Because if Sarah Palin is there the Russians must be close."
I haven't had a White Russian in a really, really long time. OMG SO GOOD. :3

Or like "Drink a Fuzzy Navel whenever Georgia is mentioned." xD

If you actually played by the rules though?
"Take a shot every time some one mentions Afghanistan or Iraq is mentioned."
"Take a shot whenever McCain does the creepy smile or acts like he's going to have a heart attack on stage."
"Take a shot whenever Obama says "Hold on a minute" (orwhateveritwas)"

HAHAHAH you'd be dead from alcohol poisoning half-way through.  or like, puking your guts out. xD

Catching up with people you haven't seen in a while is always nice... even if a distance has grown and you're not sure when you'll see them again... it's nice to know you can still relate on some things.   I left though, and early too. D: work tomorrow DDDDD:

My to-do list is endless these days though.  I barely have the energy for "fun" which sucks.  And with a lot of my friends fun mostly happens when *I* organize it, but like I have time for that anymore... when will I ever catch up... OTZ what am I doing with my life.... (that's an endless questionnnnnnnnnnn.  no answer.)

I really like Tomiko Van's cover of "Tooku Tooku" (originally by... Makihara Noriyuki? D: if what I found from a simple google search, lol, was the original, then I like hers better. D: ).  It was one of the only good songs off her second cover album imo.  The arrangement was slick, I loved it.  I really like the jazz feel to much of her solo work, and from that a few gems of songs have come, but most of the songwritng is just too bland. D:  anyway, this song is stuck in my head.  And it's not exactly spring, but the whole "far away/new beginningt/giving it your best on your own" thing in the lyrics http://www.kiwi-musume.com/lyrics/makiharanoriyuki/tookutooku.html  -  personally I really relate to that right now.  ugggh fuck my life xD   Most of my close friends and I can barely meet each other this year... living on my own, slightly overwhelmed, etc.  Eh, that's life.

So, yeah, I FINALLY started listening.  Finally.  What's worse, I've actually HAD it for a while.  What's wrong with me?!
Well, particularly for really GOOD albums from artists I really respect, when I listen to them want to be able to focus on what I'm listening on.  I don't want my first listens to be background music.  And seeing as lately both my time and my attention span have been virtually non-existent, it just sort of fell to the bottom of the priority list.

However, now that I've begun the listening process, of course, I'm thinking, "Wow, it was stupid to ignore this for so long."  While it may not meet a certain Aiecoholic's expectations after having heard And Hate (haven't started on that one yet either.  It's probably good I'll be listening to it second... but that's the other major album on my list right now), I'm still pretty happy with it.  

I don't know how much needs to be said... I'm really digging the middle-eastern instruments - isn't it a sitar? I dunno.  May I say, I really enjoyed the intro.  Usually I don't feel one way or the other about them but this one sticks with me as being quite creative, with the water and the tribal drums and whatever the little orchestral bit was. I really love Fukurou no Yurikago... I'm glad I got to hear that one in concert.  I love the guitar riffs in this one as much as Tatsurou's vox.  Anjelier is fantastic.  I actually really like Chiisana Mado... maybe I'm oddly in a ballad mood?  But it does have an "epic" feel and for me that was a refreshing change of pace.  I really enjoyed the end of this song, when the bit of Spanish-sounding guitar comes in.  And all things considered it sounds like Tatsurou has improved his falsetto since I last paid attenion to it, which was... Yasashii Uta.  Yeah.

Eh, well.  I suppose I don't have much to say or much to add to what's already been said.  I only started listening to it today, so it might take me a bit longer to forumulate my thoughts.  It's certainly got a bunch of things going on.  On the one hand I feel like MUCC tried some new styles and got fairly creative with it, with some excellent results in the stronger tracks of Libra, FUZZ, Fukurou no Yurikago, and Anjelier, and Chiisana Mado, imo.  And the rest is a bit underwhelming.  Win some, lose some, either way you learn.  Maybe it will impress me as I take more time to listen to it?  Maybe it will just make perfect background music... but either way, it's a welcome addition to freshen up my library.

I'm actually posting.  I have hardly logged in in ten weeks, even, much less posted.  I have much LJ housekeeping to do.  BUT FIRST.  I came here to post this amusing reflection.

