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passed Wednesday December 29
ok, so now i passed all my courses. which means now i technically should graduate. however, fu gave me a C for his course. i know i had a high B/low A going into it, so he obviously marked my final paper way, way down. it was worth 40% of my final grade, and i had a, say, 90% on the rest of the work. so, to end up with a 75% (mid-C), i received a 50% on the final paper. what a nerd.
i tell you. some people are too uptight about academic deadlines.
in other news, i got an A in my chinese literature class, and a B+ in japanese (what else is new).
amelie Thursday December 23
while we're on movies, nate watched the fourth movie this morning out of the four we rented: amelie. he hadn't seen it, and i've seen it multiple times. however, that movie has the highest rewatchability of any romantic flick ever.
i absolutely love it. and i'm in love with audrey tautou. or rather, i'm in love with amelie poulain.
movie marathon Tuesday December 21
even as a non-student (hopefully, i still don't say anything certainly until i see those transcript grades, even though everyone thinks i'm being paranoid. wouldn't you be paranoid too? do you realize how much professor fu can f-u me here?) ... wait a second, let's start over. that parenthetical notation went on for way too long.
even as a non-student, i still have pitchpipe work to do. i can't escape it, it's how i pay the bill, "the bill" being my airline mileage credit card that i route all my other bills through. yet, because i'm sick with this nasty viral sore throat and fever, and because i just needed to take a day off, nate and i watched a record three films today, one of them topping out at just under three hours.
preliminary reviews:
- das boot · this film is a long, drawn-out WWII epic about the german u-boats. from the german perspective. good war films are like that, showing the humanity of the soliders themselves. enjoyable, but, just ONCE i want to see a sub movie where the depth charges actually just take a submarine down. it can be an empty submarine, that's fine, but i just am losing faith that the things actually do anything.
i guess what i'm saying is that if japan doesn't pan out, i can call on my boys todd and nate to help me write a war movie about submarines. naomi'd produce it. i envision the initial storyboarding to go something like this:
mark: ok, and then we've got the scene where the captain remains really calm, even though everyone else is freaking out because the submarine keeps taking water.
nate: right. we need something to make him nervous, or at least, make the audience think that "this might be it". the nonchalant nature of the captain is not because he's seasoned, but he's too proud to admit that he dived too soon!
mark: i like it. yeah, let's play up the vulnerability of the captain.
todd: let's bring on some more depth charges!
mark: sweet!
nate: i was just about to suggest that.
maybe we should stick to our day jobs. and maybe submarine movies should get a new theme. please. but i liked it... all THREE HOURS of the director's cut.
- hero · yeah, the one with jet li. i watched this one for the first time back at 705 california with eric and drew, jie stopped by during it too. i think he made some comment about how good it was. it's certainly pretty, but it's not a movie you can watch over and over again. maybe it's the dialogue i can't get into. i did regret not continuing with mandarin, though. in some aspects, i think spoken chinese is probably far easier than japanese.
- starsky and hutch · i know i'm too tall to be tom cruise or ben stiller, but i wouldn't mind being either if i had to be a movie star. i guess more than those two i'd rather be owen wilson, i just don't fit the blonde part. except that owen wilson was in "shanghai noon" with jackie chan. i don't know if i can forgive him for that. on one hand, yes, you can say to your friends later: "i did a movie with jackie chan", but then their follow-up is most certainly going to be "which one?".
if chris tucker can score "rush hour" and "rush hour ii", you can do a lot better than "shanghai noon", mr. wilson. and jackie? well, he can make whatever damn movie he likes about the most ridiculous things, because that's what he's always done, and he does his own stunts. he rules in a way that you never will, owen wilson. but other than that, i'd rather be you than ben stiller. but more than that i'd rather be a taller tom cruise. i'd pass on kelly mcginnis, believe it or not. i don't do blondes. and i don't want to hear any tia carrere jokes either, because i don't think she's that cute.
oh oh! and how can i forget to talk about snoop dogg. any movie with snoop dogg rules. hands down, no questions asked. especially a snoop dogg movie where he starts throwing down about how to golf.
so that wraps up the movie marathon for today. i hope you enjoyed the reviews. i feel less sick. yay.
graduation day Sunday December 19
today is the last day i'll be using this movable type category "school" for awhile. i say "awhile" simply because grad school is on the horizon; i don't have plans yet, but my mom said it well when she suggested that i couldn't be the only one without a master's degree of some sort.
i know she was joking, and if i chose to not pursue a graduate-level degree, she would be equally supportive. but i do know her recommendation is to get one.
i feel as though i would want to get one because it would give me a real chance to learn. i learned a lot in college, certainly, but undergraduate education is about a lot more than just your major. it's about life, and figuring out the parts of it that aren't so clear. sure, some people have their lives all planned out, or planned out for them by their parents, but i have had the luxury of never having such pressure.
