pig || Seattle || back to personhood || Shukudai-kun || The Quiz Show || Nick and Norah

[ltgmars]

Ate three dinners today. No breakfast or lunch, but three dinners in fairly quick succession. One of my little muffins had her birthday go-out-and-rub-ourselves-on-greasy-pizza dinner, Halley and I had our semi-regular delivery-and-a-movie Saturday, and William and I had our more-regular-than-necessary late-night trip to Wawa.


Secured tickets for going to visit Halley in Seattle this summer. I need to go to the airport to validate my vouchers (pain in the butt), but hey, free roundtrip flight from Chicago to Seattle? I'll take it.


Last night I slept in my bed for the first time in three days. Today I took a shower for the first time in three days. Both were experiences I plan to repeat in the very near future, though I'm still awake now for some reason. I'm really impressed at how the birds start singing at 4am exactly. Chirpy bastards.


Spent most of today napping and watching back episodes of Shukudai-kun. (God bless the internets, which doth bring porn and pretty Japanese boys, sometimes together.) I'm in the middle of the third Odoroki! special (October 2007). So much more to watch before I'm caught up, augh. But I'm learning a bundle of useful Japanese words, like mujuuryoku, which is the Japanese word for "zero gravity". (Why yes, they do do experiments in zero gravity. I love these boys.)


The Quiz Show needs to be less episodic if it wants me flailingly anticipating each new episode (like I did with UtaOnii). As it is, the weekend rolls around, and someone posts a link, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah, another episode aired." Currently downloading.



Tonight's Halley movie was Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, which was delightfully fluffy. Highly recommended for anyone who enjoys awkward meant-for-teens movies, even though Kat Dennings's face is distractingly long and her chin exceedingly jutty-outty.

Comments

Sounds like fun!

[areyoumsgreen.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a pretty solid day. It's great that you're getting to relax a little after working so hard. And congratulations on getting your trip to see Halley all figured out -- that sounds great! I'd really like to revisit Seattle sometime soon -- checked out a lot of colleges there, but haven't really been back since.

I too have experienced the birds chirping at 4.00, but over here it gets light out then too... gross. Sometimes it's tough to sleep in the mornings because I can't shut out the sun.

Hope everything stays happy! Do you have any plans for this upcoming week?

Re: Sounds like fun!

[ltgmars.livejournal.com]

♥

[rebecka-jo.livejournal.com]

Ate three dinners today. . .

Today I took a shower for the first time in three days. . .

Spent most of today napping. . .

SCANDALIZED. D: you sound like such a college student. groce. & also i'm jealous that last night you were with three people (h0r), and i was with one, who isn't even a human.

i cannot stand the quiz show, and i gave up on ohno's terrible acting in uta no oniisan after three episodes. you have nerves of steel. are you looking forward to neener's new drama? it looks incredibly mediocre, tbh, but i'll give it a try, as always. for neen.

ugh, get into kpop fandom (SHINee, 2PM, and 2NE1, specifically). dammit, i cut all of the kpop fans from my f-list. and now i suffer in silence.

EDIT: oh. i see certain people who commented above me are infinitely nicer than myself. i did mean to congratulate you on your hard work, and well-deserved break. i'm just crusty like the old sailor i am. also, i still have classes and work every day, so i'm bitter, so bitter :Dv

[ltgmars.livejournal.com]

I'm jealous that you spent your night with a cat, even if it's a pain the butt. Also, you probably mentioned this before, but does it identify as male/female/neither? "Foxy", was it? Really vague name. It could be a stripper of any gender.

D: D: D: I think Ohno's an adorable actor. The Maou role might have been a better fit for him as far as his dramatic abilities go, but his expressions are so wonderful that I couldn't keep my eyes off him. *_* And yes, I am looking forward to crying at another Nino drama. I have yet to not cry when I watch his acting.

Korean former-freshman is trying to get me into K-Pop, too. Wonder Girls was the latest video she sent me; she mentioned that she doesn't like "pretty girl groups", though. Something about how they won't tell her their secrets to being pretty -- "Just tell me which hospital you went to!"

