My pitas page

march 20, 2004. my oldest website featuring my dry point etchings, my first formal attempts at photography, other little sketches and my mini phantasy star fan page has been removed from the web. grrr. i'm really sad to have lost my webpage... (who knows where i put the backup of it...) but this also gives me a chance to re-organize and rebuild it. ..... ...... ...... i also have a fun idea for a new menu that i got from a dutch art institute's website (www.aki.nl). in japanese "aki" means "autumn" but in dutch it means "art" ... and it is pronounced like "hockey" without the "h" ....how about that? learning new stuff is fun. i am slowly realizing that i'm a product of post-modern times as many of my main interests in "art" actually have to do with really new media: photography, animation, digital imaging, interactive art (like videogames). even the japanese woodblock prints i like so much are not as old as i thought they were. haa haa! the photo, visualizing cultures course, and the experimental video course readings and discussions all helped me realize this, and the history of chinese painting (that reaches back about 3000 years....) helps give me some perspective. i find this semester's courses fit exceedingly well together, and all the bitterness about school last semester is pretty much gone. hmm. in the meantime, it is cold and rainy outside. but if we pretend that my life is just like it is in old japanese court literature, say like in genji, then the rain is very fitting for this moment. at least it is spring.

friday march 19, 2004. this semester has been very busy and exciting. it's funny how it's all worked together and i love it when that kind of thing happens. although i miss practicing japanese with a class (i can feel the kanjis dripping out of my brain stroke by stroke) it is a great thing to take a break from it. i will leave wellesley without any ill feelings for my already disappearing dept. well. i guess it would be better to think of it as a rebirth. but i still say it is backwards and ridiculous of the administration to clump a bunch of asian language and lit depts into one. i see it as a failure, by highly educated people no less, to hold up to their advertisements of promoting multiculturalism.... in light of my recent studies of history, photographs and paintings from about 150 years ago (when japan's ports were forced to open to foreign trade), i'd like to say that to an extent that even we might not realize.. we haven't changed much. it's no longer a wonder to me why, before i started formally studying japanese, i used think japanese and chinese were pretty much the same. of course there are reasons, and benefits (like tibetan and korean becoming available for study...) but the idea really ticks me off. instead of raising hell with some of those crazy student orgs on campus though, i've decided to do a little photo piece. . . . .. . ... so i really wasn't intending to write about that just now. but the things that are really going on are painful to talk about but writing might help. spain has suffered a horrible horrible terrorist attack and it's gotten me down. one of my spanish friend's mother just died of cancer last week. it's sad stuff. the hardest thing though is realizing how my traveling around (which is primarily done to visit people i know and care about) has made will suffer unbelieveably. this is a complicated problem, and that is only part of it... but yea. i feel like a ghost is getting its revenge on me again. this is really eerie and i haven't felt this kind of sadness in a very, very long time. so that is what is happening with me. as usual great happiness and progress comes hand in hand with the tragically sad.

Monday, November 24, 2003: hello, i am a work (well the shift ended just now so i will leave soon..) but i was inspired to write a new note up here ... at work i have a mac to play with, and it has recently been updated to OS X. OS X comes with a web browsing program called safari, and today i thought i wouuld use it instead of IE. there was a link to jim's (my boss) website (http://www.jtfanclub.com/) and today i found out that he has a weblog. hee hee. this semester i have made a few new additions to my sprawling websites. someday i hope to have a huge hunk of webspace to get the sites all in one place... and i'll get some of my older sites updated and fancy looking. (or really, i'll just rescan the pictures so they come out better!) i am excited to hear that the chinese pictures site i worked on this summer is about to be launched!!! i'll post the website up when it comes. also, if you'd like to see some crazy animations i worked on this summer that accompany a neuroscience textbook check them out here: http://www.wellesley.edu/Biology/Concepts/ncwebpage/ncwebmain.html there are four in all and can be found in the sections called "Fixative" and "Immunocytochemistry "...whoo hoo! so that's all. website designing is fun. take care, g

