Sarah

The good times are killing me

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 23:54:39 GMT

Well, the first set of classes are done, and the results are in: an A in Parasitology, and a B in Genetics. I'm upset I didn't spend more time studying for genetics, but considering how hard the final was, I'm not too surprised at the results. Anyway, now it's time to focus on Neuroscience and Physiololgy. Neuro seems to be the harder of the two so far, particularly because our professor forgot to take a course on how to teach. His notes are just random structures in the brain with no explanations - literally just pages of lists at times, and he acts as if we already know all this stuff and he's just giving us a refresher course. His deadpan German accent doesn't help either, although it was used to great comedic effect the other day. Basically he was showing us an MRI, and pointed out several key features. "Note the unusually thick skull - this person is extremely hard-headed and could probably ride a motor bike without a need for a helmet. Note that the subject is a female, as indicated by the necklace (it was slightly visible). Also note the teeth - her husband spent a lot of money on her replacements." And while we're slightly puzzled yet amused at the fact that he's pointing out these things, he delivers the zinger in the same deadpan voice: "that's my wife." We all crack up, and he seems to take no notice and continues on with the lecture. XD

Physio is much better, since our professor is amazing. Finally a guy who can really teach, and builds up our knowledge from the base up, rather than having us jump into the middle and figure out the basics that lead up to it on our own. He's got a great sense of humor too, and in his case the accent - a very strong australian one - is a bonus. But of course nothing is perfect, and that was revealed today, when I looked at the sample questions he put online. The man is insane, and is asking us about things we've never heard of (and he definitely did not lecture on), or asking us to solve chem equations. I'm sorry, but it's been a while, and chem was never my favorite subject. My roommate freaked out as well when she saw the questions, and we plan to demand an explanation tomorrow.

Aside from school, there isn't much else, since school kind of dominates life here. I did experience my first tropical storm, though (my roommate, having lived in Florida, swears it was a category 1 hurricane). In any case, it was frightening. I was stupid and hadn't checked my school email for a few days, which, had I done so, would have informed me of the impending storm heading for us. Instead, the storm let me know it was here by waking me up in the middle of the night. I've heard wind howl, but this was beyond that. More like primal rage. It took me a good 10 minutes (mind you that I'm not very alert then) to even figure out it was the wind making that insane noise. I couldn't see much outside my window, but I could tell it was raining too. The strange part was that it sounded like the storm was both outside my window and my bedroom door. Of course storms can't come inside buildings, I reasoned, so I just tried to go back to sleep. That was a little hard to do with so much noise, but I managed somehow. The next morning was interesting. I woke up to open my blinds and see a lake where the soccer field in front of my dorm was. I just kept staring at it, before hearing some noise outside and going to talk to my roommates. Apparently they'd been up most of the night chatting with other students, since everyone was freaked out by what was going on, and not many of us have been through big storms like this. Then there was a knock at the door, and I answered it. The first thing I noticed was that the hallway was completely flooded. Housekeeping was taking care of it, and they wanted to know if our rooms had been flooded as well. Thankfully we were nice and dry. The only casuality was my roommate's window screen, which was now adorning a small tree on the bank of the newly-formed lake. Lovely. It hasn't rained much since then, and the past two days have been very warm, thankfully. It's ironic that I'm here in Grenada and I'm wearing warm hoodies and socks and still freezing. The reason is that we all don't agree on what a normal temperature is. My roommate Ekta is a freak who needs the temperature set at 67 F. My other roommate and I wanted it at 74 F (and trust me, 74 F in this room is NOT what a normal 74 F is like - it still feels more like 64 F). We finally compromised at 72 F, but it was still killing me, so I talked to her and raised it to 73 F. I didn't want her to sweat (I don't know how she does, but she says so), but she does have a large fan, and I told her to use it. She told me to open my window, but I refuse to when I can see bugs crawling on the inside of the screen, waiting to jump right in. It doesn't hurt that Parasitology has scarred me for life against any insect or worm (not that I had much affinity for them to begin with). Anyway, it's at 73 F right now, and I'll manage with my hoodie. During the day it's not so bad since I open the blinds fully to soak up as much sunlight as I can. But throughout our temperature talks, I kept getting hit with the feeling that she reminded me of someone. The answer soon hit me. She was like Joanne. The same stressed out personality, extremely apologetic, and, well, just a little off. She's not as extreme as Joanne yet, but it feels like she'll get there in a few years at her current pace. Scary.

What else? Oh, I'm learning how to cook. Haven't burned down the kitchen yet, but I have burned a few potatoes. I know a lot of people enjoy cooking, but I'm not one of them. Not yet, at any rate. If it's anything more complicated than making plain rice, I'm terrified at the thought. I'm trying to make an effort, though, since I do want to eat healthy, and this is also more economical (ordering oily takeout and buying massive amounts of pasta wasn't the greatest way to get through last term). So far so good, but the term is still young, and I'm very lazy. ;)

Ah, and in case you're interested, my mailing address hasn't changed since last term. I'm not sure at the moment what it is, but I'm sure I have it written down somewhere. ^^;;

2nd term - GO!

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 18:36:33 GMT

103 weeks later...I suppose it's time for an update. ;D

Well, I'm finally here in Grenada, and 2nd term is already in full force, and I'm hoping the weekend will be enough time to catch up. But, to start from the beginning:

Packing was about as fun as packing generally is when you're not going on a fun holiday. I was homesick during the past week, despite being home, but then my brain isn't exactly the most logical thing. Anyway, I packed and things went along fairly smoothly until we were about to take the exit for the airport on the day of my flight, and I realized I left my cell phone charger at home. We still had two hours before my flight, so my mom dropped off my dad and me at the airport to check in, while she and my brother turned back around to go home and pick it up. We checked in and sat waiting, thinking it should only take an hour at the most, considering there was no traffic on the 105. Of course, with my luck, the 105 came to a dead halt right before the Sepulveda exit, and they were stuck there for over an hour in traffic that did not move, period. It was stressful because my dad and I kept looking at the clock and getting nervous about the flight, esp. since we still had to go through security. Finally, just as they had finally crawled to first in line at the freeway exit, I had to call and tell them to mail it to me, since I would miss the flight otherwise. It sucked, since I wanted to say a proper goodbye to them, and I felt horrible for making them go through all that traffic. In retrospect, I should have just told them to mail it to me in the first place, but well, I've learned my lesson now. Actually, this flight was all about lessons. Onto the next one...

So, we take the flight and make it to our first stop in Miami, where we ate breakfast and I was very bleary-eyed from not being able to sleep on the plane all night. I can't sleep on planes in general, but being in the middle seat with a stupid TV flickering in my face on a red-eye flight didn't help. Anyway, the next leg was to go to Barbados, which I wasn't looking forward to because it's just not a nice airport, and it always depresses me. We got there, were immediately drenched from the humidity, and went the through the whole mess of going through customs, baggage claim, and then getting out of baggage claim (meaning fighting our way through massive crowds), then going to the Liat (a local airline) counter to re-check in our bags and then waiting at the terminal for our flight 3 hours later. Of course, the flight was delayed, so instead of leaving at the original 5:30 PM, we left at roughly 9:30 PM. In the meantime, I tried my best to fight off the depression I was feeling, and it helped to talk to a fellow student I met at the terminal. It was annoying to have them keep lining us up to board, only to tell us to either shift our line, or go sit down again (we all refused the latter, sensing that there was no point in losing our place in line over and over again). In general, I hated the staff there, and the overall stupidity/inefficiency of everyone. I really missed home. So, we finally board the tiny plane with little propellers, and manage to stuff our carry-ons in their tiny bins, when it turns out they overbooked the flight, can't find the pilot, and there's an irate couple on the plane who kept getting shifted to later flight times, and were being shifted from this one as well due to the overbooking. The guy just slammed stuff, and the woman told the crew flat out that if they wanted her off the plane, they would have to drag her off. Well, eventually they left reasonably peacefully, and the pilot appeared to tell us, as we already knew, that we'd first be stopping in Tobago, drop off & pick up a few passengers (it's like a bus, really), and then go to Grenada. So, everything went smoothly for a while, until we started flying toward Grenada. About halfway there (and really, it's only a 30 minute journey), they tell us they're re-routing us to Trinidad for the night, and we'll get a flight to Grenada tomorrow. Of course, it's about them to give us a reason why, so off to Trinidad we go, where we land at around 11 at night, to go through the whole mess of immigration, baggage claim, and customs again. If only it were that simple, though. We land in Trinidad to find out half our baggage never made it on the plane from Barbados, so nearly everyone floods the lost luggage counter, and it's painfully slow to get through everyone. I found two of my bags, but of course the one that didn't make it was the one that had EVERYTHING most important. Namely, all of my clothes, sans the ones on my back and one set of underwear and pajamas in my carry-on, my laptop battery, my local cell phone charger, my school papers, my shoes (again, minus the ones I was wearing), etc. To my credit, despite wanting to break down and cry, I didn't. I did meet some nice people, though, since everyone bonds in times like this, and that helped. Anyway, got out of the airport sometime after 1 am, and then this prickly Liat woman told us the reason for the flight change. Apparently if the crew flew the extra 5 minutes to Grenada, they'd be over the max. hours they're allowed to work in a day, and so in their nutty minds it seemed like a better idea to turn around and fly to another island. None of us bought it, but I could care less at that point. I was worried sick about my bags, and could only hope it would make it to Grenada on another flight. Lessons learned: never fly Liat, never pack all of your important things in just one bag, but spread them out to minimize the loss (or better yet, strap it all to yourself - it might be a bit uncomfortable, but the peace of mind gained is worth it), and only keep hot-pink or other garishly colored luggage. Well, the night was still young, and there was more fun in store. The van finally came to take us to our hotel, the Bel-Air, and we hopped it would be decent so we could actually shower and maybe get a little rest before catching the "special charter flight to Grenada just for us" which the lady assured us would fly out at 8 am. We weren't taking any chances, so rather than be at the airport at 6:30 am as she told us to, we planned to be there at 5. So, we drive up some dirt road to find a small building more akin to a reconverted garage. Welcome to the Bel-Air. Our room was suitably horrible, complete with mosquitoes flying out the minute the bell-man opened the door, to lumpy floors hastily covered by carpet, a bathroom not worth looking at, much less using, and linens whose state of cleanliness I had good reason to mistrust. On the bright side, the AC worked very well, and we basically half sat and slept in bed with the AC on full blast and the lights on to keep the mosquitoes away. I don't enjoy being in their company in any case, but when I see a sign at the airport saying malaria is back on that island, I REALLY don't want to be anywhere near them. I covered up my head & face with my hoodie and basically huddled up for a few hours before getting up to catch the van back to the airport. I looked like a wreak, but I didn't even care to try and comb my hair out at that point. So, we get to the airport, check in our bags, see that the flight is supposed to leave at 8:10 am, and wait at the terminal. And wait. And wait. It's 8:10 and there's no plane out there. There are no Liat representatives there either, and we can't leave to go talk to them since we've already gone through security. At last, after we all complain (some more colorfully than others), a miracle happens and our tiny little plane comes. As we're walking out on the runway toward it while being rained on, that little piece of junk never looked better. We board, and all I do is pray the entire time that we'll just make it to Grenada. Lo and behold, for the first time in a while my prayers are answered and we make it there without incident. Of course when we land we see that our bags still aren't there, and fill out baggage claims again. Liat flights are all booked right now, so they had the bright idea of leaving behind half the luggage on each flight, and sending it out in spurts on other subsequent flights. We're assured we'll get them within a week. Haha. No clothes nor means of communication (well, I had my local cell, but that would die soon as well, without it's charger) until HOPEFULLY a week later. I'm tired and despite not having eaten anything since Miami, not hungry at all.