Re: person above you -- he's the boy. He's required to be nice to me. No worries. I appreciate your bitterness. I can "dig it". v:Dv

[rebecka-jo.livejournal.com]

(laughing) ily. i'm sitting here, waiting for 2:30pm to come, but the minutes are dragging. You know it's bad when you're wishing to go to work.

foxy is a female, and if she belonged to me, she would not have such an atrocious name. kristen named her as such, mostly, so she could sing out, hey foxxaaay layyydaaaaaay~ punctuated with bow chicka bow wow. yes, she is incredible.

have you seen the pictures of kazu with the twins yet? it fills me with some sort of feeling. but he seems so much happier lately, eh? he also looks better rested. and yet, inversely. . . ohno looks like he spends his days smoking twelve packs, and his nights drinking twelve cases while catching nothing on a dinghy.

. . . wait.

your korean friend knows what's up. my baby of the group SHINee, minho, recently had work done for the very first time! a rhinoplasty. T^T they grow up so fast~ (he's 16).

wonder girls are not worth it. they're by far the most popular girl group in asia, besides morning musume, but i'm not too keen on 'em. my favourite girlgroup, the new 2NE1, whose debut music videos you watched, are going to crush WG. i am sure of it.

SHINee:



FANTASIC amirite? they debuted in may 2008, have three MVs, one album, and own my heart. truly. they're been on hiatus for months, but they're making a comeback in a week. expect to see flailing at my journal, and possibly here, much to your chagrin.

as well, nobody does fanservice like koreans. i mean, ohmiya (OTP, IRL, FTW, etc) is perfection, but even the audacity of nino cannot match SHINee's kibum declaring his homosexuality, repeatedly. the day nino turns to ohno and says, you know what? i hate seeing you with women - disgusting, it's disgusting. you don't like boys? you like me. you know how much i love you.

^ kimbum said this to fellow SHINee member jonghyun, who replied accordingly with,

go on a date with some guy who likes you.

the faithful boylove pretending, the repeated plain-spoken admittances of gayness, while infuriating and delightful at the same time, should at the very least suck any arashi fan in right away.

a lot less gay, unfortunately, is rookie group 2PM, made up of seven men, two of them being korean-american, and one being thai-american (nichkhun, who is currently a national obsession in the south korean entertainment industry - a little depressing, a racialist mascot, but still).

but instead of embedding one of their spectacular, overtly masculine, acrobatic performances, let me instead insert this fanvideo of their waxpaper kiss game. i love how some of the guys (there are members of the 'brother' group, 2AM, and the host of this how also participating) react like, bro, this is gross, yo!, and some seem to drearily accept their menial fate as entertainers, and a few even enjoy it sincerely. but, the reason i love this so much is that, at the end of the video, we see my 2PM OTP, nichkhun and wooyoung, share a passionate kiss shielded by a translucent paper, followed by the campiest expressions ever. enjoy.



and, oh! it is issac - makes sense. i was pretty sure your friends don't like you that much. :> as well v:Dv is a ridiculous emoji; i feel as if you're mocking me for my pure and unsoiled love of :Dv and richard nixon. weeping, i'll leave and stop spamming you now, love.

[ltgmars.livejournal.com]

Nino with the children. My heart didn't know how to respond. :O

Okay, K stuff. Korean friend (let's call her "Grace", since her name is Grace) -- Grace started it all off with these guys:



She mentioned how when they first "hit the streets", as you will, everyone saw "the fat one" and was like, "d00d, that guy's fat. He must be really good at singing and dancing." I've since memorized maybe two of the steps. I also aspire to sing while sitting in a cubic frame.

SHINee is good. I like it. Moar, moar.

Kiss video was amazing. I loved the lion-attacking-a-wildebeest parallel drawn. Super cute at the end. :3 And I have heard of 2AM and 2PM. Grace mentioned them. Said something about how 2PM is called 2PM because they're hot, and 2PM is the hottest time of the day. I nearly cried laughing so hard. (But I guess in the grand scheme of things, there could be cheesier names. Like "Arashi", for example.)

And briefly: I kind of have a sense of how you feel about the whole fanservice thing, but I wanted to mention it anyway because it's relevant-ish. (Also, I love being circle-jerk intellectual on LJ.) In my Japanese Nationhood paper, I argued that male cross-dressing is more prevalent in media and the public sphere than it is in home life and the private sphere, and one of the points I made was that the attention paid to homosexuality/cross-dressing in media, instead of allowing people to be more open to it, actually harms people in the private sphere because of the why non-normative men are caricaturized and boiled down into a single stereotype. It's much more difficult for cross-dressers in particular (I say this because this was the main focus of my paper) to come out within their own homes and families because cross-dressing isn't necessarily an indication of non-heteronormative sexual preference, but it's still coded that way -- virtually all cross-dressers in the media are gay and all gays in the media are overtly feminized. Another point is that non-heteronormative figures in the media are often the targets for jokes and nasty remarks, even if it's just for laughs (e.g., Sho makes a lot of "ugh get away from me" comments when Haruna Ai is macking on him).