I scare boys.   :D 
Boys, not men.  I don't scare them.
Especially the kinds of boys who are like, "hahah, I'm going to act like a tough, 'masculine', egotistical male... not even because I'm particularly tough, but just because I'm male so I think I have the right to act like that.  And I'm going to treat people around me in accordance with traditional gender roles."

Because I come along and treat them like, "you're full of shit and I don't buy it."
And they don't expect it because I don't look particularly 'bad-ass.'
But rub me the wrong way and I get quite hostile and don't back down.

So I know at least two guys who appear to be very, very intimidated by me.  They don't act normal around me but it's not in the "I think you're cute" way - it's in the "I don't understand why you don't act cute" way.  Like, they try and act like they don't really notice I'm there so that they don't make an issue of it, but they get kind of stiff and awkward and are always a little afraid and apprehensive when speaking with me, like I'm going to eat them or something.

It's kind of funny because when people don't piss me off I am naturally kind of sweet-natured.  (It's almost annoying to me because people tend to get the wrong impression, that I'm just totally nice and sweet and simple and good-natured - so they sometimes write me off at first.  But that's just my natural, usual disposition.)  So the boys I intimidate think I'm sweet.  Until they start treating me like some sweet little girl.  And then I get super, super bitter and make them regret it.  I don't actually WANT them to fear me per se, I just want them to get the message - "treat me with more respect than that.  I am your equal.  I treat you as mine.  I expect the same treatment from you."

Ahaha.  This is one of those moments when I'm going to put aside all modesty and say, "I love myself." :D

I just watched a video in my Journalism/Media class about "marketing cool" and Mtv corporate-sponsored-cool of recent times (the video was a few years old though, so I don't think it's accurate any more as far as the influence of the internet goes, which it largely discounted).  It made me sick.  The attitude of "let's do whatever we can to sell shit!" and "let's manipulate the young, undiscerning (and admittedly, easily manipulated) teenager into buying stuff!!"

I missed out on a lot of the "Mtv culture" in highschool, and god, I'm glad I did.  One of the resulting key differences in my highschool experience and what this video described: my biggest interests were never really very marketed to me.  I had to find them myself and research them myself.  I mean, yeah, they were a little marketed - I first saw anime on TV and the first Jpop I ever heard was an anime ending theme - but really, most of my exposure wasn't from corporate media TRYING to sell something to the American teenager.  Just a few years later, and there's WAY more media trying to sell the same elements of Japanese culture to an American audience than there was when I was just getting interested.

That being said, I don't deny that pretty much everything I like is corporate-sponsored.  It has to be.  Most music artists, if they want to get their music out to people, they need to "sell out".

But there's a huge difference between a individual musician or a group of them, with TALENT and a MESSAGE, whose music has enough inherent value, who just happens to "get marketed" in order to get their music out there... and something that was taken from trends and corporate research and explicitly 'created' with clever marketing with the express purpose of making money, on all sides.  Example of the latter: Dir en Grey's unfortunate discography.  There's a girl in my Japanese class who has worn a Dir en Grey shirt several times and frankly, she seems in many ways to be a... tool.  Because why else would you subject your ears to that crap?  The irony is that tools such as herself think they're not tools, everyone else is.
And generally that key difference is revealed in the music itself.
Unfortunately, despite the way most people's daily lives are saturated with music, most people are still not critical listeners.

And, of course, it goes without saying that this attitude extends from music to pretty much everything in pop culture/mass media.  TV, movies, clothing, magazines, even books, I suppose.

Ugh.  I have a feeling my Journalism/Media class is REALLY GOING TO PISS ME OFF A LOT, but I'm going to force myself to take it anyway.

Note: I didn't edit this, just kind of type-ranted it, so... sorry for my incoherent thought processes and typos.  I'm too pissed off to fix it right now.  I'll do it later.

I have a new goal in life: to learn Jazz Piano.

I think it all started from watching Tokyo Jihen live in Dynamite Out!.  Okay, I admit, I couldn't wait and watched the whole thing online, but it doesn't replace having the actual merch so sometime (hopefully soon, like after Christmas), I can buy it. 