Dispirited and broken, I go to my dorm to get my key, and find out that our front door is wet and has mold growing around it. Therefore, it can't shut or open properly. I move in, and start to unpack the other two bags, and put the food mom made for me in the freezer, hoping it hadn't gone bad. Then I rush to go register, only to find out that I missed the morning time, so I have to come back at 3. In the meantime, we call a taxi and go get my stuff out of storage, to find out that it's got mold. Alexandra is no more, among other things. Thankfully I had bought a replacement already, and now I use Lizzy. May Alexandra's soul rest in peace. *moment of silence* Then we go to the airport to check if my bag is back, which it's not (surprise, surprise), and I call home to tell mom about my adventures, and she starts hounding both the Barbados and Grenada airports to get my bag to me this minute. Then we go to the grocery store to get food (which was good timing, since they ran out of food by the next day), and come back to my room. Dad started unpacking for me and washing my things to get the mold out, while I went to go register, which I did. Then I went to go pick up my books, and that was lots of fun. So, I didn't print out my confirmation form for my book order because I ordered it while in school last term, when I didn't have a printer in my room, obviously. But I had written down my invoice number, and I had printed the screen and saved it to my laptop, as the best I could do. I was supposed to be emailed a confirmation as well, apparently, but I never knew, nor got one. Anyway, I go there, and the guy says that he can look up my order if I just give him my ID, which I do. There's no order under my name. I go back to my room to get my invoice number, as well as my flash drive, which contains the image of the confirmation form I'd print-screened. I make the mistake of giving him my flash drive first, and when he puts it into his computer the thing freezes up. The guy blows up at me, and thinks I gave him a virus. I tell him there was nothing else on there except a jpeg file, and it's not my fault. That only makes him more mad, and I'm trying not to cry (I hate my thin skin) in front of the long line of students behind me. He takes it out and restarts (as I suggested much earlier) eventually, and the computer works fine, so obviously it was my fault. Anyway, he tries my invoice number, and still no order, so I'm sent home. I decide to email billing and see if I was indeed billed for these books or not, because if I was, I sure as hell want them. While walking back, I'm at my lowest low, and I just can't take it anymore. At that moment, I guy I knew from last term spotted me and called out to me to say hi. I look up and start to cry because I've lost it, and he immediately says he's sorry and realizes I just need to be alone, and goes away. I finish walking back willing myself to get back in control, because I don't want more people to see me crying, and barely manage to by the time I make it to my room. I hear voices, and it's my old roommate talking to my dad, and I try to have a normal conversation with her without breaking down again. I didn't cry, but unless she's very dense, she probably could tell I was on the verge of crying. Dad is unreasonably happy, which puzzles me, since when I last saw him he was stressed and upset, trying to see if he could extend his flight (he was scheduled to leave the next morning). Dad tells me mom's nagging paid off or my luck was finally turning around, because my bag was at the airport waiting for me. I'm in shock, and kind of unable to feel the joy I should have felt, but it was just too unreal. Anyway, we call the same taxi guy, rush to the airport, and wait for some idiot at the Liat counter to speak to us. Of course none of them do, and I pretty much became a racist against all caribbeans at that point for being lazy assholes who refuse to help out anyone. I know I wasn't being fair in generalizing like that, but honestly, I think overall the majority of them are like that. So, one guy tells us to go talk to a woman currently socializing with some other people. I go to her, and she looks upset to be told to actually work, and she yells back at the first guy. Finally she goes and pages some other guy, who finally comes out to take me to the arrival area (I'd have been there and back myself much sooner, but security is a pain; Grenada is such an ideal target for terrorism, afterall). But at least I get there, see my bag, lunge at it, check to see if everything is still there, and get the hell out of there once the customs guy is done interrogating me with stupid questions about why I'm in Grenada.

I get out feeling so happy, and dad is happy, and everything seems to be going my way at last. We go back to my dorm first, and then I say bye to dad, who's leaving to spend the night at a hotel. I come back after that, and don't know where to start. I desperately need a shower, and I have a massive amount of packing and arranging to do in my little jail cell of a room. I clean up a bit, and then go to take a shower, which felt great. Then I just kept unpacking & sorting, while taking many breaks in between when I'd feel sick of it. Somewhere during that I got my appetite back and was starving, so I ate the food mom gave me. Surprisingly, it was all fine. =D Then my other roommate came, and her flight was basically the same story in that she flew Liat, so her flight was delayed and she lost one bag. Unfortunately, she still hasn't gotten hers yet. =( We commiserated, and then I cleaned up enough so I could actually sleep on my bed. I woke up the next day and spent about half of it finishing up the unpacking. I guess I was just really slow or something. I checked my email and billing told me to go talk to some guy at the bookstore, and it was all sorted out. The guy turned out to to be the same one who yelled at me, and I don't think he was very happy to see me. I tried my best to let him know the feeling was mutual. I told him I got an email from billing telling me to tell him to check his email (a very terse message to him from billing saying "We billed her $405.00. She has to receive her books."), and he told me to wait. He finally called me over and asked me to check off which books I ordered. I couldn't remember, but I knew my total cost, so I just found the ones that added up to that, which wasn't very hard. Then he finally gave me my books.

School started as well, and my schedule is 8 am to 12 pm everyday. I'm so excited to finally have half the day free. It's such a luxury to have so much much time to study and actually do other things like eat well or maybe relax. First term really was horrible. Anyway, the schedule is a bit odd, but overall in our favor. For the first two weeks we have only Genetics and Parasitolgy, and then the finals for those two in the third week. After that we start the main classes - Physiology, Neuroscience, and Immunology - and those go on for the rest of the term. Oh, and Clinical Skills will be interspersed throughout, like the pest of a class it is. Genetics is alright, but at 8 in the morning I have a hard time concentrating, and, while very nice, the professor is not exactly the most lively of people. He has an interesting accent since he's from Newfoundland, though. The last two hours is Parasitology, and that's more interesting since the professor is very well known in the field and has a lot to say. Then again, seeing what nasty stuff these little things do to people isn't so fun.

I had a sore throat for the past two days, and mom was worried sick I'd caught something. I was too, since I was sitting next to a girl with the flu the day before. Luckily I feel fine now, and I think it was just from the constant temperature changes I go through, from freezing in my room to hot outside. Of course, being paranoid-me, on the second day of feeling kind of ill, I convinced myself I had malaria, since that's what our lecture was about, and (in my mind) everything fit. I spent the night with mosquitoes who possibly had malaria in Trinidad. For the first 11 days the patient just shows normal flu symptoms (I have a sore throat and a runny nose! :O), and then you get alternating fevers (my hand flew to my forehead like a nervous reaction every 5 minutes). I probably would have willed myself sick, but the rational part of my brain (yes it exists, although sadly in a very marginalized state) kept telling myself to shut up and stop worrying. Thankfully I'm fine now, although my nose insists on running still. Oh, and we avoided hurricane Dean entirely, so that was also nice. Having very little experience with rain, much less a hurricane, was freaking me out.

And now here I am, trying to catch up on studying this weekend, and also cooking some extra food that I can eat during the week, when even making a sandwich is a heavy burden. I always appreciate home and the US in general so much since coming here. Just one more year and I'll be back! *knocks on wood*

I'll upload some pics as soon as I figure out how to do so on here. >_>

Apocalypse Now

Sun, 21 Aug 2005 02:00:51 GMT

The End has finally come.

Just got back about half an hour ago from approximately 9 hours of hell in its purest form. I'm feeling slightly feverish and I have dark circles under my eyes, but otherwise I guess I'm alright.

Highlights of my day:
1. I now know exactly how cholera cause diarrhea *shudders*
2. Russians were funny people.
3. Sperm whales can finally relax - we've figured out how to make ambergris synthetically.