So basically while I enjoy the fanservice because c'mon, it's fanservice, in the end it's not quite helping the queer community deal with being queer in their own lives. And maybe it's not designed to help the queer community that way -- it is the media, after all, and so much of it is about being sold than anything else -- but it's still a shame that when it comes down to it, the queer community can't have a truly sincere voice in either the public or private sphere without running into some walls.

[rebecka-jo.livejournal.com]

inez, my affection for you is so great, please allow me to indulge in one of my world famous anecdotes to friends. yes, famous the world over. i don't usually do this for my online friends, so please cherish it. :>

i love going into work, and then being told "we don't need you today :)". so i went to the mall, to pick up a schoolbag for summer (finally settled on a keroppi bag. KEROPPI CHO KAWAII NAAAA) and i bought a piece of naan (traditional indian flatbread, you probably know it) and a take-away container of hummus.

got home at 6:00pm and immediately began to eat the naan and hummus. halfway through, the piece of naan is discarded, and scooping hummus up with finger commences. three quarters of the container later, horrified realization dawns on the depravity of the situation. walk of shame to the refrigerator to put hummus away. hummus will make a reappearance right before bedtime, most likely.

. . . i hope you enjoyed it. yes, even when spoken, the anecdotes are italicized.

now. SUJU SUJU SUJU. grace is correct. we were all horrified by the fat ones (two! there's two, i tells ya! kangin and shindong. the latter has a tragically fat name, even). kidding aside, sizeism is a huge problem in korean, and i think indeed most other people were at least shocked at their size. i love shindong, in any case. also: see icon. that's shiwon, my favourite member, and a fundamentalist christian. he is constantly on about jesus - almost like a caricature, although unaware of his own silliness. i am convinced he's dating the chinese member, hangeng. yes, mine is a special kind of illness.

oh yes. more shinee will be had, very soon. i am expected to be blown (away) by the boys for their comeback. for now, look upon my one and only actual crush on a man, jinki (stage name: onew. commonly called: dubu - yes, because he is bland and spicy). he tells jokes that are so heartrendingly awful and awkward, a term has been coined for it: onew condition. it's the feeling immediately after a particularly uncomfortable joke is made, or the atmosphere that follows general uncoolness.



grace is right. and also very cool for liking 2PM ("cool" is used very loosely here). what time is it? it's 2PM, baby! T W O P M, tha hottest time a' tha day! that line is completely serious, and you will respect it. but you can make fun of 2AM's: 2AM, the time of wake and not sleep.

D: yeah. yeah. 2AM has jokwon, though, who is practically openly gay. ask grace, she knows. i won't even go there. i'll let you discover it yourself. thank me later.


nichkhun (right) and delicious chansung (left).

okay. srsbzns in the next comment (I CAN'T STOP TALKING, SORRY! it's the hummus).

[ltgmars.livejournal.com]

Hummus is so delicious.

Thank you for the anecdote. I will tilt slightly and cherish it in all its italicization. <3

Interestingly, there seems to be a lot of... "non-homogeneity", I'm going to call it, in the K-pop boy bands. Maybe I don't know that many J-pop bands, I can't think of any that are Japanese guys + guy(s) from another (Asian seems to be the trend here) country. Ah, Japan's xenophobia strikes again!

i destroyed the comment limit by 2,000 characters.