at any rate, graduate school is far more focused, and as such, i believe it is possible to be more useful as a scholar at a graduate level, and you get to teach or at least TA, and hey, that's a bonus. just ask ashley.
it'll be a few years for me, probably. but i'll be there, eventually. where, well, that i don't have the answer to.
finals week Thursday December 16
i know i've been MIA for awhile; finals week can do that to you.
i had a paper due monday. in my notebook i had written, "december 13th". somehow, during the hubub for my japanese paper, i filled in the "3" digit to become a "6". at least, in my head. yes, i decided that my paper was due on thursday.
so, much to my surprise, on monday i found other students turning in their papers when i merely went to ask for source advice from my professor. he was out anyhow, so i sent him an e-mail about the deadline issue. he was, of course, not pleased.
neither was i, though. i don't like letting down professors by any means. so i decided that since i had "enough time" to do this paper -- he said he would accept it late at a penalty -- i would do it well. the assignment was for 8-10 pages, and i wrote 14. the way i see it, this is the last serious, big paper of my undergraduate career. might as well go out with a boom.
i have one more to write today, but this one is only 5 pages. it should write itself, it's for my classical chinese literature course.
in other news, tony from merry ann's just called me about training. looks like i have a "fun" job now.
november Wednesday December 8
i've got strong empirical support now to theorize that november is usually rough, and that december is a good rebound. very progressive months they are; at least, they have been for the past four years.
november 2001: i was all in love with that angela girl, and despite how much we spent time together and had a good time, i was just too young for her and we were going in different directions. these things come to me as obvious now, but that november i was beating myself up over it. didn't know any better. that very december, i decided to forget about it and met heather.
november 2002: i was all in love with the idea of liking esther, because i thought that somehow that would make my life "work out". then i had that whole mess where i got food poisoning, which i still believe was part punishment for hurting esther's feelings via my own ridiculousness. lesson learned, but that still doesn't change the fact that she doesn't really like talking to me. you've got to take life as it happens, and i don't hold it against her that she still holds it against me. that december, i knew i needed to move past it, and that's when i met cara.
november 2003: i was all torn up about the recent cara breakup, and i mean really. i had been all wrapped up in this romanticized fairy tale, and unwrapping that proved more painful that i would have thought. things weren't getting too much better into december, though, but if you'll permit me to count january everything got much better: i saw that yes, she still did care, and that it just wasn't going to work because of the way we live our lives. well, that realization came later. but i felt better at that time, so. that december was nuts, i had no real finals, and so i just bugged everyone else. had some dinner parties. oh, wait, i still remember that the first e-mail i ever got from nancy came on december 1st, so we'll say that december might have been good for that alone.
november 2004: stuff happened, but no real girl trouble this year. i didn't get a much-needed scholarship, i barely got my JET application done on time, i lost two grandparents, i didn't get anything done school-wise, and i procrastinated on a big work project. there's even more than that, too, but not appropriate material for this blog. message me or e-mail me if you're really that curious. december, well, is in progress. so far so good, though. since i don't have the distance of one or more years, i will refrain from detailing the highlights of this month -- time shall tell.
i might answer in response to the question "why do you blog" that now i can use my own primary sources to make a new secondary source about my own life. scholarly analysis of my life, yes, this is what happens when you are a full-time student who writes papers likes it's his job.
running a 5k Sunday December 5
last night at my dinner party -- the biggest and most successful dinner party to date -- kathy told me she was running a 5k race today. i wanted to join in.
when i woke up today, the weather was very nice, so i could easily run outside without fear of kicking up my asthma. rather, i think it's better to run out there and get all that junk cleared out. anyway, that's gross.
i was dehydrated for the run, and i haven't been running recently. these two factors do not help when you are running a "race", and therefore set a unrealistically fast pace. my first mile was just over seven minutes, and my second one was eight.
but then i started to lose it. badly. i was by myself (the race had spread out), and all of a sudden i heard nate's voice in my head:
"phooze, don't be a wuss. it's a 5K race. we ran farther than that in boston when we went around the resevoir. c'mon phooze...push."
so i ran harder, and i knew that running harder would bring me to the finish line sooner. and so i started talking back to nate, but since he's nate, i was calling him "holmes" in my head. when i get tired while running with nate, i go off on crazy tangents to rationalize. today was no exception.
"holmes, this whole running thing, i should have had more water. i should have trained a little."
"dude, holmes, i don't know, this wind is unbearable here.."
and so i just imagined nate running right next to me, urging me on. then i looked up, and my quickened pace had caught up to the next person up: a young girl wearing a hooded sweatshirt with a name on the back:
HOLMES
and so he was. my final time was 25:05.
naysayers beware Wednesday December 1
cara from high school got a free ipod, and then she was all excited. i looked into the free ipods scam, and found out it's not a scam: just something that takes good friends and a lot of time.
i began on something like october 5th, and now, december 1st:
too good to be true
all ye who 'ere naysayers, these be ye just desserts.