TODAY IS SATURDAY NOv 22, 2003 ahh i am at work now. but my head aches a lot so i don't feel like working on prints, or reading, or doing much except resting. but i have overslept today (maybe that is why i have such a headache) so i don't fall asleep. so i write! this isn;t the kind of headaches that gets worse when i look at light. it comes back when i lie down. what a weird thing. in any case, aside from this headache i had a nice shower this morning and i played aria of sorrow until i finished collecting the three monster souls i needed left and got the chaos ring, which isn't as cool as i thought. oh well. i have played that game out (almost!) all i have left to do is to trick the game into giving me 100.2% of the castle and beating the boss rush for those special items. hmm! pretty soon i shall have to find a new game. or i may put my gameboy away and finish up the seiken densetsu 3 game i have going. i am stuck in the thieves den though. hrmm. i am also halfway through a delightfuly well written book called Mary (by nobokov.) nobokov is amazing! i love the way he writes. it is very distinctive. to me it is rather like those old english writers who like to describe everything for five paragraphs, except the way he does it everything seems very sumptuous and exciting. i particularly enjoyed his description of a neon sign in the night... maybe i'll post it up here for everybody to enjoy. it was lovely. videogames and books are the same though (i guess as it is with everything) that when you don't get back to them in a while it is hard to pick up where you left off! so i try not to get into too many all at once! latley i have been studying with another gal from my japanese class and it has become more enjoyable and i learn more this way. next semester we might try doing some studying together on other things we care about to keep our japanese skills up. a lot of people are also unfamiliar with all the prefectures and regions in japan, so maybe we can go over those too! it is useful to know. things have been going well lately. i was very tired yesterday but today i feel well. i bet swimming this week has helped out a lot. i missed swimming so i went for a couple mornings and afternoons during the week! it is so refreshing to float around and go diving when the old women aren't doing their water exercises. i have decided not to apply for JET this year. i have also found out that a cut in funds at wellesley means that the japanese dept isn't able to do their 5th year teaching degree program... so those are two things that i won't be doing any time soon. school is winding down finally and i am very excited. next semester will be great!! i will take one or two classes at MIT, and two others at wellesley about chinese painting, or japanese history and digital animation! yay! i will miss all my friends who are going abroad though! that may be the last i see of some of them!! hmm. oo when my shift ends i think i will get a snack. today i will hold an ochazuke party for my friends in the japan corridor! last week i got a lot of supplies at porter square, furikake (which is seaweed bits and seeds and dried up leaves and fish that you put on your food for flavour) and red-beans and green tea ice cream mix! this will be great! but the party is not happening until late today so i will have a snack to tie me over until then. i'm also excited about the dance performance my friend lauren is in today! (she is the ra of our hall!) i miss visiting people and having visitors on the weekend but having these slow restful weekends has helped me get ahead with my work so when exam time comes things won't be so hectic.. and maybe i'll come home early! yay! oh yea! i did an interesting photo shoot the other night... one of the gals in my photo class has been having an internal battle about how to portray the female nude in a non objectifying way. one of her models cancelled on her at the last minute so i filled in for her and we did this photo shoot with me and another girl were we had various famous images and art projected onto us. tasha says she is bossy but she was very open to suggestions about lighting, backdrops and set ups... it was fun collaborating with her! i can't wait to see the pictures either. ahh it has been nice to get back into the photo lab. well. it's just about time to go. i wonder if the hoop has any quesadilas! that is one of my new favorite foods! :) bye bye!