Anecdote of the day:
I was walking out of the room to take my break and realized I didn't know where the bathroom was, so I went up to a girl by the door to ask her. Before I could say anything though, she suddenly said "Did you know I have the same last name as you?" I was so out of it though that I was kinda like, "um....last name....nope, definitely not in the review notes...." When I finally put two and two together I said "Oh. Um....so you have the same last name? Wow... that's um... I mean, how wierd.......hey, do you know where the bathroom is?"

Ok, update time over. I'll discuss past events such as graduation and anything else that I can't recall at the moment from the past 2 months later.

Birthday Post

Fri, 20 May 2005 04:42:40 GMT

Nooooooo! Today I am.......23 years old!!!

So.....very.....old.....;-P

Well, I guess I should look at the bright side and be thankful for my long life ^^ Hehe, anyway, today was a good day. The weather gods created a pretty day, my professor gave me an "A" on my midterm (and I'm not being dramatic - I was convinced I had failed it), my flies decided to hold off on giving birth to maggots, and in general, life was good.

*crosses fingers and prays for good luck streak to last for next 364 days*

^_^

The experts have spoken...

Sat, 14 May 2005 01:48:25 GMT

Your dating personality profile:

Liberal - Politics matters to you, and you aren't afraid to share your left-leaning views. You would never be caught voting for a conservative candidate.
Big-Hearted - You are a kind and caring person. Your warmth is inviting, and your heart is a wellspring of love.
Intellectual - You consider your mind amongst your assets. Learning is not a chore but a constant search after wisdom and knowledge. You value education and rationality.

Your date match profile:

Big-Hearted - You want someone compassionate, someone gentle and kind. A loving, nurturing person will fill that hole in your life.
Adventurous - You are looking for someone who is willing to try new things and experience life to its fullest. You need a companion who encourages you to take risks and do exciting things.
Shy - You are put off by people who are open books. You are drawn to someone who is a bit more mysterious. You want to draw him out of his shell and get to know what he is all about.

Your Top Ten Traits

1. Liberal
2. Big-Hearted
3. Intellectual
4. Adventurous
5. Practical
6. Wealthy/Ambitious
7. Shy
8. Athletic
9. Romantic
10. Sensual

Your Top Ten Match Traits

1. Big-Hearted
2. Adventurous
3. Shy
4. Practical
5. Conservative
6. Intellectual
7. Athletic
8. Traditional
9. Romantic
10. Funny

Take the Online Dating Profile Quiz at Dating Diversions

Books

Fri, 06 May 2005 17:42:34 GMT

I got this reading list from toriem. Argh, there's still so much I have to read! Oh, and like toriem, I also cheated a little and italicized the books I'm in the middle of.

Instructions:
1. Bold those that you've read.
2. Add 3 more books to the list.

001. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
002. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
003. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
004. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
005. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
006. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
007. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
008. 1984, George Orwell
009. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
010. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
011. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
012. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
013. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
014. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
015. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
016. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
017. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
018. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
019. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
020. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
021. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
022. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, JK Rowling
023. Harry Potter and the Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
024. Harry Potter and the Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
025. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
026. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
027. Middlemarch, George Eliot
028. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
029. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
030. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
031. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
032. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
033. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
034. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
035. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
036. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
037. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
038. Persuasion, Jane Austen
039. Dune, Frank Herbert
040. Emma, Jane Austen
041. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
042. Watership Down, Richard Adams
043. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
044. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
045. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
046. Animal Farm, George Orwell
047. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
048. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
049. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
050. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
051. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
052. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
053. The Stand, Stephen King
054. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
055. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
056. The BFG, Roald Dahl
057. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
058. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
059. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
060. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
061. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
062. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden
063. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
064. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
065. Mort, Terry Pratchett
066. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
067. The Magus, John Fowles
068. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
069. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
070. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
071. Perfume, Patrick Susskind
072. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
073. Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
074. Matilda, Roald Dahl
075. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
076. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
077. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
078. Ulysses, James Joyce
079. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
080. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
081. The Twits, Roald Dahl
082. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
083. Holes, Louis Sachar
084. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
085. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
086. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
087. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
088. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
089. Magician, Raymond E Feist
090. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
091. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
092. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
093. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
094. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
095. Katherine, Anya Seton
096. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
097. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
098. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
099. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
101. Three Men In A Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
102. Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
103. The Beach, Alex Garland
104. Dracula, Bram Stoker
105. Point Blanc, Anthony Horowitz
106. The Pickwick Papers, Charles Dickens
107. Stormbreaker, Anthony Horowitz
108. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
109. The Day Of The Jackal, Frederick Forsyth
110. The Illustrated Mum, Jacqueline Wilson
111. Jude The Obscure, Thomas Hardy
112. The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole Aged 13 1/2, Sue Townsend
113. The Cruel Sea, Nicholas Monsarrat
114. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
115. The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy
116. The Dare Game, Jacqueline Wilson
117. Bad Girls, Jacqueline Wilson
118. The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
119. Shogun, James Clavell
120. The Day Of The Triffids, John Wyndham
121. Lola Rose, Jacqueline Wilson
122. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
123. The Forsyte Saga, John Galsworthy
124. House Of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
125. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
126. Reaper Man, Terry Pratchett
127. Angus, Thongs And Full-Frontal Snogging, Louise Rennison
128. The Hound Of The Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle
129. Possession, A. S. Byatt
130. The Master And Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
131. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
132. Danny The Champion Of The World, Roald Dahl
133. East Of Eden, John Steinbeck
134. George's Marvellous Medicine, Roald Dahl
135. Wyrd Sisters, Terry Pratchett
136. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
137. Hogfather, Terry Pratchett
138. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
139. Girls In Tears, Jacqueline Wilson
140. Sleepovers, Jacqueline Wilson
141. All Quiet On The Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque
142. Behind The Scenes At The Museum, Kate Atkinson
143. High Fidelity, Nick Hornby
144. It, Stephen King
145. James And The Giant Peach, Roald Dahl
146. The Green Mile, Stephen King
147. Papillon, Henri Charriere
148. Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett
149. Master And Commander, Patrick O'Brian
150. Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
151. Soul Music, Terry Pratchett
152. Thief Of Time, Terry Pratchett
153. The Fifth Elephant, Terry Pratchett
154. Atonement, Ian McEwan
155. Secrets, Jacqueline Wilson
156. The Silver Sword, Ian Serraillier
157. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
158. Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
159. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
160. Cross Stitch, (Outlander) Diana Gabaldon
161. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
162. River God, Wilbur Smith
163. Sunset Song, Lewis Grassic Gibbon
164. The Shipping News, Annie Proulx
165. The World According To Garp, John Irving
166. Lorna Doone, R. D. Blackmore
167. Girls Out Late, Jacqueline Wilson
168. The Far Pavilions, M. M. Kaye
169. The Witches, Roald Dahl
170. Charlotte's Web, E. B. White
171. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
172. They Used To Play On Grass, Terry Venables and Gordon Williams
173. The Old Man And The Sea, Ernest Hemingway
174. The Name Of The Rose, Umberto Eco
175. Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder
176. Dustbin Baby, Jacqueline Wilson
177. Fantastic Mr. Fox, Roald Dahl
178. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
179. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
180. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery
181. The Suitcase Kid, Jacqueline Wilson
182. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
183. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
184. Silas Marner, George Eliot
185. American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
186. The Diary Of A Nobody, George and Weedon Gross-mith
187. Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh
188. Goosebumps, R. L. Stine
189. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
190. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
191. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
192. Man and Boy, Tony Parsons
193. The Truth, Terry Pratchett
194. The War Of The Worlds, H. G. Wells
195. The Horse Whisperer, Nicholas Evans
196. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
197. Witches Abroad, Terry Pratchett
198. The Once And Future King, T. H. White
199. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle
200. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews
201. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
202. The Eye of the World, Robert Jordan
203. The Great Hunt, Robert Jordan
204. The Dragon Reborn, Robert Jordan
205. Fires of Heaven, Robert Jordan
206. Lord of Chaos, Robert Jordan
207. Winter's Heart, Robert Jordan
208. A Crown of Swords, Robert Jordan
209. Crossroads of Twilight, Robert Jordan
210. A Path of Daggers, Robert Jordan
211. As Nature Made Him, John Colapinto
212. Microserfs, Douglas Coupland
213. The Married Man, Edmund White
214. Winter's Tale, Mark Helprin
215. The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault
216. Cry to Heaven, Anne Rice
217. Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, John Boswell
218. Equus, Peter Shaffer
219. The Man Who Ate Everything, Jeffrey Steingarten
220. Letters To A Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
221. Ella Minnow Pea, Mark Dunn
222. The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice
223. Anthem, Ayn Rand
224. Bridge To Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
225. Tartuffe, Moliere
226. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
227. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
228. The Trial, Franz Kafka
229. Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
230. Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles
231. Death Be Not Proud, John Gunther
232. A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
233. Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
234. Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton
235. A Raisin In The Sun, Lorraine Hansberry
236. ALIVE!, Piers Paul Read
237. Grapefruit, Yoko Ono
238. Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde
240. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
241. Chronicles of Thomas Convenant, Unbeliever, Stephen Donaldson
242. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
242. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon
243. Summerland, Michael Chabon
244. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole
245. Candide, Voltaire
246. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, Roald Dahl
247. Ringworld, Larry Niven
248. The King Must Die, Mary Renault
249. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
250. A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L'Engle
251. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
252. The House Of The Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne
253. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
254. The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
255. The Great Gilly Hopkins, Katherine Paterson
256. Chocolate Fever, Robert Kimmel Smith
257. Xanth: The Quest for Magic, Piers Anthony
258. The Lost Princess of Oz, L. Frank Baum
259. Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon
260. Lost In A Good Book, Jasper Fforde
261. Well Of Lost Plots, Jasper Fforde
261. Life Of Pi, Yann Martel
263. The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
264. A Yellow Raft In Blue Water, Michael Dorris
265. Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder
267. Where The Red Fern Grows, Wilson Rawls
268. Griffin & Sabine, Nick Bantock
269. Witch of Black Bird Pond, Joyce Friedland
270. Mrs. Frisby And The Rats Of NIMH, Robert C. O'Brien
271. Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt Bleh.
272. The Cay, Theodore Taylor
273. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, E.L. Konigsburg
274. The Phantom Tollbooth, Norton Jester
275. The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
276. The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan
277. The Bone Setter's Daughter, Amy Tan
278. Relic, Duglas Preston & Lincolon Child
279. Wicked, Gregory Maguire
280. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
281. Misty of Chincoteague, Marguerite Henry
282. The Girl Next Door, Jack Ketchum
283. Haunted, Judith St. George
284. Singularity, William Sleator
285. A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
286. Different Seasons, Stephen King
287. Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk
288. About a Boy, Nick Hornby
289. The Bookman's Wake, John Dunning
290. The Church of Dead Girls, Stephen Dobyns
291. Illusions, Richard Bach
292. Magic's Pawn, Mercedes Lackey
293. Magic's Promise, Mercedes Lackey
294. Magic's Price, Mercedes Lackey
295. The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Gary Zukav
296. Spirits of Flux and Anchor, Jack L. Chalker
297. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
298. The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, Brenda Love
299. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace.
300. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison.
301. The Cider House Rules, John Irving.
302. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
303. Girlfriend in a Coma, Douglas Coupland
304. The Lion's Game, Nelson Demille
305. The Sun, The Moon, and the Stars, Stephen Brust
306. Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh
307. Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco
308. Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson
309. Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk
310. Camber of Culdi, Kathryn Kurtz
311. The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand
312. War and Rememberance, Herman Wouk
313. The Art of War, Sun Tzu
314. The Giver, Lois Lowry
315. The Telling, Ursula Le Guin
316. Xenogenesis (or Lilith's Brood), Octavia Butler (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, Imago)
317. A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold
318. The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold
319. The Aeneid, Publius Vergilius Maro (Vergil)
320. Hanta Yo, Ruth Beebe Hill
321. The Princess Bride, S. Morgenstern (or William Goldman)
322. Beowulf, Anonymous
323. The Sparrow, Maria Doria Russell
324. Deerskin, Robin McKinley
325. Dragonsong, Anne McCaffrey
326. Passage, Connie Willis
327. Otherland, Tad Williams
328. Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
329. Number the Stars, Lois Lowry
330. Beloved, Toni Morrison
331. Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, Christopher Moore
332. The mysterious disappearance of Leon, I mean Noel, Ellen Raskin
333. Summer Sisters, Judy Blume
334. The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo
335. The Island on Bird Street, Uri Orlev
336. Midnight in the Dollhouse, Marjorie Filley Stover
337. The Miracle Worker, William Gibson
338. The Genesis Code, John Case
339. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
340. Paradise Lost, John Milton
341. Phantom, Susan Kay
342. The Mummy or Ramses the Damned, Anne Rice
343. Anno Dracula, Kim Newman
344: The Dresden Files: Grave Peril, Jim Butcher
345: Tokyo Suckerpunch, Issac Adamson
346: The Winter of Magic's Return, Pamela Service
347: The Oddkins, Dean R. Koontz
348. My Name is Asher Lev, Chaim Potok
349. The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler
350. At Swim, Two Boys, Jaime O'Neill
351. Othello, by William Shakespeare
352. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas
353. The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
354. Sati, Christopher Pike
355. The Divine Comedy, Dante
356. The Apology, Plato
357. The Small Rain, Madeline L'Engle
358. The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Richard E Cytowick
359. 5 Novels, Daniel Pinkwater
360. The Sevenwaters Trilogy, Juliet Marillier
361. Girl with a Pearl Earring, Tracy Chevalier
362. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
363. Our Town, Thorton Wilder
364. Green Grass Running Water, Thomas King
335. The Interpreter, Suzanne Glass
336. The Moor's Last Sigh, Salman Rushdie
337. The Mother Tongue, Bill Bryson
338. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
339. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
340. The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
341. Pages for You, Sylvia Brownrigg
342. The Changeover, Margaret Mahy
343. Howl's Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
344. Angels and Demons, Dan Brown
345. Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo
346. Shosha, Isaac Bashevis Singer
347. Travels With Charley, John Steinbeck
348. The Diving-bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby
349. The Lunatic at Large by J. Storer Clouston
350. Time for Bed by David Baddiel
351. Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold
352. Quite Ugly One Morning by Christopher Brookmyre
353. The Bloody Sun by Marion Zimmer Bradley
354. Sewer, Gas, and Eletric by Matt Ruff
355. Jhereg by Steven Brust
356. So You Want To Be A Wizard by Diane Duane
357. Perdido Street Station, China Mieville
358. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
359. Road-side Dog, Czeslaw Milosz
360. The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
361. Neuromancer, William Gibson
362. The Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
363. A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr
364. The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
365. The Gunslinger, Stephen King
366. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
367. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
368. A Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
369. Ivanhoe, Walter Scott
370. The God Boy, Ian Cross
371. The Beekeeper's Apprentice, Laurie R. King
372. Finn Family Moomintroll, Tove Jansson
373. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
374. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick
375. Assassin's Apprentice, Robin Hobb
376. number9dream, David Mitchell
377. A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin
378. Five Quarters of the Orange, Joanne Harris
379. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
380. Einstein's Dreams, Alan Lightman
381. Dance On My Grave, Aidan Chambers
382. Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula Leguin
383. Hyperion, Dan Simmons
384. Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
385. Checkmate, Dorothy Dunnett
386. To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis
387. A Clash of Kings, George RR Martin
388. The Egyptian, Mika Waltari
389. Moab Is My Washpot, Stephen Fry
390. Contact, Carl Sagan
391. Mythago Wood, Robert Holdstock
392. Feersum Endjinn, Iain M. Banks
393. The Golden, Lucius Shepard
394. Decamerone, Boccaccio
395. Birdy, William Wharton
396. The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
397. The Foundation, Isaac Asimov
398. Il Principe, Machiavelli
399. Post Office, Charles Bukowski
400. Macht und Rebel, Abu Rasul
401. Grass, Sheri S. Tepper
402. The Long Walk, Richard Bachman
403. Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
404. The Joy Of Work, Scott Adams
405. Romeo, Elise Title
406. The Ninth Gate, Arturo Perez-Reverte
407. Memnoch the Devil, Anne Rice
408. Dead Famous, Ben Elton
409. Scarlett, Alexandra Ripley
410. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
411. Look to Windward, Iain M. Banks
412. The Colossus of Maroussi, Henry Miller
413. Branded, Alissa Quart
414. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
415. Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac
416. White Teeth, Zadie Smith
417. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
418. The little prince of Belleville, Calixthe Beyala
419. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
420. A King Lear of the Steppes, Ivan Turgenev
421. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
422. Memoirs of a Revolutionist, Peter Kropotkin
423. Hija de la Fortuna, Isabel Allende
424. Retrato en Sepia, Isabel Allende
425. Villette, Charlotte Brontë
426. Steppenwolf, Herman Hesse
427. Ubik, Philip K. Dick
428. Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler
429. Solaris, Stanislaw Lem
430. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
431. Nausea, Jean Paul Sartre
432. The Island of the Day Before, Umberto Eco
433. The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
434. The Angel Of The West Window, Gustav Meyrink
435. A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway
436. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
437. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
438. In the Eyes of Mr. Fury, Philip Ridley
439. Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks
440. Into the Forest, Jean Hegland
441. Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
442. The Giving Tree, Shel Silverstein
443. Go Ask Alice -Anonymous
444. Waiting For Godot, Samuel Becket
445. Blankets, Craig Thompson
446. The Girls' Guide To Hunting And Fishing, Melissa Banks
447. Voice of the Fire, Alan Moore
448. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
450. The Honorable Schoolboy, John le Carre
451. The Essential Ellison, Harlan Ellison
452. Gorky Park, Martin Cruz Smith
453. A Great Deliverance, Elizabeth George
454. Life Mask, Emma Donoghue
455. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
456. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
457. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
458. The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell

My Additions:
459. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
460. Don Quixote, Miguel Cervantes
461. Cyrano de Bergerac, Edmond Rostand

Total number of books read: 90 (including my additions ^^)

Random things or my weekend

Tue, 03 May 2005 01:43:29 GMT

Sean and I watched 'Kung Fu Hustle' with Sharon on Saturday. I'm not sure if I like it better than 'Shaolin Soccer,' but it was very very entertaining. All I can say is that Stephen Chow is a comic genius :)

I'm reading more of 'No Name' right now and I really wish I wasn't since it's getting harder and harder to read it sporadically. It's strange, but it reminds me of 'Vanity Fair' right now - although with Wilkie Collins it's not wise to think you know where the story is going. Just another reason why he's so cool ^^

Oh! we went to my aunt's house on Sunday and I was looking through her library to find something, and guess what I found lying around?

1. Easton Press edition of Jane Eyre.
2. Special leather-bound edition of The Hobbit (the really pretty green one that I always drool over).
3. Modern Library hardcover copy of Mansfield Park.

