Some surprising things I discovered that I forgot to post in previous reports:

They call it J-Pop here, too. It is really weird. There are whole sections with "J-Pop" labels in record stores here. One Japanese girl (The one who named me Eri) was surprised that I was surprised by it.

At Tanabata Matsuri we saw a HUGE blonde, mirrorshades-wearing, totally thugged-out Yankee guy walking around carrying... a curly lhasa apso with a pink bow in its hair wearing... a tiny pink kimono.

Oh, other weird thing... "Yankee" means "ganger", and non-gangers totally chat about all the Yankees freely, with American kids, with no apparent recognition at all of the obvious roots of the term. (Oh yeah!! And one of the women in my class has a really really thick Finnish accent, so she rolls all of her Rs really badly... it is really really funny, cause she talks JUST like a Yankee!!!)

I have SO MUCH ART in my mailbox right now. I have more professional illustrator portfolios than I have socks, and I have a metric fuckton of socks.

Tomorrow is the midterm. (God fucking damn this program goes by quickly!!!!! I wish I were doing the year-long one. If I had but known what was going to happen with apps last year I would have applied for the big FLAS, but noooooo.)

Must chill over test.. .we don't get grades on these things.

I cannot deal with speaking. On paper my grammar is pretty good, but I gave my happyou a week ago and when I was done I realized that I had 5 fingernails on the notebook in front of me. The whole time I was talking about Takarazuka I had apparently been peeling the nails off my left hand, bending them into right angles, and layign them on the paper in front of me. Gah. Hope no one noticed that.