Sunday Nov. 3, 2003. so there's been a lot going on. aside from the usual, there have also been some amazing experiences. On thursday october 16th i spent all day with the tonda puppet troupe!!!! i'd been comissioned by the japanese dept to take pictures of the workshop in the morning and the show in the evening... but i ended up hanging out with the folks all day long! i played with the puppets, translated, took them shopping, toured them around the school, helped put the sets together and even got to be in a wave in the show! :) it was so much fun. as we were packing up from the workshop in the morning i met akai-san, the woman richard had stayed with this summer :) we made fast friends and had a great time together. it was so nice to be speaking in japanese again... they were funny and interesting, and it was great to meet them. after shopping and lunch we started getting the stage ready for the show... and i had to run around and do all sorts of errands. it was being like a crew member on opening night... i had forgotten how fun it was to help put on a show!!! if i'm able to i'd love to go spend some time with them in japan someday. photos, japanese, theater, what else could i ask for!? that's the kind of experience i've been studying japanese for all this time.... :) later that weekend there was a spontaneous get together of funkhousers in concord... it was really nice. the next weekend my partner for the final astronomy project and i spent all friday night observing the asteroid hermes! we had lots of technical problems.. but we ended up flooding the observatory computers with about 150 images of our object!!! talk about getting a headstart.... :) it was a lot of fun. hermes is a veeeeeeeery interesting asteroid... as it has been missing ever since the 1930's until only two weeks before we observed it. hermes is a near-earth asteroid which means it has a highly irregular period and can easily be lost as it moves very quickly. read more here: yea. so while we were observing that friday night the KECK conference was going on... so the obs was hopping with astro/phyisics students from five different colleges... i got a free dinner at the college club and i also met ASHLEY THRALL!!!! out of the blue... i hadn't seen her for years :) it was great. these folks were all at wellesley to present their astro related projects that they had worked on in the summer.... ashley had just come along for fun :) hmm... so on saturday night will picked me up and we went out to a club in boston to see freezepop! i had tried to see them earlier this year but since the commuter rail flaked out on me it was a no go. that was thouroughly disappointing (well, but then i went to see iggy pop along with fischerspooner so it was ok..) heh.. but this time we made it!! with nick and will :) it was in this tiny club called middle east and while the bands weren't playing they were selling their own goods or mingling with the crowd :) so i actually got to meet liz enthusiasm! it turns out that she did only one semester of japanese -- which was just enough to write that song. it's too bad she stopped. . . anyways, in one dark corner of the hall were these asian looking folks. i wanted to go talk to them but i got distracted and by the time i was free they had started to set up for their show. they were mono, the opening act for freezepop. i don't think anybody had ever heard of them .. it seemed like everybody there was just interested in freezepop. but wow we were all in for a surprise!! (well, really, having them being the opening act for freezepop was probably somebody's gross mistake, as they are a completely incompatible beast... but boy i'm so happy i got to see them!) yes. so mono starts out quietly, and progressively gets louder and louder and louder till you think your head is going to explode and your internal organs thump in time with the baselines... the folks on stage swayed lightly along with the dark riffs and when the music got loud they thrashed around like the guitars had posessed them! it was seriously dark and hard!!! i've never seen such an intense live show... wow. i was pretty amused but i feel bad for the folks who were eagerly awaiting freezepop (only to be assaulted by mono)... not to mention freezepop themselves.. it must has been a hard act to follow up. but they did ok... they're new stuff sounds great. to get a feel of how clashed out that show was... take a look at freezepop's website ( http://www.freezepop.com/) and mono's website (http://www.canal.ne.jp/~sound/mono/) this weekend has been a little more quiet... i layed low at a halloween party in the observatory on friday, half goofing off half looking over the data we collected the week before. i enjoy the company of the 'regulars' there very much... it is a very comfortable place to be on this campus! and not only are the people cool, and the machines fun, the old building has this character to it... basically it reminds me of a scene from Myst. especially since most of the time i spend there is in the mysterious hours without sunlight.. its fun listening to the low grinding sound of the dome when you shift it around... yes i love the obs. hmm. on saturday i slapped together a website, and am almost finished organizing a photo website of the trip to japan this summer... looking back at those photos is so refreshing. i think i'll have a party to commemorate the birth of that site. the other website i got immersed in was based on my tanner exhibit. tanner is this conference dedicated to presentations/pannels and exhibits done by students who have studied abroad through wellesley. i've got an exhibit going up of 12 of the photos from my year in japan. i scanned the negatives in, photoshopped the scratches and crap out of them, and made huge 13x19 printouts. i was at work doing all this website stuff and after i was done organizing the photos from the summer, i noticed my "READY TO PRINT OUT" folder on the desktop. say, i'll just make a supplement to my exhibit thought i... and ended up doing that instead of the summer website. hee hee. i'll print the url out and and it to people. heh. yay! when i figure out what the url is i'll post it up here. so tanner is the big event for me this week. i'm glad it's just about over. yesterday night i finally saw Lost in Translation... and it was great. if you want to see more in that vein try Kill Bill or Wasabi. . . i guess they are all different kinds of movies but... japan is like that in all those films. (well, in kill bill it is a little more like what japan seems like from stories about japan from japan/asian comics/movies...) if that makes any sense at all. i wish that my photo exhibit would have shown something otherwise.... that was my original intention, but when it came to boiling my 70 choices down to 12, i feel like we ended up with the same fare. i wanted to go through picking them with somebody else figuring that what i liked might not be the best formally speaking... my prof had the idea of "how japan looks to a tourist"... and i was trying my best not to be one. i hate that word -- when it is applied to me. i guess that's kind of silly, but yea. hmm. ok i'm starving, i'll write more some other time. these are the best times.