The last one was the nail in the coffin for me. I mean, I think I can safely say that I'm obsessed with all things Jane Austen, and here my aunt, who has only heard of her, has a pretty hardcover edition while I don't?! So, after my shock wore off a little, I faced a dilemma. I could either grab the books and run for the car, laughing maniacally, or I could shamelessly beg my aunt to let me "borrow" them. I finally decided the latter option would be best. Anyway, the story ended happily, since my aunt smiled and said I could have them. Looking back though, she probably though my sanity was at stake, because I basically ran toward her frantically waving the books around and screaming incoherent things like "Easton Press!" "Green Leather!" and "Mine!" Well, the moral of the story is that I now have three new lovely books to display on my woefully-inadequate bookshelf. *Goes to pet them* Really, R.O.D. is my reality.

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 20:23:04 GMT

My stupid flies decided that they'd rather stay in larval form than grow up (and instantly after writing that my mind is flooded with all things related to Peter Pan ^^), so I'm taking an lj break. If bingblot somehow survived my last post, this one should do the trick :-P

News update #1) My mom came back from India two days ago. My reaction: yay for real food again! No, actually I'm not that bad of a daughter - I help as much as I can - but then again, after tasting my cooking, I'm not surprised if my mom would rather cook herself ;) She said she really liked my uncle's new house since it's completely modernized, so yay for not having to live on a farm anymore. Then again, when I do think of the farm I think of my grandparents, and it's still so hard for me to realize that they're not there anymore. I mean, I know that they've passed on, but I don't think that fact will hit home until I actually go to India and see the change myself. But yeah, now we're just waiting for my dad to come home next week.

News update #2) I went to a Tori Amos concert Monday night with toriem. It was great to hear her without the band this time, although I'm still not sure what format I like best. Once again, I was blown away by her ability to play on two instruments and sing at the same time without making a single mistake. *sigh* I can barely play on one piano....not fair. The set list wasn't bad, although I would have loved to hear the set list for the San Francisco concert. On the plus side, she performed "Ruby Through the Looking Glass" and "Sweet the Sting," so that made me happy. Oh, and I really liked her solo version of "The Beekeeper" - the organ (I think) was really pretty. Oh, and before the concert she did a meet & greet behind Royce and I got to stand really close by, so that was fun :)

Quiz Time

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 02:01:56 GMT

You are "All Souls' Night".

Which Loreena McKennitt song are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Hayao Miyazaki

Fri, 18 Mar 2005 18:08:11 GMT

I was at the ghibli lj community and found this very long article from The New Yorker. It's a more personal look at Miyazaki, and oh so fascinating:

LETTER FROM JAPAN

THE AUTEUR OF ANIME

A visit with the elusive genius Hayao Miyazaki.

BY MARGARET TALBOT

The building that houses the Ghibli Museum would be unusual anywhere, but in greater Tokyo, where architectural exuberance usually takes angular, modernist form—black glass cubes, busy geometries of neon—it is particularly so. From the outside, the museum resembles an oversized adobe house, with slightly melted edges; its exterior walls are painted in saltwater-taffy shades of pink, green, and yellow. Inside, the museum looks like a child’s fantasy of Old Europe submitted to a rigorous Arts and Crafts sensibility. The floors are dark polished wood; stained-glass windows cast candy-colored light on whitewashed walls; a spiral stairway climbs—inside what looks like a giant Victorian birdcage—to a rooftop garden of wild grasses, over which a hammered-metal robot soldier stands guard. In the central hall, beneath a high ceiling, a web of balconies and bridges suggests a dream vision of a nineteenth-century factory. Wrought-iron railings contain balls of colored glass, and leaded-glass lanterns are attached to the walls by wrought-iron vines. In the entryway, a fresco on the ceiling depicts a sky of Fra Angelico blue and a smiling sun wreathed in fruits and vegetables.
Situated in a park on the outskirts of Tokyo, the Ghibli Museum is dedicated to the work of Hayao Miyazaki, the most beloved director in Japan today, and—especially since his film “Spirited Away” won the Oscar for best animated film, in 2002—perhaps the most admired animation director in the world. Miyazaki’s zeal for craft and beauty has set a new standard for animated film. With a few exceptions, we seldom know the names of directors of children’s films, but if you have seen a Miyazaki film you know his name. He not only draws characters and storyboards for the films he directs; he also writes the rich, strange screenplays, which blend Japanese mythology with modern psychological realism. He is, in short, an auteur of children’s entertainment, perhaps the world’s first.
Miyazaki designed the Ghibli himself. The museum was partly founded by his movie studio—after which it is named—and is now a hugely popular, self-sustaining attraction. Though the museum is intended for children, who might be supposed not to care so much for beauty per se, it is, in nearly every detail, beautiful. A reproduction of the cat-shaped bus in Miyazaki’s “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988), which is large enough for children to climb on, has glowing golden eyes, and fur both soft and bristly, like a caterpillar’s. The museum showcases not only the visual splendor of Miyazaki’s films but also what inspires them: among other things, a sense of wonder about the natural world; a fascination with flight; a curiosity about miniature or hidden realms. When I visited the museum this summer, it struck me as one of the few kid-oriented attractions I know that take seriously the notion of kids as natural aesthetes—in part because it portrays for them a creative life that they might plausibly lead as adults.
One typical exhibit, “Where a Film Begins,” depicts a room in which a young boy dreams up an idea for a movie. The room is supposed to be a study inherited from the imaginary boy’s grandfather, and the mise en scene captures an idealized, slightly antique coziness; a glass jar of colored pencils sits atop a wooden desk, and worn tapestry pillows rest on a library chair. The display conjures a creative young mind’s half-glimpsed notions and sudden enthusiasms: models of a flying dinosaur and a red biplane hang from the ceiling; thick books about birds and fish and the history of aviation occupy the bookshelves. As sentimental as it is, this room makes you think with pleasure about the dreamy stage that often precedes the makings of art. Standing amid its congenial clutter, a child visitor can easily grasp how it is, as Miyazaki writes in the museum’s catalogue, that “imagination and premonition” and “sketches and partial images” can become “the core of a film.” Indeed, “Spirited Away,” the story of a sullen ten-year-old girl who finds herself transported from an abandoned theme park into a ravishing spirit world, was inspired in part by Miyazaki’s own visit to a peculiar outdoor attraction—a Tokyo museum where old Japanese buildings, including a splendid bathhouse, had been carted from their original locations.
Miyazaki is detail-oriented to the point of obsession—he traveled to Portugal just to look at a painting by Hieronymus Bosch that had long haunted him, and sent Michiyo Yasuda, the color designer for his films, to Alsace to scout hues for his latest movie—and so, too, is his museum. For the in-house theatre, which shows short films that he makes especially for the museum (including a sequel to “My Neighbor Totoro”), he hired an acoustic designer to create an uncommonly gentle sound system. Miyazaki wanted the opposite of the “tendency in recent Hollywood films,” which is “to use heavy bass to try to pull the audience into the film.” He thinks that movie theaters can be claustrophobic, even overwhelming places for young children, so he wanted his theatre to have windows that let in some natural light, bench-style seats that a child can’t sink into, and films that make them “sigh in relaxation.” Miyazaki fondly remembered the days when cigarette smoke in a theatre could draw your attention to the beam of light stretching from the projector, so he placed the projector in a glass booth that protrudes into the seating area. “I want to show children that moving images are enjoyed by having huge reels revolving, an electric light shining on the film, and a lot of complicated things being done,” he explains in the museum’s catalogue. Colleagues told him that projecting the films digitally would help preserve them, but Miyazaki relished the idea that, eventually, viewers might see “worn film with ‘falling-rain’ scratches on the screen.”
To plan the menu for a museum café, Miyazaki hired not a professional chef but a woman who was a good home cook and had raised four children: he wanted homemade bread; katosand, breaded pork-cutlet sandwiches; and fresh vegetable soup. When he heard that children were prying open the little windows on a model of a house in the museum, he was delighted, and placed pictures inside the house for kids to see. He painted several large murals—one of a commissary, another of an old animation studio—himself. Some of Miyazaki’s ideas could not be realized. He had wanted to make a mountain of dirt at the Ghibli Museum—a mountain with muddy, slippery stretches where children “would fall and get scolded by their mothers.” He had liked the idea, too, of a spiral staircase that gently swayed w hen you walked up it. These notions were eventually deemed unsafe or impractical, but, overall, the museum still feels stubbornly, and joyfully, idiosyncratic.
Despite Miyazaki’s fame—his latest film, “Howl’s Moving Castle,” grossed a record $14.5 million in its first week of release in Japan—he almost never grants formal interviews. Yet a few days after I visited the museum I was lucky enough to run into him doing a tour of his nearby studio, and he began chatting amiably. It immediately became apparent why he was compelled to make imaginary worlds. A spry, slim man of sixty-three, with silver hair, parenthesis-shaped dimples, and thick, expressive black eyebrows, Miyazaki betrayed a profound dissatisfaction with modern life. He complained, “Everything is so thin and shallow and fake.” He lamented the fact that children had become disconnected from nature, and fulminated about the deadening impact of video games on the imagination. Only half in jest, he said that he was hoping for the day when “developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer, and wild grasses take over.” And the conversation grew only darker from there. A man disappointed, even infuriated, by the ugliness surrounding him, Miyazaki is devoted to making whatever he can control—a museum, each frame of a film—as gorgeous as it can be.

