intensity

For having "slept" about 3 hours during the past 48, I feel pretty okay. I really needed this kind of weekend, in fact. Friday I went home in a Mood and took a long and very satisfying nap. Yesterday at approximately 11:30 a.m. I was up at the northern end of Mie with eight other people, spread out between two apartments, beginning the 24-Hour-Comic challenge. 24 pages, one day to plot them out, draw them up, and put them all together. It's the kind of thing I would find myself doing in Riley Hall the weekend before a critique, the kind of thing I have been doing entirely not-enough of after getting my fake art degree that represents more of an afterthought to my English thesis than a double-major. Some ruminations along those lines were contributing to Friday's mood.

Yesterday, though, all the external constraints of my undergraduate studio work were gone - this project was almost entirely self-directed and wouldn't be held up for critique against standards that are only right for passing a specific class. The varied and loose-knit group of misfits was there, gathered by our common interest and encouraging each other by our mere presence, at times - didn't matter that the person sitting next to me was playing old-school Sonic on her DSLite at two in the morning, the important thing is she was staying awake with the rest of us, though all the sensible circuitry in everyone's brain was telling them to have a goddamn nap already.

I made the mistake of laying down on a folded-up futon in the corner for oh-but-10-minutes. It was horrendously difficult to drag myself back over to the table where my story lay barely coherent up through page 14. I felt every junky munchie-snack I had eaten since waking up, actually every pseudo-food I had fed myself in the past week, and all the effects thereof. My head was fried. Then the endorphins kicked in and I was wired until six, just like this time last year. Crash for a couple hours, force down a banana and some cereal, head off to work morning shift at the library and then try not to nod off during a 90-minute lecture. Okay this morning was a little different, but still, same admixture of relief and relentless energy-drain alternately spurring you into the day with ambition or exhaustion, toward another accomplishment or just the achievement of making it home to your bed before you do a faceplant & pass out.

Probably thanks to four years of kinesthetic learning, I did not go kerplunk but instead carried on with normal waking hours and waking-hour activities up until now, bedtime. Along with the inevitable muscle complaints from stiff and scrunched drawring positions, I hope at least some of the intensity inspired by yesterday's arting marathon will remain with me when I wake up tomorrow.

and on the 3rd day he became ZOMBIE JESUS

Today the Easter Bunny left a basket - okay a big brown box - at my door...okay the delivery-man knocked 4 or 5 times and probably rang the doorbell once or twice but I was in the shower and I completely horrified/mortified ("horrtified"?) him by answering in my towel because gjfshkdlt I need a bathrobe. Inside the box were several types of candies, a piece of sheet music for piano, Maruchan ramen (which you can't get in Japan, but I have found that Nissin ramen is almost exactly the same stuff except it obvs does not have "Oriental" flavor packets), and Vol. 45 Issue 14 of The Onion. Apparently President Obama has been depressed and distant since the Battlestar Galactica series finale. I probably would have been, too, had I been following the show at all. I will have to pick it up sometime when Hulu is actually available in my region.

Anyway, thanks, Easter Bunny :B

Also today, I started cooking again. Like real cooking, not boil-some-noodles or fry-up-an-egg kinda "gorramit I dun' feel like eating :c" cooking. I am attempting to grow some hhhhhherbs in little earthenware pots so that I may have fresher things with which to cook in the fall, but the seeds I bought were kinda old (packaged last year), so I 'unno if they'll sprout or not. According to the internets, I may have to wait 1 - 8 weeks to find out.

Also also today, before I started cooking again, I was a spectacular dork and got to snark at comics-universe Nightwing as comics-universe Talia al-Ghul while animated-universe Nightwing got sassy with Booster Gold over shacking up with said al-Ghul crazy/awesome manipulative ho-bag and letting her convince him that the ninth Doctor of Doctor Who fame has, in fact, kidnapped and spatio-temporally dislocated the anthropomorphized embodiment of madness and mania, Delirium of The Sandman fame, the consequences of which include but are not limited to the unbalancing of the entire multiverse and Batman becoming "normal" again, i.e. not-Batman-anymore. Yeah.

As a prelude to this nerdomancy, Nicole and I drove to the Meiwa Aeon center to see "The Watchmen" yesterday, and I am pretty sure we were the only two people in the entire theater, besides the American dood sitting next to us, who could A: appreciate the historical contexts referenced by an alternate-history-1985, and 2: track and discuss the film's deviations from the comics. Then we spent a good 10 minutes trying to decide who would have better-suited the role of Laurie.

Lazy Sunday

Last weekend was pretty busy - Chieko, a part-time teacher who used to work at Shima & might be coming back next year (yey!) drove me all about Ise shopping for apartment things, and we visited Naiku, one of two grand shrines in the city dedicated to the highest Shinto god & goddess (Naiku is the goddess shrine). Monday was my epic smash-and-grab run to Nagoya, which left me pretty exhausted.