Sunday, August 3. hello. last weekend i had an interesting visit to canton for the first time in... two years? time's gone by pretty fast. i hung out with jack and norm, and had lunch with the hathaways on saturday and sam on sunday... everybody else was out of town. the golf course is now a big plain of dirt waiting to become a strip mall, in fabulous ct fashion... and erik hathaway runs the junkshop-- the last place i really visited in canton before we moved. it was really great to see the hathaways again after all that while. norm and jack and i went to six flags on saturday -- that is where riverside used to be, but six flags bought it out and now it has a waterpark and really big roller coasters! the superman roller coaster was the best coaster i've ever been on! this weekend i stayed at school and will came down to visit..so i got a lot of work done and we saw some movies we always wanted to see. i got a bad headache today though. (today is sunday aug 2nd). we went for a walk just as a thunderstorm kicked up.. since we were walking around the lake you could see the rain coming in.. and three ducks swimming around... and a lot of lightning. i'm sleepy. ~me

July 22, 2003. Today, a Neuroscience professor called me a 'geek'. :)

Hello!! today is sunday july 20th, 2003. i had a great weekend! i saw my cousins isamari and tania and my mum! we went into boston and harvard square to see the sights and eat good seafood. there was a guy who looked just like abraham linclon holding a camcorder hee hee! and a whole bunch of other people in civil war costumes in front of the monuments and historical buildings. we found the statues of ducklings from the "make way for ducklings" book and they were a lot smaller than i remembered. ... will also came over for the weekend and we went to see pirates of the carribiean!! (it was greeeeaaat! arrr!) and visited the pet store to look at the kitty city... and to play at the game center whee! i finally found my own copy of einhander at the game stop. yay! :) on friday night we had fun playing glow-in-the-dark frisbee in the lake at night!! yay i had such a nice weekend :) after will left today i decided to take a walk around the lake because i had never done that before! there are lots of interesting buildings and almost everything is a forest path! there is one long stretch of the path though that would look great in the spring because of the flower bushes planted all along the path.... i don't know what that flower is called oh well. from the stone bridge leading back into wellesley at the end of the trail i saw a HUGE snapping turtle!! i hope he doesn't take trips into the lake at night :( hmm. last weekend i went to PHILADELPHIA with kat!!! it was super! kat was searching for an apartment to live and i figured i would tag along because i'd never been there. i like philadelphia a lot! we went to the the liberty bell and dawn showed us around the art museum and we walked all over town -- finding interesting shops, and fountains that were green and pink. along the ben franklin parkway there were flags from many countries around the world... there were so many lovely old buildings... and there were tons of fireflies near where we stayed at night! kat had never seen a firefly until then... we were staying with a wellesley grad liz and her friends from philly there and they had a silly dog named missy :) the day after the last journal entry i wrote i went to an iggy pop concert with kat!!! it was super!!!!!! as an added bonus we discovered another interesting band called fischerspooner.... they reminded me of those decadent-effeminate japanese rock groups.. (particularly malice