John Lasseter, the director of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” is an ardent fan, and a friend, of Miyazaki’s. He recently visited the Ghibli Museum with his sons. “You know how when you’re watching a movie, you’ll say, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen that before’? With his films, that happens in every sequence,” he said. “And he has such a big heart; his characters and his worlds are so rich. The museum is like having a place to visit these worlds. It’s like when Disneyland first opened, in the fifties—visitors must have felt, in a very pure way, like they had walked inside a Disney film.”
People have been invoking Miyazaki and Disney in the same breath for a long time, and in some ways it is an apt comparison. Miyazaki films are as popular in Japan as Disney films are in America. (“Spirited Away” Is Japan’s highest-grossing film ever.) Miyazaki-inspired merchandise—such as plush versions of the Totoro, a rotund woodland creature of Miyazaki’s devising—is nearly as ubiquitous in Japan as Disney stuff is here. Like Walt Disney, Hayao Miyazaki started his professional career drawing animation cels and rose to head an independent cartoon empire with a tentacular hold on kids’ imaginations.
Yet, in themes and style, Miyazaki’s eight films do not much resemble the Disney oeuvre. Unlike Disney movies—so many of which are based on familiar fairy tales—Miyazaki’s films are either original stories or his adaptations of fairly obscure works. Though they contain set pieces of suspenseful action—he is particularly fond of airship battles and dramatic rescues in the sky—they have a much quieter, less frenetic feel. In part, this is because they are not musicals: no brassy showstoppers or treacly ballads to interrupt the narrative. Moreover, his films rarely have villains of the scenery-chewing, extravagantly blackhearted Disney variety. Miyazaki sometimes forgoes villains altogether—as in “Totoro” and the charming “Kiki’s Delivery Service” (1989), the story of an apprentice witch—making you forget what a fixture they are in other children’s films. His is not a black-and-white moral universe; he has sympathy for the vain and the gluttonous and the misguided, a bemused tolerance for the poor creatures we all are. Some of his characters can be threatening or unappealing, but also complex and capable of change—like the moody young wizard in “Howl’s Moving Castle,” which will be released here later this year. It might be said that Miyazaki’s malevolent characters are capable of redemption, except that redemption is too Christian an idea: it’s more that they prove capable of a kind of shape-shifting, which allows them to reveal a different facet of themselves.
The absence of villains also means a refreshing absence of perfect and perfectly pretty heroines, their lives arcing towards romance. Miyazaki’s protagonists are usually girls, and though they are likable and loyal, they tend to be ordinary children—which makes them extraordinary in the world of children’s films. Miyazaki dwells on the latent phase of childhood, so that his girl characters are often close friends with boys. And they can be bratty as well as grievously sad, as well as plucky and resourceful.
In “My Neighbor Totoro,” one of the loveliest children’s films ever made, two sisters, Mei and Satsuki, are not idealized; they are at once goofy, brave, and vulnerable, like a lot of kids. The sisters have just moved with their father to a new house in rural Japan. Gradually, the two girls discover a host of strange but benign woodland creatures: fuzzy little soot sprites that hang out in old houses and hide when you turn on the lights; the plump, whiskered Totoros, who live in the roots of a giant camphor tree; and the marvelous cat bus, with its headlight eyes, caramel-colored stripes, and extra legs that function as wheels. (In a 1993 televised discussion between Miyazaki and the director Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa mentioned how much he admired the sweetly surreal cat bus.) There is a gentle hint of Shintoism in all this: the father, an anthropologist, respectfully accepts the notion that the forest is presided over by spirits, though he is no longer able to see them, as his children can. Unlike the animals in most American cartoons, these creatures are not excessively anthropomorphized; they don’t speak, which somehow makes them seem both more plausible and more dignified, and which gives the girls the delightful challenge of interpreting them. In fact, the film is focused on dignifying the girls’ imaginations, honoring their ability to partake in a fantasy that is both comforting and fortifying—for we gradually learn that they are separated from their mother, who is ill and in the hospital.
The tone of the film is dreamy and playful—it has the sun-soaked colors and languid pace of a summer afternoon in the country—but the way it melds such elements with a subtle psychological treatment of the children’s anxiety over their mother makes it a radical film. When four-year-old Mei learns that her mother won’t be coming home for a visit as planned, her grief takes the form of a tantrum. She howls—her mouth a black cavern, her arms stiff. (In Disney movies, children weep decorously or break into poignant song.) Satsuki, panicked and struggling to be the mature sister, shouts at her not to be so “stupid”; Mei runs away to the hospital to find her mother. Both girls are ultimately rescued by the cat bus, which opens up a warm, golden, womb-like interior to them—an entrancing image of solace—and bounds across the countryside to return them to their father. Miyazaki is a master at conveying emotions as a child would experience them: obliquely, often physically, with a thread of magical thinking that promotes resilience.
Miyazaki’s films are also striking for their preoccupation with the environment, and their not entirely metaphorical suggestion that the natural world is capable of remembering what’s been done to it. (He believes that we harbor “memories in our DNA from before we took the form of humans.”) “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind” (1984) is set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans live huddled on the edge of a toxic forest. Is heroine finds beauty in the lush, strangely colored undergrowth and the giant cicada-like insects that dwell there, nursing a grudge against the humans who’ve poisoned their habitat.
Miyazaki began his animation career in the nineteen-sixties, at a time when the economic miracle that had swiftly transformed postwar Japan into one of the strongest economies in the world was, almost as swiftly, obliterating its countryside. In the nineteen-eighties, the government cleaned up the worst industrial pollution, but Japan is still a country where developers (especially golf-resort planners) have free rein, where most people prefer nature in tamed and miniaturized form (bonsai, Zen gardens, lavishly packaged tiny melons), and where few places are untouched by commerce (there are vending machines on Mt. Fuji). “Spirited Away” contains a memorable scene in which a gloppy-looking creature—the spirit of a polluted river—comes to the bathhouse to be cleaned; a lot of dirty, foul-smelling labor is required. For this sequence, Miyazaki drew on his own memories of cleaning up a river—and pulling things like bicycles out of the muck.
Miyazaki’s movies are threaded with other personal obsessions, just as samurai imagery pervades Kurosawa’s work. Pigs, for example, turn up in many films. (“The behavior of pigs is very similar to human behavior,” Miyazaki has said. “I really like pigs at heart, for their strengths as well as their weaknesses.”) A 1992 film, “Porco Rosso,” tells the story of a pig that flies—he’s a pilot who works the skies over the Adriatic before the Second World War. In one tender scene, the pig recalls the air battle in which his fellow flying aces just kept ascending—floating ever upward into a cold empyrean death—while he, a more earthbound creature, could not face such self-sacrifice. Next month, Disney, the American distributor of Miyazaki’s films, will release a video version of “Porco,” whose title character will be voiced by Michael Keaton. It will also make available an English version of “Nausicaa,” with voices by Uma Thurman and Patrick Stewart. With these two releases, the entirety of Miyazaki’s eccentric output will be available in good English versions for the first time.

John Lasseter told me that when the animators at Pixar get stuck on a project they go into a screening room and watch a Miyazaki film. The irony of this admiration is that Miyazaki is an old-fashioned artist who has rejected the computerized path that many animation studios, including Pixar, have taken. (Last year, Disney closed down its hand-drawn-animation unit, in Florida, in favor of digitally rendered work.) Though Miyazaki incorporates some computer graphics in his films, he insists that all his characters and backgrounds be drawn by hand.
Toshio Suzuki, a wry, articulate man with close-cropped silver hair and an elfin grin, is Miyazaki’s producer and longtime collaborator. “When silents moved to talkies, Chaplin held out the longest,” he told me. “When black-and-white went to color, Kurosawa held out the longest. Miyazaki feels he should be the one to hold out the longest when it comes to computer animation.” Miyazaki lavishes particular attention on his backgrounds, which are full of painterly flourishes. I’d never really noticed the colors in an animated film until I’d noticed his. Skies and seas are saturated in strangely emotional blues; wet halos surround the red lanterns and absinthe-green signs in “Spirited Away”; in “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” the young witch’s dress isn’t quite black—it’s the smudged purple of the darkest plums.
Even Miyazaki’s most outlandishly imagined characters have an unnerving realism. The eerie, poignant No Face in “Spirited Away” is a creature who wears a mask, whimpers softly, and eats everything in sight, greedily eager for communion with others; he glides along like an inky rain cloud, and expands just as ominously. In the same film, a flock of white paper birds flash through the sky: they are like origami, only sharp-edged, and capable of drawing blood.
Miyazaki’s starting point for a film, Suzuki said, is often a small visual detail. Five years ago, when Miyazaki read a Japanese translation of the book “Howl’s Moving Castle,” by Diana Wynne Jones, a British author, he was immediately taken with the idea of a castle that ambulates around the countryside. “The book never explains how it moves, and that triggered his imagination,” Suzuki recalled. “He wanted to solve that problem. The first thing he did on the film was to start to design the castle. How would it move? It must have legs, and he was obsessed with settling this question. Would they be Japanese warrior legs? Human-type feet? One day, he suddenly said, ‘Let’s go with chicken feet!’ That was, for him, the breakthrough.” Suzuki thinks of Miyazaki’s approach as uniquely Japanese: “In traditional Japanese architecture, you start with one room—maybe the alcove, where you hang some pictures. You spend a lot of time trying to pick the right shelves, the right little pillar, what kind of handles the drawers will have. Only when you finish that room do you worry about the next. In the West, you start from the general and go to the specific. A Hitchcock movie might start off with a panorama of the city, and then the camera closes in on a street, and a house, and then the stairway inside. If you’re a Japanese filmmaker, you might start with the railing on the stairway. When Miyazaki makes a film, he is thinking, like with this new one, O.K., first off, here are two very important points to settle: Does Sophie, the little girl in the movie, have braids or not? Are they long or short?”
But it wouldn’t be quite right to describe Miyazaki’s approach as wholly Japanese. As with fantasy writers in the British tradition, from C.S. Lewis to J.K. Rowling, Miyazaki makes the details of the worlds he creates concrete and coherent, so that we might better suspend our belief for the bigger leaps of fantasy. This devotion to realism, Suzuki acknowledges, “is rare in Japanese animation,” which tends to revel in the freedom from earthly laws that the medium allows. Miyazaki can be steely in pursuit of this goal. In a Japanese television documentary about “Spirited Away,” he is shown at a meeting with his young staff, explaining how they are to draw certain images based on his storyboards. “The dragon is supposed to fall from down the air vent, but, being a dragon, it doesn’t land on the ground,” Miyazaki says. “It attaches itself to the wall, like a gecko. And then—ow!—it falls!—thud!—it should fall like a serpent. Have you ever seen a snake fall out of a tree?” He explains that it “doesn’t slither, but holds its position.” He looks around at the animators, most of whom appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are taking notes, looking grave: nobody has seen a snake fall out of a tree.
Miyazaki goes on to describe how the dragon—a protean creature named Haku, who sometimes takes this form—struggles when he is pinned down. “This will be tricky,” Miyazaki says, smiling. “If you want to get an idea, go to an eel restaurant and see how an eel is gutted.” The director wriggles around in his seat, imitating the action of a recalcitrant eel. “Have you ever seen an eel resisting?” Miyazaki asks.
“No, actually,” admits a young man with hipster glasses, an orange sweatshirt, and an indoor pallor.
Miyazaki groans. “Japanese culture is doomed!” he says. When he describes a scene in which his heroine, Chihiro, forces open the dragon’s mouth to give it medicine, he says the animators should be thinking, as they draw, of what it’s like to feed a dog a pill, when you tip its head to the side, and “the dog clenches its teeth and its gums stick out.” There is more note-taking, but no sign that this might be a familiar experience.
“Any of you ever had a dog?” Miyazaki asks.
“I had a cat,” somebody volunteers.
“This is pathetic,” Miyazaki says. The documentary shows the chastened staff making a field trip that night to a veterinary hospital, videotaping a golden retriever’s gums and teeth, and then returning to the studio to study the video.

