Last night I went to my professor's to watch a movie for class. Somewhere around thirteen or fourteen of the people in my class were able to make it. We were watching Tokyo Story. It was actually really fun. The house was beautiful. It had everything that you could hope to be in a professor's house. One of the guys said, "You know what, actually this is better than I hoped for. It's so... pretty!" It really was. The TV room had big plush couches all on one end and on the other end, there was a great dark red wood TV cabinent and then a whole wall of books, again in a dark wood bookshelf. The door swung open directly into the front hall, which was lit a little below full, allowing it leaving only the faintest of gray shadows in the corners. The door itself was glass. The dark wood theme continued on the door and on the racks as well, but I digress.

We all piled into the room, more or less sitting in the same horseshoe pattern that we inhabited in class, except this time, we were ranging ourselves across the couches. They had pizza and a wonderful salad with peeled oranges and sugared almonds. The sugars almonds were amazing 0.o

As far as the movie itself, it was kind of funny how that came about. One of my friends was commenting that it was going to be a looong movie. We, however, had already signed up for the three hour long film, so I don't think we came in surprised. Actually, with all of us there, it really didn't seem so long at all. True, at the end, I was checking my watch a lot, but it was mostly because I was afraid that the grandfather was going to die and I was trying to divine if they had enough time in the movie to develop it in the story (I do the same thing with books... I know, I'm terrible.)

It is a movie about this Japanese family, five children in all, where the children have all grown up and more or less moved away. This elderly couple goes to visit them and as the movie progresses you realize that the elderly couple is not getting the visit that they hoped for. While they understand their children are busy because they all are sucessful, they also really only came down to Tokyo to see them, a fact that only their daughter-in-law, who's husband died, is sensitive, to. Anyway, don't want to ruin the whole movie. I think that information right there just gives you an understand of the over-arching theme: there's a lot more to the movie than that. It was very sad and very beautiful.

It was sort of funny, because it reminded me so much of one of OUR movies from the same period (1950s). The main difference is probably speed, and mannerisms, but I didn't really expect that to be similar. Americans are just fast fluid people. They like what they have to say to roll quickly off their tounges, they like devolving into moments of desperate romance, happy ending that are really new beginnings! I think its part of who we are, as a sucessful new country. We are still only a little over 200 years old, after all. If Japan is an island nation, we are a new nation; our newness defines us.

So I liked the movie, even though I almost cried at the end. If you don't mind subtitles and you are interested in the plot, then you will probably like it. Bring some good friends along, though. Good friends and good classmates, I think, make everything a little more fun.

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Well, I got back from visiting my sisterling. Her birthday was over the weekend, so she had a 'thanksgiving' party and we all ate turkey and cornbread pudding and tatters and peas. Yum. Yum. Yum.

So. As you may already know, I am doing this thing called nanowrimo. You can check it out at www.nanowrimo.org. I hit 9,000 words and, being rather proud of myself for doing all that in 3 days, I was getting lazy. So I went on the forums to search out some steam. That came in the form of "word wars". Word wars are these pretty cool things where you and one of your writing buddies IM each other up and say, "Hey, let's write for 10 minute" (or longer) "and race see to how much we write!" I thought, "Cool. I'll probably get pwned hardcore, but at least I'll have a reason to actually sit and write for 10 minutes" you know, like a freewrite kind of thing.

Well, turns out I'm better than I thought! I am WIN! Of course, then again I have this lovely blog to thank for that. Writing begets more writing, as they say, and writing more or less regularily here really builds up what you can think of in a 10 minute word war. Also! Now I'm sporting 13800 words!

It's not too late to start Nanoing! The goal is 50,000 words in a month which is about 1,667 words a day for 30 days. Just go to the site, sign up and start writing! Just think, at the end you can say that you, too, have written a novel.

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Well, I put together a movie night tonight. It was a lot of fun! People came over, we all watched "the Covenant" which is a great movie that's a little scary, a lot of action and a really lot of hot guys.

My sound was pretty much "the total junk" so I'm not sure anyone could hear most of it, so basically we just talked through the whole thing... which was a lot of fun. One of the girls really didn't know any of the other girls, which I worried a little bit about, but she's a great person and very friendly, so it wasn't a big deal.

The most of the chips are gone and most of the chocolate is gone, so I'm basically left with smarties and sprite W007! So yeah... I will have to find some way to dispense with them. Smarties anyone?

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Alright, so about... oh, maybe a week ago, our president pops on the forums and is like "Heeeey, you guys wanna do safe treat?" Now, safe treat is this pretty cool deal where they set up this safe trick or treating event set up by the local RSOs. That way, kids are all together (WARM) and they don't get any weird candy or anything (at least I think that's what 'safe' is all about?) So the deal is that the RSO (Resident Student Organizations) put up these candy boths and have activites and stuff. Well, I thought it was an great idea! It's a little bit of recruitment masochism left over from my high school writing club. I knew it was important for people to realize that we existed, so writing club put together a both for EVERY event. *twitch*. So I automatically post back, "Oh! Sure!"