mizer) arr... to sum the concert up, fischerspooner was a trippy show with fantastic lighting, costumes and costume-changes and other onstage effects... to the relentless electro-gothic beats, the singers pranced around on stage in five million different costumes while dancing girls swayed around in sync... iggy pop was iggy pop!! he was the act everybody in the crowd- from people in their late 50s to teen punks --- was waiting for... he got on, his band played, and he thrashed around like the short ball of energy that he is for a few hours... and then came on again after a very short break for an encoure where he jumped off stage to greet his fans up close!!! so i got a good look at him up close and he is about as tall as me!! i thought that was amusing :) that's all!! life is good. work has been a bit hard... but it's getting better! love, ~me

this is the same day. as i look over my page on this PC, it now hits home again that colours on a PC look a lot darker than on a mac. heh.

hi. today is june 26, 2003. it is 10:32 pm. through misfortunes i have not been able to get to see freezepop playing in boston today. the train never came. stupidly i waited around for about 30 mins because the sign said that they were having delays due to "the heat"!! i find it amusing that the commuter rail has delays for the heat as well. so. then i called a cab, and the cab didn't come in 10 minutes like they said. or 20 mins. or 30 mins. so i walked back, because in the half an hour that it would take to get to central square right now freezepop will be done playing. oh well. next time i will go see them with will! or maybe we can take a trip and see them in pittsburg in a while. who knows. oh well. when i was tired of waiting around i needed to break some change to call a cab so i went up to a lady who was getting into her car, and she was very startled and started to shut the door so i told her i was going to mug her or anything and then she talked to me. it turns out that she got a death threat today on the phone from a co-worker who had just been laid off recently. :( so she was pretty jittery. but she gave me some change in exchange for my 20 and told me where the police station was and where i could find a payphone. they fixed the payphone next to the commuter rail!! yes!!! ok. yesterday i had korean chinese style noodles made fo me by anna, and then had a big conversation with her and ani and then was invited for margaritas at kat's room. she made me a strawberry flavored one and we discussed corset designs, and then we went swimming in the lake :) yay! yesterday was a fun night. and then the night before i went to bonnie's place for dinner and on my way home i saw a very small owl!!!!!! it looked like a stump but it was in a place where a stump wouldn';t be and when it flew away into a tree it made no noise so it was definitely an owl. i wonder if they dig for bugs too. it was a little owl so it wouldn't eat really big animals. i have been working at the computer center at school this summer and it has been really fun! i'm learning flash and making a picture database yay. with the flash i make exciting animations about neurons getting holes put in them and shrimp brains. and the database, which we start this year but will leave for other knapp interns to finish, contains slides taken by another prof who went to china in 1972. the projects are amazing, and the folks i'm working with are all rad, and i am happy to be here. :) i'm going back to my room for some juice now. bye!

Gay/Lesbian movie! You love fooling around with the
same sex, so it's no surprise you'll be
starring in a gay porn flick. We all know you
"swing that way"...