It seems almost inevitable that the world’s greatest animator should be Japanese. Over the past decade or so, Japan has become, outside the United States, the most successful exporter of children’s pop culture. With television shows like “Pokemon” and “Yu-Gi-Oh!,” which have huge casts of creatures accompanied by their own stats and trading cards, the Japanese figured out how to tap into children’s mania for collecting and classifying. With shows like “Hamtaro” (“Little Hamsters, Big Adventures”) and “Sailor Moon” (in which giggly, shopaholic schoolgirls turn into saviors of the world), they got the idea that overmuscled superheroes, as alluring as they are, can seem out of reach, whereas smaller creatures that are simultaneously cute and powerful are easy to identify with. With Hello Kitty—the blank, big-headed cartoon cat—they proved that innocence was an aesthetic that could be pushed to extremes. Sanrio, the company that manufactures tens of thousands of Hello Kitty products—from pink vinyl coin purses to packets of “sweet squid chunks” bearing her wide-eyed likeness—is a billion-dollar business.
One reason the Japanese are so good at this kind of thing is that many adults in Japan are curiously attuned to cuteness. Even in a cosmopolitan city like Tokyo, kawaii—or “cute”—culture is everywhere: road signs are adorned with adorable raccoons and bunnies; stuffed animals sit on salarymen’s desks; Hello Kitty charms are offered for sale at Shinto shrines. It also a culture where anime (cartoons) and manga (comic books) are both widely consumed and, in some cases, highly regarded as art and literature. No one knows exactly why comic books are so popular in Japan; one theory is that they grew out of woodblock prints and seemed naturally connected to a broader artistic tradition that produced some of its best work on ephemeral, everyday objects like fans and screens. In any case, manga make up nearly half of the book sales in Japan, and you see people of all ages reading them on the subway. Animated programs, of which ninety or so air on Japanese TV every week, have long been shown in prime time, on the assumption that families will watch them together. And while much anime and manga is intended for adults—violent sci-fi and pornography, as well as contemplative family dramas—the market for children remains the largest. Although much of Japan’s kid-oriented anime has been exported to the U.S., a great deal—such as “Anpanman,” a hugely popular series about a bean-paste-stuffed bread roll—has not. (A fan Web site notes, “To a non-Japanese person, the concept of a living bread superman who fights giant germs and feeds the hungry with pieces of his head may seem bizarre.”)
Miyazaki distances himself from all this commercialism. He doesn’t care for a lot of contemporary Japanese animation. “Animators are getting too old,” he told me. “Animation used to be for young people. Now people in their forties are the ones who are supporting it.” When he watches movies at all these days, he said, he prefers documentaries, especially “the simple ones that just try to show other people and other civilizations. They have their own distortions, but, still, I like them.” He is a leftist who thinks that too many people are making money off children, who frets over the spectre of virtual reality “eating into our emotional life,” and who wishes that we could drastically reduce the number of video games and DVDs for sale. He worries that he is contributing to the problem by making anime himself, and isn’t keen on promoting his own films, which is one reason that he resists interviews.
Several people who know Miyazaki told me that mothers frequently approach him to tell him that their child watches “Totoro” or “Kiki” every day, and he always acts horrified. “Don’t do that!” he will say. “Let them see it once a year, at most!” In an essay he wrote in 1987, he was already concerned: “No matter how we may think of ourselves as conscientious, it is true that images such as anime stimulate only the visual and auditory sensations of children, and deprive them of the world they go out to find, touch, and taste.” And yet he would not be quite the figure he is—recognized by children on the street, in a position to make any movie he wants—in a country that did not honor animation and fetishize childhood quite so much.

Hayao Miyazaki was born in Tokyo in 1941. His father helped run a family-owned factory that made parts for military airplanes. His mother, like the mother in “Totoro,” was sickly and often bedridden, but she was also smart and strong-willed. “My grandfather was affluent, and he knew how to live,” Goro Miyazaki, one of the director’s two sons, recalled. I spoke with him last summer at the Ghibli Museum, where he is the curator. “He liked to have fun—he liked to go to restaurants and movies. My grandmother was very intelligent and not particularly interested in going out. She had her own mind and she didn’t like to spend money. She exerted a huge influence on Miyazaki. When he was young, he had all these questions—big ideas—and it was his mother he could talk to about them. He was one of four boys, and he was the closest to her.”
His friend Suzuki was more direct. “He was a mama’s boy,” he said. Suzuki thinks the fact that there is always an old woman in Miyazaki’s films, and that she is often a trenchant character, is a tribute to the director’s mother. “When he was small, and his mother was ill, the four brothers took turns helping out with the chores. But he loved her the best of all of them.” (Like the tough grannies in his movies, Miyazaki’s mother surprised everyone by living into old age.)
Neither of Miyazaki’s parents was artistic. “My grandfather liked buying paintings, and he liked showing them off to guests,” Goro Miyazaki said. “But I don’t know that he had any particular artistic understanding. It’s a mystery where Miyazaki’s talents came from. He had a kind of a complex toward his brothers, and that gave him a strong motivation to succeed at animation. His brothers went into business; they were more influenced by their father. But success wasn’t easy for him. He wasn’t dexterous, and he really had to work to achieve what he has.”
At Gakushuin University, in Tokyo, Miyazaki studied economics and political science. But he also joined a children’s literature group, where members read and discussed fantasy fiction. As a senior in high school, Miyazaki had sneaked out to see the first Japanese animated film made in color, “The Legend of White Snake,” when he was supposed to be studying for his entrance exams. The film had a big impact on him, he wrote years later, because while he could say that it was “cheap melodrama,” its naked emotionalism touched him. “My soul was moved and I stumbled back home in the snow that had just started. Comparing my pitiful situation to the characters’ earnestness, I was ashamed of myself, and cried all night.” At the time, he had been trying to write a sophisticated, absurdist manga, but he realized, somewhat to his embarrassment, that he was more interested in creating something sincere.
In 1963,Miyazaki went to work as a rookie animator at Toei Animation, in Tokyo, which primarily made cartoons for television. The company’s animation had a particular style—the style we associate with anime in general, though not so much with Miyazaki—and it derived mainly from economic necessity. Japanese studios were not the wealthy behemoths that Disney and Warner Bros. were, and they saved money by drawing fewer cels. The result was jerkier, with more stilted movements and longer closeups, in which faces often filled the screens: a kind of cut-rate Expressionism. The big, round eyes that Westerners associate with anime became signatures then—the legacy of Osamu Tezuka, the comic artist who, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, drew Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion. (One theory is that Tezuka was influenced by Betty Boop, who was very popular in Japan.) Miyazaki admired the soulful Tezuka, but his influences were more cosmopolitan: he loved Chagall, Bosch, and the Russian animators Lev Atamanov and Yuri Norstein, who made bewitching animations based on Russian folktales. His image of Japan was so shaken by memories of the country’s postwar devastation that for years afterward, he told Kurosawa, his imagination turned reflexively to Europe—a fantasy version, stitched together in his mind, that had never experienced the Second World War. (In his films, Europe looks like a harmonious amalgam of Scandinavia, Alsace, and the Amalfi coast, with a bit of Dalmatia tossed in.)
At Toei, Miyazaki met Akemi Ota, an animator, whom he married in 1965, and who decided to stay at home when the couple’s two sons were young. (Goro, who was a landscape designer before going to work at the Ghibli Museum, was born in 1967; Keisuke, an artist who makes intricate wood engravings, was born two years later.) On his first job at Toei, Miyazaki also met Isao Takahata, an animation director with an intellctual bent, who had graduated from the University of Tokyo with a degree in French literature; and Michiyo Yasuda, the gifted color designer, who went on to work on most of his films. The three of them were officials of the animation workers’ union, and spent a lot of time during union meetings discussing their own artistic futures, which they were determined to entwine. “It wasn’t too philosophical—more practical,” Takahata recalled. “ ‘O.K., you’re drawing a robot. It’s got to be heavy. What kind of holes does it make in the ground when it moves?’ We talked a lot about the challenges of depicting things correctly.”
In the seventies, Miyazaki and Takahata both took jobs at Nippon Animation. Between 1974 and 1979, Miyazaki was a key artist or scene designer for five of Takahata’s television series, including “Heidi,” and worked on a film for television that Takahata directed: “Panda! Go Panda!,” a funny, sweet movie featuring a spirited, pigtailed, pug-faced little girl—the precursor of Miyazaki’s heroines. “She was modeled on Pippi Longstocking,” Yasuo Ohtsuha, an animator who worked with Miyazaki on several projects, said. “Miyazaki wanted to draw an audacious, energetic little girl—they’re just a lot more fun to draw. We thought of her as a girl from American or European literature, because Japanese girls aren’t—or weren’t, anyway—all that high-spirited.”
Miyazaki is a workaholic, and that tendency was in full force by then. “When I was small, he would come home at 2 A.M. and get up at 8 A.M., and do TV series all year round,” Goro Miyazaki recalled. “It was very rare for me to see him. Every morning, I’d look into my father’s bedroom and see him sleeping. Just to check: ‘O.K., he’s here. He’s in the house.’” When, in his early thirties, Goro started working closely with his father for the first time, on the Ghibli Museum, he felt that he “understood his creative processes so well precisely because he’d been an absent father. When I was a child, I studied him. To learn more about him, I watched his movies obsessively. I read everything that was written about him. I studied his drawings.” With a rueful chuckle, he added, “I think that I am the No. 1 expert on Hayao Miyazaki.”
When I asked Goro if he’d ever talked with his father about what he’d learned about him, he laughed and said no, he couldn’t picture that happening. He was closer to his mother, he said, who would take him hiking and mountain climbing, and who taught him the names of trees, flowers, and birds. But Goro did remember that after his father finished a production the family would celebrate with an eel dinner at a restaurant. When he pestered his father for toys, Miyazaki had shown him how to whittle instead—an ability for which he was now grateful. It left him with the feeling that no matter where he was he could make something with his hands.

