Sunday, September 20, 2009

September 20th 2009

Ok well I feel I need to keep writing in this thing because I don't keep a proper journal but nothing really big has happened. School is still good, I finally found the short story I want to translate. It is called black bird (kokucho). I have only read the first few pages but if I can just get some time I should be able to make some real progress with it.

Yesterday we went up to Phoenix to visit grandpa who has been diagnosed with cancer. I feel weird about grandpa dying because I don't really know him besides the bad things my parents say about him , he divorced my grandma who is the sweetest person in the world. And also he's 70 something so he would only have another 10 years at best. And I have a pretty strong belief in the afterlife so I'm just not worried about him. But anyways its a good 2+ hour drive up to Phoenix and there was a temple trip I wanted to go to but instead I went with the family. We visit with grandma for 20 mins then have lunch with grandpa and then we are done. Mom says we are going to visit her mom in order to get out of spending time with Grandpa's new wife and instead we spend all day walking about a stupid outlet mall. My entire day that I really needed to use for homework and studying was waisted with Angie trying to find cute shoes. Like I really want to see my extended family but my mom cares so much more about shopping then she does seeing relatives.

I am really worried about Angie. I thought if she got a boyfriend she would get out of this rut that she is in but that doesn't seem to be the case. I mean she did get a job she did go back to school but she is still so angry at the whole world. And she hasn't gone to church for at least a year. I invite her but she says no. It's not an issue about the doctrine of the church its the people, or rather how Angie views everyone. She thinks that everyone is this perfect Molly Mormon (stereotypical super churchy girl) and they all think they are better then her. But its all her attitude. She is so mean to people when they try and talk to her they get scarred off and then she thinks that they don't like her. I want to help my sister so much. I really love her but I don't know how to get her to just snap out of it. It breaks my heart sometimes.

I think in fact that the three oldest girls all have had situations where they have been offended or felt shunned by other girls at church and that has caused them to not want to go at all. I dunno I just wish there was something I could do.

On more positive notes. I saw that wolverine movie finally, why was there no concern about continuity with the other films? Sabertooth and Stryker are major characters in the other films and the people in this one are so different you would think they were completely different characters with similar names or something. And why is there so much focus on throwing in cameo mutants? Why was the blob in the movie? Are there really blob fans out there who really want him to be worked into the movie for no reason? Or what about deadpool and how he had all sorts of powers that he wasn't supposed to? That makes deadpool fans angry and deadpool fans are the only reason you should put him in the wolverine movie anyways. I don't get it. It was a fun action movie and definitely not as bad as X3.

I did install windows 7 on my pc with no upgrades and it runs amazingly. I don't know how but Microsoft somehow saved windows from the horrors of vista. It runs faster the xp did, boots atleast as fast as xp did, and does so many little things I don't think I could ever go back.

Well I guess thats it.

Monday, September 7, 2009

School started

Well I guess the big thing is that School finally started. This long boring summer of not doing anything finally came to an end. I am taking Modern east asian history, Advanced practice in Japanese, Japanese civilization and Japanese religion. Besides the advance practice class all of these are 200 level classes so the work load isn't too bad and I have them all on Tuesday Thursday which is good but that means I am at school from 8 am till 7:15 pm. Its a little rough. But I really like my classes. The EAS class is pretty generic and the readings are dull but its mostly review for me. The Japanese language class is exactly what I need because its a tiny focus on spoken practice but a huge focus on translations. The teacher is actually a British guy but he spent years living as a monk in Japan so he knows his stuff. For my other two classes I have the same teacher and he is really cool and just one of those teachers that I click with. I am also taking a church institute class so I get free parking, awesome, and the institute building is a really cool place to just hang out.

Work is kind of sucking because I put 24 hours on my availability and left it pretty open. Normally I would have had no problem getting 20 hours but because they have this stupid scheduling program now I'm getting like 15 hours a week. I need more money I've got a car now. I am really looking forward to graduating and quiting that joke of a company.

So there are three things that I need to get done in my spare time this fall. The first is work on my senior capstone project, which is to translate 25-30 pages of Japanese into English. Since this is my big project I want to translate a short story rather then a chapter out of a book but I am really stumped as to where to start looking for stuff like that. Its really hard to find stuff online in Japanese just because they just don't have the stuff you would expect them to. The second thing I need to do is to put together some resumes and post stuff on like monster.com to start preparing for getting a new job. Because I want to quit before December so I need to get a job lined up. The third thing I need to do is turn in the application stuff for JET. Yeah I've decided I am going to apply for it. It seems like a pretty solid choice. I just need to get letter of recommendations, transcripts for schools, medical papers, etc... Its a lot of work.

Other then that nothing much is going on. Still no girlfriend, no plans to move out, just kind of going with the flow. Because of the cut hours I am starting to realize how little money I really have but I really want to upgrade this desktop computer, its really sucking right now. What I would like to do is install a small solid state hard drive, upgrade the ram a little bit, and throw Windows 7 on it.

Well I have to get back to home work