And then there was silence.

So, our president says that he's got a thesis to do and HE'S sure not doing it. Sensing the frustration, I post back that I'll do it so long as I have 1 person to help me out.

The forums remain silent.

Finally, someone posts back and I start my wheels turning. What do we have to do? How much is this going to cost? How are we going to deal with that? Blah, blah, blah. Our entire saved funds are... 50$. W007! So I think to myself "Self? We have to undershoot that by... a lot", so I set a budget of 20$ and start planning. Basically, I thought, I had to pick something that cost practically nothing. Fortune telling? Too chinsy. Storytelling? Too HARD! Paper activity handouts? Too expensive. So I was feeling more and more tired, more and more NOT up to it when I suddenly got an idea: Coloring Station! I was like COLORING books! Then I was like.. ooo, people will PROBABLY want to walk off with those. So I decided that I would draw out BIG ones on butcher paper (FREE to RSOs) and then buy some crayons (Not free, but relatively cheap). So by time I get all this figured out it's the day of and I have to race to Walmart, get all the candy, get the crayons, got some gift bags for people who may or may not show up to help and then RACE over to the union, find my table, find the butcher paper, ineffectually tear off the butcher paper, go back up to get the extra bag of candy they provided. THEN I had to draw out all of the coloring things and then I figured out where to set them (we were at the end of the stairs, so we had some room to lay stuff out to the side and stuff) and then I shook out a box of crayons by each one and sat down.

I tried to read. I couldn't read. I was too worried about the kids coming! So I sat there and looked anxiously around for the guy who told me that he would be there by 4:00. Aaaaaggggonnny. It looked really pretty all laid out like that, but I was terrified that no one would actually want to color!

I was wrong!

The kids started to come soon after and I had my hands full trying to figure out how to weigh the amount of candy I gave out versus the candy I had. I knew I had too little, they said to prepare for 300-400 kids and I just simply didn't have the budget. Strangely though, my coloring seemed to be just as big of a hit as the candy. Little knee tall kids would come down and stare and stare at the pictures and then stare and stare at me and say, "Can I color this?" "Sure!" I'd reply and that easy response seemed to just MAKE their days. They would pick up a crayon and immediately start coloring, at least until their parents would say to each other, "Oh no, we're going to be here all night" and pry the poor kid away.

Trick-or-treating is a tough game, because what goes on in every interchange is really a parent/kid teaching moment. Some parents just want to make sure their kids say "thank you", some parents want a "trick-or-treat" AND a "thank you", some parents just want their kids to take some candy and go, some parents want to make sure their kids "Only take ONE!" and some parents are just happy with trying to teach their kids to talk. Figuring out which is which is a didactic case that I never quite managed to figure out.

But MAN they were cute. All these mini people running around, looking up at you with their lantern eyes, all these hundreds of intelligent thoughts running across their eyes, you just wanted to get right down on the floor and start teaching them something. Mostly I just asked, "Do you want to color?" and they'd say, ".... Yes."

So, now I have five beautifully colored pictures sitting on my kamakazi butterfly chair in the corner of the room. I don't know what to do with them, but I'm really excited about them. It was one of those things that was definitely worth the effort.

I got two club members to come help me out and I think they really had a lot of fun, too. There was a lot to DO for one and a lot of kids to watch, for two. With their help, I got to sit in the chair for a little. Also, lucky for me, both of them brought extra candy. With the combination of their candy and one of our club member's mom going to K-mart and buying us MORE, we managed to last the 2 hours before we ran completely out of candy! Sooooo many kids! So, naturally I have a lot to thank for them being there. I was glad that I prepared the little "thank you" gifts, though they were a little lame. I totally want to do it again next year.... it probably means that we have to have a bake sale or something XD.

Oh! And from a club publicity standpoint: we recruited one member AND we talked to our assigned RSO representative. Both of them appeared to be a little impressed. And that, if I don't say so myself, is called "Slick"!

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Did you know that barcodes can do letters and numbers? Did you know that you can generate your very own barcode for free online? Well this is mine:



and here's where you can get yours!

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Normally I wake up at 10:00, I crawl out of bed and then I say a series of expletives before racing off to class. Today I went to kicking boxing, showered, blow dryed my hair, got a flu shot AND ate breakfast and wrote a blog entry. That would be this one, right here, all before 10:00.

By the way, kick boxing was apparently step areobics today and I practically died XD. Well, now I'm going to go off and find something to do until 10:30... now, I think I realize how I did it all in highschool...

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