What kind of porno would you star in?
brought to you by Quizilla

Today is Wednesday April 30th, 2003. it is pretty late. hello out there. i just thought i would write some things down before i forgot them..... hmm. well it is just about the end of the semester for me. today was a day off at school for folks working on big projects and thesis stuff to present what they have found. it is a fun exciting day where you get to see what everybody else who you may not meet because they live in some different department is doing. it is fun. now i must get on with my work. but before that i will add the things imeant to say before but never did. when i got back from japan, i was shocked at how big everything was, how overly sweetened so much food is, and how very little except things at the school (there is still a lot of construction going on!) had seemed to change. i was also happy to find the squirrles RUNNING AROUND LIKE CRAZY EVERYWHERE!!!! and all the great snow :) so those are my first impressions of being back. i wrote them down in a tiny piece of paper and carried it around in my pocket all semester.... and now i've decided to tac it up here and throw the paper out. goodnight!

Startdate: Moon.Second month.10.2003.... It has been about a month since I have returned from Japan. I was striken with a bad bad cold and had to lay low for the first ten days or so.. which was something!!!!! all i wanted to do was tell everybody about how cool things were in japan but the more i talked the more i lost my voice! hehehe! that is what happens when i get sick. boo. well, things that have impressed me about being back are... the sugaryness of soft drinks, the new cheerios with strawberries in them (i haven't actually TRIED any but i did see some out on a table one day but i didn't know whose box it was so i left it there. ok i tipped it a bit to read what the box said but.... i didn't eat any at all), SQUIRRELS and other fuzzy things running all around!! i missed animals... and stars in the sky.... the snow is wonderful and home in vermont is the same as usual! what changed the most is the college.. (the hip institution that it is...) first thing i noticed was that i couldn't get my computer hooked up to the school network so.... after a bit of trouble shooting i went out in search of the computer help desk.... and found that a whole floor of the library is reduced to nothing but cement and plastic walls and hanging lightbulbs and "don't forget your hardhat" signs!!!!!!!!! at first i couldn'ty figure out where i was! the place looks so different.... but funnily enough the computer help desk people are hidden somewhere in there and i found them. they have nice new facilities and everything... hmm... the management in the photoroom i work in has changed again... and the dude who is my boss now has a thing for taking pictures of himself and putting them up all over the place... the one stuck to the computer i am writing this at now is staring at me in all its black and white glory.... i am resisting a great urge to write "BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU" all over it. BAAA HAHAHAH! maybe someday i will. with a red marker. i had a chance today to write all over his face while he was taking a NAP in an armchair in the hallway. (you'd be surprised as to how easy it is to plant grafitti on sleeping people). hehehehe. .... i should take a NAP in the KNAPP center... ::laughing:: those are my thoughts for the day. i love my schedual this semester. i am very excited!!!!!!!!!! :D

the following is quoted from http://www.koicolorado.com/domestic_koi.htm " We are often asked, "Is there is a difference between Japanese and Domestic Koi"? Let's imagine a Japanese family from Japan. They move to the U.S. for business reasons. Are they still Japanese? Let's say they have a child born in the U.S. Is the child still Japanese? Now they raise the child in the U.S., and the child learns to speak English fluently. Is the child still Japanese? The analogy to Koi fish is the same. Domestic Koi are still Japanese Koi, but they have grown up hearing English instead of Japanese. " Lately I have been pondering what makes people "Japanese" or "American" or "Puerto Rican" (Puerto Rican folks carry American passports... but they are "Puerto Rican") or any native of a country for that matter... and all the little shades of difference in between... hmm and i read this analogy and i thought the idea of koi speaking japanese, but their offspring losing it because they live in america a really amusing :) goodnight.