But anyway.  Seeing them live... HZM is amazing.  He was so into it.  And it seemed like his piano parts were so much more intense and involved and alive the on recordings... and he totally was the music.  I know some people (and I find this happens often with singing, oddly... counter-intuitive) like to stay still in an attempt to focus, but... it seems to me that if you're really focused on the music you're performing (and if you're an experienced enouh performer not to have stage fright), you'd just go with it.  How could you stay still like a statue?  Anyway, that's how HZM plays live, apparently.  Moving.  NOT statue.  And it's really captivating to watch.

So I have a newfound love for jazz piano.

But what's more, once I started thinking about it... I'm not a great pianist, and I'm horribly out of practice.  But I CAN, kind of, play.  At least the basics and far enough beyond.  With enough diligence, I could get a lot better.  I'm not great but I'm not a lost cause, and there will never be a better time than now.  The sooner I can learn it, the better.  While I still have some brain plasticity. ;D

I've always wanted to learn it, but it's only recently that I've admitted to myself that it might be worth a try.  Before, I was always just like, "Oh.  That's too difficult.  I could never do it, so why bother?"  And it will be really really hard.  I'm going to start working on my own to understand it a little bit and then either next semester or in the summer I'll start real lessons.  And I need to start doing some research on the 'real' jazz pianists - listening practice.  It's so incredibly involved.   Learning a whole new language.  But I really, really want to. 

So, anway, now that I've bared my soul on LJ at 3:00AM... {seeing as I never update or check LJ as it is...}
Okay.  Yeah.  Moving on.

Somebody pls explain the internets for me. I need to get a clue.
How is it that I always plan on spending a fraction of the time I actually do online?
Every night.
Ridiculous.

And I have something else to admit:
I know this is officially old meme x 9000, but stupid pictures of cats still make me laugh.

Anecdote:
We have a whiteboard on our door. The girls right across the hall have a MAGNETIC white board. You can't mix the markers because if you do, you have to use vinegar and nailpolish remover to get it off of THEIR board.

So they had drawn a bunch of happy stick figures and stuff on their board. And one of the other girls on the floor came along and thought it would be funny to draw huge dicks on the stick figures. But accidentally did it in my marker. xD ahah. And apparently it's against policy to have "fuck" written on our doors. So the girls across the hall made up a new e/u combination letter for their board so they can still essentially write it. XD WINNERS. 

Whatever.  Bedtime.

1. I just had a cup of earl grey with some milk and realized I had forgotten just how amazing that is.

2. I want some REAL British biscuits, McVitie's or something, but the nearest World Market is too far away... ;-; oh for the comforts of home where I could easily drive there and buy some, no problem.

3. Arg. After trying to prepare for a meeting with my advisor and laying out several different graduation plans, I realize I have no idea what the fuck I am doing and I'm starting to think College is a waste of time. No joke. I want to learn Japanese and Korean, yeah, but I think academia is shit and even when the topics are fascinating I don't want to spend my life writing papers.

4. I want to write a book. I wish I had a story.

5. I've been looping a lot of Inugami Circus-dan and Deadman, and I like. *_* but more on that later.

DINNERTIME.

PS: Zombie, *this* is what I texted you about.

You Should Be A Leo

What's good about you: you always speak your mind and aren't scared of anything What's bad about you: you have to be the boss, and you love to control others In love: you enjoy being admired and pampered, but don't always reciprocate In friendship, you're: easy to get along with and the center of attention Your ideal job: member of royalty, TV anchor, or investment banker Your sense of fashion: classic well fitting clothes that last forever You like to pig out on: Greek or Italian food

If you can tell me why this is funny, then +100 for you.

Then I took this because of that^.

You are 60% Leo

Your Personality is Very Rare (INTP)

Your personality type is goofy, imaginative, relaxed, and brilliant. Only about 4% of all people have your personality, including 2% of all women and 6% of all men You are Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Perceiving.

Pretty sure this one is even more of a laugh... it was the easiest, too..


PS, this is funny too:

Never Date a Cancer

Clingy, emotional, and very private - it's hard to escape a Cancer's clutches. And while Cancer will want to know everything about you, they're anything but open in return. Instead try dating: Leo, Sagittarius, Gemini, or Aquarius

Heh. x 1000. I know someone who should take this. *pokes*