Happy Halloween, everyone! It's never too late to go trick-or-treating, you know.

Anyway, I'm sitting here trying to eat an over-caramelized apple in celebration, even though the city I'm in right now is supposedly big on Halloween -- at least, that's what my Japanese professor says, but I don't feel safe enough to go out alone at night. On top of that, I don't have any means of getting a costume, barring the chance that I become bold enough to go as myself.

My school itself "celebrated" on Friday, with discussions on Halloween in Japan monopolizing our first Japanese professor's lecture on the tea ceremony, our second Japanese professor bringing candy to our drill class in a beautiful lacquered box, and our history professor including Jack-o'-Lanterns in her slide show on Japan's takeover of Manchuria. (My I.R. and Russian professors didn't do anything, but to be fair Halloween has no place in discussions of international relations, and it still isn't very popular in Russia. I think my Russian professor would actually be happy to know that Novosibirsk just celebrated its first Halloween. She has two little sons, so I imagine she took them out trick-or-treating around the neighborhood earlier this weekend -- they're so cute!)

On a different note: I normally try not to talk that much about my personal problems or normal news from my daily life, as I worry that you would all find that boring. However, if you'll bear with me, I'd like to write about something that happened to me a few days ago.

( Long text behind the cut! )

On another note, a warm welcome to knuddeluff!

If ever I have come through on anything, it has been providing carefully-arranged screencaps of works in progress.

( «Я вам написала...оперу!» Or, the completely expected yet dramatic entrance. )

Also!

Happy birthday, mairenn_k!

I'm so sorry I missed it! I'm glad your birthday turned out well.

I'm sorry for maintaining such a faint presence here, but I have to write four essays (about 4,850 to 5,950 words total) by next Friday. Coincidentally, three of them are for a take-home exam that was given to us earlier today; this confirms my suspicions that my professor in that particular course is either a) confident in our abilities or b) devoid of a sense of time.

( Never unperceived, ever understood! )

Also! If you got a virtual snowflake cookie without a message from me, then I apologize--I thought I could send another round with personalized messages yesterday, when I had more time, but LiveJournal apparently takes more than it gives. Thank you to lady_kikyou, vegetas, grprsa, mairenn_k, la_vie_noire, starlady38 and kencana_kencana for the messages and gifts! I'll have something up for everyone later tonight, before I'm crushed by the competing forces of procrastination and deadlines.

Note: this isn't actually an excerpt from my memoir, but something I had to write as a result of the Halloween meme. You can thank technophile for this.

Given the progress I've made on my paper concerning the role of trans-social cooperation in the construction of democratic governing modes, I've decided to share with you all my recent efforts in compiling the memories and shifting identities of my life into a brief memoir. The tentative title is "On the Nature of Sensorineural Hearing Loss and its Transformative Effects on Postnationalist Personal Spheres;" I appreciate any and all constructive criticism.

( An excerpt from 'On the Nature of Sensorineural Hearing Loss and its Transformative Effects on Postnationalist Personal Spheres.' )