Friday, December 13, 2002 (08:01 p.m.) hello. these are my deep thoughts of the day. i decided to post them up here so that i could remember them later. 1. as i predicted before the demand for japanese pop stuff in america will lead to something big, very soon. now Jump is being put out in english. mangas ARE going to take over america. just look at all those people at otakon. it isn't just an underground/nerd/otaku thing to do anymore. 2. today i learned that The Tale of Genji has never been translated into Spanish. i think that is a terrible shame. recently i have been contemplating what i could do to aid the introduction of japanese/japanese culture to spanish speaking people. (ie, people like my spanish friend and my puerto rican classmate from college, who are interested in japan). people want to know! even if it is a few people isn't that a good thing? i had been thinking about opening up a school to teach japanese to spanish speaking people. but... genji calls? i would have to study much more spanish and japanese to be able to even begin to attempt but... 3. on a similar note the similarities between (what i know about) puerto rico and japan are astoundingly many. (good grief, my english is going to hell at the moment :) ) ..... those are my very unedited thoughts...... i have been reallyreallyreallyreallyreally stressed and busy latley. and wanting to speak spanish or japanese. i learned that the word for APPLE in korean is SAGUA at dinner the other night. (the way you pronounce SAGUA is exactly how you pronounce AGUA in spanish but by mushing an S sound at the begining. the S sound is like the S sound in SAND. so try it. SAGUA). the air in tokyo became crisp and fresh for about three days after the two to three inch snowfall on monday. it has been 11 years since this much snow has fallen this early in the year. to sum things up it is extrememly unseasonably cold to the japanese, but to the new englander in me it has been very nostalgic weather. the other day i tried heating up some apple juice with cinammon in it (to see if i could make some hot apple cider) but it wasn't the same. hahaha :) just for the record apple juice in japan is much tastier than it is in new england. especially the nontranslucent kind. but in japan as far as i can tell there is no such thing as deep brown apple cider. (i didn't even see any in the super speciality market). winter to many japanese people is sitting around a short heated table (called a kotatsu... or in my host family's case the normal wester style table with a gas heater next to it) eating mandarin oranges (mikans). yay. i better get to work.

Today is November 4th. Monday. It is a national holiday today so I have no class! I just took the best online quiz ever (thanks richard!). It is about what KOI (you know, those monster japanese carp that swim around in parks... among other life in the pond). I never realized they were classified... There is a famous koi in Yamagata Prefecture that has marks on its forehead that makes it look like it has a human face (kind of like that game Seaman) Anyways I am an asagi. these are my results:

You'll probably love fallenlights.net.
Which Koi Variety Are You?

hi! today is october 21. today i cleaned up the kendo room with my mates and then we ate crackers and grape calpis (the very best stuff on earth) and then i updated my website. so check it out folks! www.geocities.com/oacatus2001/index yayy! have a nice day! love, me

today is the same day as the last entry, just a few moments later,,, this is for those who are curious about the goldfish. the ones i caught in fuchu both DIED within the week (what more could i expect from a matsuri at a temple with crows as their mascots...) but near the end of summer i went to a small local matsuri at the hachiman shrine near my house and i caught this silver goldfish with a fat head and i put him right into the lake with the otehr fish and he:s been growing and growiung and i am so proud. yay ;) here is a neat website www.paperrad.org ahhh. the stange people i know. love, me

today is friday october 18th. today i went to an onsen (spa with natural bubbling heated water from a hot spring yay!) with mama and granny.i like sitting in the bath outside because your legs can be all warm in the water while your shoulders can be all cold in the air. we watched the sun set.:) i got some pictures from the spring when i came to visit. (oh btw, i am in yonezawa now! not tokyo! i have come here for a few days because this week is a break from classes for everybody at school! yay!) i wanted to visit everybody again before i leave! hmm. tama chan came back after disappearing for six days (tama chan is a seal who likes being in tokyo), i just noticed in the yahoo front page that they have some ads for The Ring. i saw the original horror movie that they based it on and it was cool... i wonder why they felt they had to remake it, i wonder that a lot sometimes. like desperado. that movie never should have been made. (laugh) el mariachi was just fine yea? hmm. what else is up? when i return home (i mean tokyo!) i:ll be able to catch the last day of the school festival :) i can:t wait to see the manga club publications!! wee (sure, i have something tucked in there too but it is nothing compared to what the other girls have done.) they:re pros. ;) i:m working on my next story now. hmm. less than two weeks before the first round of exams... i:m taking a national kanji comprehention test soon!!! hoo!! well that is all for now. byebye.

hello! just in case somebody hasn:t heard, i am going to kyushyu for four days with hisako :) i am very excited! that is the news for today.

