Holiday Requests 2011
Comment with: a day, a fandom, a pairing, and a prompt, and I will do something* for you, to be posted on the day you claimed. Any fandom you know I'm familiar with is fair game, though I reserve the right to ask for a different prompt if you pick something I don't feel comfortable with, or a fandom I haven't been into in a long time.

*"Do something" here can mean "make colored icons," "produce an uncolored drawing" (to avoid the two-year-long Christmas debacle!), "make a music mix," or even "compose a MIDI ditty."

( Please feel free to read more or make a request under the cut! )

This is my last week of the semester, and I have the following to do before I can go home in any semblance of self-respect:

1) Write a twelve-page paper on textile and garment industries in contemporary China by the 13th.
2) Take a grammar exam for Japanese on the 14th. (It's not a real final, thank goodness!)
3) Write roughly 4,000 words for a take-home final exam.
4) Go to my last voice lesson on Tuesday. (Okay, this will be fun.)
5) Recite a poem at Monday's Russian dinner.
6) Complete five graduate school applications by the 15th. (Cornell, thank you so much for having a January 1st deadline. Harvard, curse you for using such tiny spaces on an online application.)

And now for a genuine personal post! There's even a new icon post over at momoizumu, too, like old times.

( About Middlebury... )

( ...and about school right now. )

( Also, a music meme! )

Fortunately, I've gotten myself a Pixiv account! Unfortunately, I've also started uploading things to it, which clearly means that I am going to lose sleep for the next few months over whether or not the (mostly) Japanese fandom likes my digital scribbles. I shall consider myself successful when someone on LJ finds my fanart on Danbooru, crops them, and posts them as artsy icons.

More seriously, though, I'm beginning to regret it, as I now feel obligated to post captions in Japanese...when I still can barely write in Japanese. Our classes are centered around Professor Eleanor Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language, which -- as the title suggests -- doesn't focus on the written language at all; as such, while conversationally we're ahead of students studying at the same level with different texts, we're very definitely illiterate.³ That said, I feel that the textbook's grammar explanations are remarkably clear and illustrative based on what I've heard about other people's problems with Japanese. At least everybody seems to fully understand the difference between "wa" and "ga!"

¹ No, seriously, Spicy Kimchi Noodles and Spicy Kimchi Noodles alone gave me my first kidney stone. They contain the average human being's daily allowance of sodium, and possibly the average horse's, too. Do not eat these noodles.

² What's ironic about this is that the weather is not a good subject for small talk in Russia. It's too boring and pointless.

³ Thus far we only know a chunk of the katakana syllabary, which Professor Jorden started off with in JWL (Japanese: The Written Language) on the basis that it would provide us with many more words to read and write off the bat. (I myself was pretty dubious about it at first, but if you think about it, what can we do with hiragana at this point? Write out particles and the copula over and over again? We need kanji to make it work!)

That is, the Last Mass Posting of Memes for this school semester.

The sudden heat wave following the brief flurry of snow last week has damaged my efforts to get my papers written. It's a sign of weakness, but I have too much difficulty focusing when the temperature is over 70°--and it's become much hotter inside my room than outside, since this residence hall is a masterpiece of lazy design.

Let's see if I can at least finish my annotated bibliography before tomorrow!

( There's something to be said about relying too much on Internet memes. )

( And now for something completely immature! )

What I enjoyed about this school year versus the last was that Spring was soon in coming. The crabapple tree underneath my window is in full flower; there are cherry and pear blossoms along the sidewalks I normally use to get to classes; the temperatures have been reaching 60° almost every day! There are even panicle hydrangeas and magnolias in bloom.

Though it had been raining for the past two days, the sun was shining brightly this morning. It was snowing.

Humans and nature just...don't get along, do they?

( Let's celebrate with that 'Better than it Sounds' meme. )

I'm lucky the due date for one of my papers was postponed to May 11th. Now all I have to do is write fifteen pages before then, and ten pages before the 6th, while preparing for the Russian and Japanese finals. ...Which, um, I'm obviously doing right now. Yes.