[rebecka-jo.livejournal.com]

lulz, the song i'm listening to right now has the line, dick too big for the sodomy. yes, the mood is set.

you know, i love you. you know. :> crossdressing and extreme effeminacy are tools of the media. for entertainment, these 'freaks' are trotted out, to make men feel more masculine, and women feel more feminine. but there is something else: it is inherently difficult for many people to grasp a relationship outside of the heteronormative. so gay men, especially, are either made into de-sexed clowns (the new halfs on japanese television are a good example of this, i think), or a counterfeit woman (which is the only way some people can grasp 'her' wanting a man). in reality, the transsexual and hetero. drag communities are very, very small - most gay men a person encounters are not, in fact, gender inverts (i'm really sorry for using that ugly, outdated term, but i couldn't think of a better one :[ ).

exhibit a: screencaps from last week's episode of Atashinchi no Danshi, where this character, played by yusuke yamamoto, is a cross-dressing man who is 'afraid' of women. through the episodes, the undergoes 'therapy' to 'turn his straight'.




it's a crack comedy drama, but the fact that something seriously resembling the ex-gay movement is even a notion in japan depressed me. as erin (immaculate) said, don't study gender and sexuality in japan. your happiness will drain out.

i'm not worried about losing my happiness - i love this subject more than any other, despite getting disheartened, a lot. but that's to be expected in any analytical or investigative field, as you well know, eh?

stereotypes are a way to know the 'other' and make it therefore less threatening. and people always want to feel superior to others - that's pretty much the basis of reality tv trainwreck shows. i'll admit to being . . . too uncomfortable to watch the haruna ai segments with arashi. the way they treat her hurts my image of them - i fully admit to protecting my realities of the guys. especially sho, who used to be a big-time offender on the homophobia front. i find ohno to be too silent to get a good read on his feelings (although he used to love new half segments. i wonder what happened?) jun treats them as he would any other guest - brashly. but nino is interesting, because he seems to be very progressive on that front. which makes me so happy.

but the ohmiya fanservice doesn't help the hardworking gay activists in osaka, whose tireless fight changed the discriminatory housing codes. and the national activists, who had a huge win with the high court ruling that same-sex marriages must be recognized in japan, if done in a country where they are legal. fanservice is to titillate young girls who are uncomfortable with masculine men, and young women who are huge perverts getting an aesthetic satisfaction (although why you like malexmale relationships and why i do, or anyone else does is deeply personal and differing - but that's another very interesting topic).

and there is the part i am most uncomfortable with: fanservice as a replacement for the not-allowed hetero relationships; because gay relationships aren't real. even in the english-speaking fanbse, this runs rampant - you've seen them, the girls that ship ohmiya with the serious caveat of they are not gay irl!. the girls that cringe through comments at gay rumours. it's interesting; my gen&sex mentor, professor david k. johnson (read his books! :> he is awesome) was bewildered by fanservice, but was familiar with 'slash' from the 1970s (star trek fanfic). so, sociologically, and historically - how did this happen? the two extremes of crossdressing and fanservice? the extremes, favoured for the reality which sits in the middle.

let us crack the code. :x i'm glad to have met you (via stalking, but still), because i think, in the years ahead, what we find out will be incredible. so basically, i want to read your paper whenever you'd like to send it (loquacious_rabbit [at] yahoo [dot] com).

aaand that's a wrap. time for me to pavlov foxy. >(

Re: i destroyed the comment limit by 2,000 characters.

[ltgmars.livejournal.com]

♥

I don't have anything smart to say right now. It might be because I haven't slept, but it might just be because I found myself nodding in agreement the entire time and wish I had more to add to the larger discussion. Certainly, there's much more to be discovered. Let's do it. :D Also, I may send you my paper, I may not. For whatever reason, I'm intensely self-conscious about my academic writing. (Probably because I have the functional vocabulary of a fetus and it shows.)

Thinking ahead some more: I really want to do my thesis on new half now, but the only thing I've found so far that I could possibly use as my "text" for it is in Japanese, and I'd have to translate it over the summer if I wanted to use it. And even then I don't know how much said text would have anything to do with what I want to do with new half, whatever it is I want to do with new half ('cause I'm not sure of that either at this point). D:

Or I could write my thesis on the nature of fanservice in Japanese boy bands and how it ultimately encourages an already rampant anti-queer culture, using Arashi videos as my "text" (beautifully, this would probably be a completely plausible thesis based on the guidelines), but then I'd be one of those East Asian Studies majors.

Re: i destroyed the comment limit by 2,000 characters.

[(Anonymous)]

hey it's me. at owrk, can't sign in. i just want to tell you:

I'm intensely self-conscious about my academic writing. (Probably because I have the functional vocabulary of a fetus and it shows.)

snorts. oh, i bet. haverford kids are a bunch of 'tards, i hear.

YOU ARE SO ORNERY. from watching arashi all night. take a nap ♥