The last time i wrote is over a month ago! Things have been going by pretty fast then. went to the english summer camp in nasu (tochigi). worked till my eyes bled out (well not really) to get my work for school done. picked up mum dad richard and randro at the airport and hand fun with them for three weeks! and then afterwards ran amok with a rather random assembly of people indeed. two weeks ago i went on another summer camp up to chichibu in saitama and bathed in the freezing cold water with lots of excited children. oooooo o o o oooo... :D just recently i bought a really tiny digital camera and a CDRW. one cd i made works, and the other CD didn:t and i am a little miffed at the moment. i:m going to see a concert with mikiko and hisako this evening (so i better get my butt off the internet and head home!) i think i:ll pick up a snack on the way. today as i was rearranging my picture collection i found an UNDEVELOPED ROLL OF FILM!! *D I WONDER WHAT IS ON IT!?!? so i:m having it developed now! wee! along with a million copies that i will distribute to people and give to hisako and mikiko as a gift when i leave (but don:t tell them ok!?) that is all for now, love from tokyo, giuliana

Hello! I went to a little festival at this shrine in Fuchu and we got some goldfish! Today I will go to the camp to teach jr high school children English. That is all. Bye bye.

ru?

hello! i went to see a really cool play the other day called "Yellow" near Shinjuku. It was a neat play with lots of lights and music and SFX and people dressed up as asian super hero-type characters. :) So there was a Kirin, a mongol wizard king, mito konmon, musashi, jubei, songoku, a spider lady, a ninja girl who had a portable furo, a weird chinese emperor looking guy, a girly samurai, a gal with an abacus, a weirdo noh wizard guy and a kid with an orange chinesey barbapapa suit. in his youth mito travels into the mystical dream world of asian mythology (i say) on a quest to seek out his ethnic roots. he ends up getting involved in a battle over a magical treasure called yellow between kirin and her friends vs the mongol wizard guy. i laughed and i cried! i realize this probably makes no sense to anybody at all. feel free to research this stuff on your own hehehe. yesterday i went to see a huge display of ikebana at the ohara school somewhere in shibuya. my favorite display was this HUGE white flower set up so it looked like it was resting lightly on this skinny green weak looking leaf. whoever did that was a genious. hehe on saturday i did a mini workshop about how to draw manga. as i know nothing about drawing manga or how to use those pens, i started with the first sheet, and got aquainted (sp?) with the pens. i like the G pen :) i:m no good at using them though so i:ll do my best. also, the problem i have when i tried to draw comics was probably this: I THINK ABOUT IT TOO MUCH. and then my head gets tired and i only draw one thing for five hours and well, if i ended up drawing manga for a living at that pace i would starve. hehe. this workshop in august will be fun. that:s all! !me

hello. today is day two that i have a diary page. this is cool. today i discovered that 'mikan calpis' tastes just like the perfect tang drink. for some reason it reminds me of summer in puerto rico and it is very nostalgic :) curry rice and tuna is really tasty too. i took a test today and it was fine. i rather like the kuwabara useful japanese class. today i will study for my kanji test tomorow and i will make arrangements for travel plans for later this month. yay! :)

hello, this is my first diary webpage ever. this is fun and easy yay! :) the awesome mysterious page of pictures is my webpage: www.geocities.com/oacatus today i met with prof morley and prof kominz and isabel in waseda uni. and then we all went out to lunch together! it was there that i learned that isabel had made a little web diary and it was linked to the wellesley site.... i have resolved to update my website and keep somekind of online giuliana update page for all my fans back home. so this is the second step. :) cranberries are good. that is all for now. love from tokyo, giuliana