First: Thank you to everyone for wishing me a happy birthday! I had classes, so I wasn't exactly free to do whatever I wanted, but I got a vanilla cake and well-wishes--that's good enough for me. (That sounds too Pollyanna-like--I received presents from my parents and grandmother, too.) It's strange, though, since I feel as though I was ten years old only a few years ago, not a whole decade. Supposedly time only passes more quickly from now on. I believe in Science, and thus disregard that as complete and utter nonsense!

Second, and more disturbing: Today, April 10th, a plane carrying Poland's President, over thirty other governmental and military figures, and several others crashed en route to Smolensk, killing all 97 passengers. The trip was planned to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Katyn Massacre, in which over 20,000 Polish POWs were killed by the NKVD.

The government should "recover" easily as the Cabinet is still intact, and this is nowhere near as damaging as any natural disaster, but this is still a heavy blow to Poland and its people.

In other news, here are some updates about several ongoing situations of interest:

Vignettes about the ongoing rebuilding efforts in Port-au-Prince.

Some more details on international donations to Haiti. Supposedly, the spending and distribution of aid will be conducted with the Haitian government's full cooperation. What I hope for the most, however, was mentioned only at the very end of the article: a focus on making Haiti agriculturally self-sufficient, so it won't be forced to rely on artificially-cheap American imports.

I unfortunately wasn't able to find many updates on Chile's recovery efforts, but did find this: Henry Kissinger and Operation Condor, a program of political assassinations conducted by Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina in the 1970s. Make of that what you will. (I have no idea what to make of it myself.)

Finally, the Iranian protest movement against the fraudulent June elections is still alive, even though the street protests have been largely driven underground.

help_chile functions very much like help_haiti, which will be holding another auction sometime in the future. The mods are looking for people who can translate the FAQ and Userinfo pages into languages other than English, Spanish, and French, and bidding is currently underway--please consider helping them out!

Also, please make threads on the meme below (unless you've decided to join the interesting community cloverbooks--thank you for the heads up, lavender88!). Quite a few people on my f-list are having problems, and...well, I fail at writing about personal things at length, especially in this journal. Just know that I appreciate all of you, and worry for all of you, even if I can't make the time to talk to you individually.

THINK

POSITIVE

MEME


One last thing: that other meme is forthcoming. I can't do it tonight, unfortunately, since I need to finish my reading on Russian imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries. Oh, how my eyes ache.

The good news is that mid-term exams have arrived at last! I have an exam on March 11th, a ten-page paper due the same day, and my very first Japanese oral exam on March 3rd. (There's also a Russian test on the 3rd, but it's a normal end-of-chapter review.)

The better news is that my professor got back to me about the major papers, which I'll be submitting tomorrow; I would have done so today, if the people at the Registrar's Office weren't card-carrying bourgeoisie didn't go home for the day at 5:00 P.M. I have to find a good way to thank her--she really went out of her way to help me out.

Those things aside, here's a meme via rainmage:

➀ Make a list of fifteen characters first, and keep it to yourself for the moment. (That way you're not leading the questions asked to fit the characters.)

➁ Ask your f-list to post questions in the comments. For example:

'One, Nine, Eleven and Fifteen are chosen by a prophecy to save the world from Four. Do they succeed?'
'Under what circumstances might Five and Seven fall in love?'
'Which character on the list would you most want on your side in a zombie invasion?'
'What would Two experience in Silent Hill?'
'What Pokémon would Eight have?'
'Write a drabble in which Two and Twelve FIGHT CRIME.'

➂ After your f-list has asked enough questions, round them up and answer them using the fifteen characters you selected beforehand, then post them.

I and the other students in our World Politics class received notice from our professor today about the contents of our take-home exam due on November 6th. It consists of two essays, the first being roughly 1,300 words long and the second being roughly 1,800 words long.

I already have a 1,600-word historiographical essay due on November 5th. Assuming that I finish the outlines, bibliographies, and most of the unrelated weekend homework by Friday...

4,700 words ÷ Desire to get a decent grade ÷ 7 days = HIATUS.
I'm sorry, everyone.

Only eight more to go! Trying to complete these while staying on top of school turned out to be more difficult than I thought.

( We look up the hill of dreams,/ The crest is in sight! )