So I declared this weekend a write-off, and I feel pretty good about that. It's not that I haven't gotten anything done - AJ and I picked up stuff for our various Halloween classes at the 100-yen shop yesterday, and I found the last pieces to my costume at Jusco, the Target of Japan - but I've gotten stuff done at my own pace, and with a minimal amount of getting out of bed & leaving the apartment :b

Today I absolutely needed to do laundry; it's one of those two-weeks-and-then-some laundry days. So that was my work for today, it's been all PJ's & internets & books & idle crafts otherwise. Unfortunately the weather people lied and it still rained a little bit today, but not hard enough to actually get the balcony wet. It was a lazy kinda rain, the kind you're not even sure is there because you hear some leaves rustling, but it could just be the wind. Only there was no wind today. The world seems to be sleepy.

It FINALLY got chilly, too, which made me so happy I opened all my windows to welcome it ( > w < ) And I got to put on my brand new PANDA SLIPPERS --->
They are fuzzy little bear-cubes of happiness. I got them at this wonderful little local chain store called Party House, which is kinda like a K-Mart but about the size of a Wal-Greens. It packs an incredible amount of stuff into a small store, and it's all really cheap! As you can see, they have some pretty awesome finds, too, not just discounted crap. In fact those nifty-looking floor-cushions you see in the picture were also bought at Party House :3

Currently listening to: The Beatles ~ I Am The Walrus
I wanna watch "Across the Universe" now . . . but I don't have it :c

ARTery

From the second class got out on Friday, this has been a wonderful weekend for arting :D

During the school festival, AJ and I visited the Ikebana club in the meeting room next to the teacher's office. Apparently my predecessor had gone to their after-school sessions last year, so the instructor had asked AJ to introduce me to her and see if I was interested. Of course, the instructor is an impeccably polite, darling old Japanese woman. And you just don't refuse impeccably polite, darling old Japanese women. It is plain and simply impossible.

Thus, on Friday afternoon around 3:30 I was up on the 4th floor in a cozy little traditional tatami room I had never known existed before that day, sticking flowers in decorative ceramic holders and hoping I was doing it right. The instructor dutifully praised my first efforts, and then added a few more cuttings & rearranged the others a bit to make it look up to standard. This is exactly the kind of reaction I had been expecting, so I took it to mean that I wasn't completely hopeless but could learn a lot from watching her fix my fumbles. But she also actually went out of her way to remark on my sense of balance to another teacher who came up to chat, and that I consider a bit unusal even taking into account the extra politeness afforded to me as a new class member and a foreigner. So here's the arrangement that got me started on the right foot (or right flower, as it were):On Saturday, I took a train into Mie's capital, Tsu, to meet up with several other JETs for a Stitch'n'Bitch. We gathered in the Mr. Donuts store right next to the train station, scarfed down delicious pastries, sewed and knitted and crocheted, and talked some trash about whatever was bugging us at the mo'. That is, in a nutshell, one of many possible iterations of a Stitch'n'Bitch, and if you are at all inclined to either passtime, I suggest you see if there is a venue for crafty crafters & sharp-tongued wits in your area :3 I made some progress on an anteater stuffie pattern I'm trying to put together. Sorry, no photos yet; it's under wraps until I can get the whole thing assembled and draw up a proper pattern to share with the world.

After Stitch'n'Bitch was done, me and a couple of the JETs from Iga (birthplace of the ninja! Man, my prefecture rocks so hard) went further north to the town of Komono, where we dined at a family restaurant inexplicably called "Tom Sawyer" and went to bed early to rest up for the town's half-marathon.

No, I didn't run. But I DID paint the faces of just about every child in the area. The lovely lady JET who works as Komono's coordinator of international relations (CIR) was running a face-painting table for one of her favorite charities; we asked for a 100-yen donation from people in exchange for our artistic services. I had volunteered via e-mail to help out, because it sounded like tons of fun.

Once word got out amongst the girls that I did Disney characters, though, it became like an assembly-line of bright, smiling faces all begging to have Stitch painted onto their left cheeks. I was moving too fast to stop and take pictures myself (sorry, Jenni! I know you would have been so proud of me!), but I think maybe one of the other JETs working the table snapped a few photos during the lull in her commissions (I felt really guilty at times, like I was hogging all the adorable kids, I consoled myself with the fact that I got a metric ass-ton of moms to toss in their 100-yen coins for our charitable cause) Here's a group project I did for four girls who wanted matching flowers on their legs:
And the best part about this weekend is that it continues through tomorrow. Yay Health & Sports Day! . . . Ironically I will probably spend most of it in bed. But I feel entitled to that, really, after running around all weekend, and the weather has turned cool again so it's going to be great day to lay around & do nothing more physically taxing than putting a needle & thread through felt or pencil to paper.