As driven as Miyazaki was, he did not achieve fame overnight. He was in his late thirties by the time he had his first directing credit—for a Japanese TV series, “Future Boy Conan,” as it’s called, awkwardly, in English. And it wasn’t until he wrote the manga “Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind,” and then received funding to make it into a movie, that he became widely known.
Toshio Suzuki met Miyazaki in 1978, when Suzuki was working as the editor of Animage, an animation magazine. He had been assigned to interview Miyazaki, but Miyazaki refused. “So I showed up at the studio, without phoning first, and Miyazaki ignored me,” Suzuki told me. “He said only one thing: ‘I’m busy. Go home.’ I brought over a chair and sat down next to him. He said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m not going home until you say something to me.’ I sat there until late at night, when he went home. The next day, I went back and sat in the same place. On the third night, he finally spoke to me—to ask advice. He asked about whether there was a specific term for this kind of car chase he was doing. I told him what the name was; we talked about other things, and after a while he consented to an interview. But then we tried to take a photo. He didn’t want a photo. Only from the back. So I got pissed. I ran the shot and I did a little caption for it: ‘A very rare photo of the back of Hayao Miyazaki’s head.’ That was my revenge. Starting from that day, we’ve been working together for twenty-five years, and I have seen him nearly every day.”
In 1985, Tokuma Shoten, the publishing company, which had released the manga of “Nausicaa,” opened an anime studio, Ghibli; Toshio Suzuki, Isao Takahata, and Hayao Miyazaki became its directors. The name was Miyazaki’s choice; ghibli is a word that Italian pilots once used to describe a wind blowing from the Sahara. To Miyazaki, the name conveyed a message, almost a threat—something like “Let’s blow a sensational wind through the Japanese animation world,” Suzuki recalled, in a speech years later. The studio would produce animation that, as Suzuki put it in his speech, “illustrates the joys and sorrows of life as they really are” and, as Miyazaki put it in the Ghibli Museum catalogue, shows “how complex the world is and how beautiful the world should be.”
Miyazaki threw himself into the project single-mindedly. “He would work from nine until four-thirty in the morning,” Suzuki said. “And he didn’t take holidays. He changed quite a bit when he turned fifty—he figured maybe he should take off a Sunday now and then. Now he tends to leave at midnight.” (Miyazaki told me, “I don’t take long vacations. I don’t have the time. My idea of a vacation is a nap.”)
Studio Ghibli’s first film was “Castle in the Sky” (1986), a fable featuring a gutsy girl from another planet, a gallant boy from a Welsh mining village, a magical crystal pennant, and a variety of flying machines that look like futuristic imaginings from the nineteenth century. Neither it not “Totoro” nor “Grave of the Fireflies” (1988)—an almost unbearably sad film, directed by Takahata, about two Japanese children fleeing fire-bombing raids in the last days of the Second World War—did well at the box office, though they received great reviews. But the “Totoro” characters had staying power: two years after the film was released, Ghibli licensed the merchandising of Totoro stuffed animals, and, when sales took off, the studio was able to cover any deficit in its production costs. And in 1989 the studio had its first hit, “Kiki’s Delivery Service.” (The apprentice witch, modeled on Suzuki’s teen-age daughter, leaves her family for a time to live in a coastal city in Miyazaki’s Europe, starting her own business delivering parcels by broomstick.) “Kiki” was seen by 2.6 million people, becoming the most popular domestic movie in Japan that year.
At that point, Miyazaki floated the idea of disbanding the studio. “He felt that after directing three films, made with the same group of people, the human relationships had become too tangled,” Suzuki recalled. He eventually convinced Miyazaki that closing shop would be a mistake. (Suzuki is perhaps one of the few people, if not the only person, who can talk Miyazaki into anything. “He knows how to handle Miyazaki,” Takahata said. “He knows that it’s like dealing with a child: when you wan something, you say the opposite, because you know he’ll say no to your suggestion.”)
The studio became successful to the point that the staff was working on two projects at once. Miyazaki, Suzuki recalled in his speech, “came up with a proposition: Let’s build a new studio!” He went on, “It was the Miyazaki way: when facing a problem, try to find a breakthrough by coming up with a much bigger problem.”
The day I spoke with Suzuki, he was wearing black jeans and a T-shirt, and chain-smoking. “Young people, unknown people with aspirations—they are very pure, honest, and so on,” he said. “Miyazaki saw that I am not that type, and he liked that.” Suzuki is the public face of Ghibli. He, not Miyazaki, attended the Venice Film Festival, in September, where “Howl’s Moving Castle” won an award for technical achievement. He’s funny and shrewd, and he fills in for the interview-shy Miyazaki with flair. Suzuki told me, “Just recently, Miyazaki-san came into my room at night and we had a talk—just the two of us. He said, with a very serious look, ‘What are we going to do about Studio Ghibli? There aren’t many young talents out there.’ He said, ‘I think I can do this another ten years.’ I said ‘You can? Another ten years?’ Japanese fans tell him, ‘Please keep making animation.’ I’m the only person in Japan who hopes he will retire soon.”
Takahata and Miyazaki, who worked together so closely for years, have lately moved in different directions. Takahata is more interested in literary and film theory, more cerebral and less enamored of magic. His films are not for children, and “Grave of the Fireflies” could easily have been a live-action film. Takahata is sixty-nine, but he has a formidable head of dark hair and a handsome, unwrinkled face. “With Miyazaki, you have to totally believe in the world of the film,” Takahata told me. “He is demanding that the audience enter the world he has created completely. The audience is being asked to surrender.” He paused. “I want the audience to have a little distance. My relationship with him is limited now. We are friends but we don’t have a direct working relationship.”
For many viewers, of course, surrendering to Miyazaki is a pleasure. Weeks after I saw “Spirited Away,” I was still thinking of the scene in which Chihiro takes a train trip, in the company of No Face, to seek out a witch who may help her save her friend. The sequence is both emotionally precise and fantastical. It’s like every solitary journey you’ve ever taken, when you felt lonely and a little exalted, but it is also deeply strange, for the train glides, stately and surreal, over a translucent blue sea, while the sky slowly ripples through the possibilities of a sunset, from the pink of crushed petals to a soft, forgiving black.

On the walls of one of the Studio Ghibli buildings is a kind of joke about Miyazaki’s fear of invasion: two aluminum poles and two red hard hats on pegs. The staff was free to borrow them, Miyazaki explained to his colleagues, in order to repel unwanted visitors. But during my visit to the studio Steve Alpert, an American who heads Ghibli’s overseas division, showed me around, and in an upstairs room I saw Miyazaki hanging out with a couple of animators. He had shown the completed “Howl’s Moving Castle” to his wife and the Ghibli staff that day. He was in a relaxed mood, and when I started asking him questions, through a translator, he started answering.
Miyazaki’s hair was parted on the side, and a luxuriant hank of it fell over one eye periodically, Veronica Lake style. He wore big oblong glasses, gray slacks, a light blue short-sleeved shirt, and straw-soled sandals with white socks. At first glance, he seemed full of suppressed amusement—even jolly.
Today, Miyazaki announced cheerfully, marked the last time that he would watch “Howl’s Moving Castle.” “I never watch my films after they’ve left the studio, because I’ve lived it and I know exactly where I’ve made mistakes,” he said. “I’d have to sort of cringe and hide, just close my eyes. ‘Oh, right, I remember that mistake, and that one.’ You don’t have to go through that torment over and over.” The remark was punctuated with a giddy, slightly maniacal laugh—more of a giggle, really. In any case, he said, he was already planning his next project: a short film for the museum. “I have several I have to make. What can I do? I have to keep feeding my staff,” he said, gesturing toward a group that had gathered around us. “Look at all the mouths I’ve got to feed here.”
I asked him what had attracted him to “Howl’s Moving Castle.” He said, “Sophie, the girl, is given a spell and transformed into an old woman. It would be a lie to say that turning young again would mean living happily ever after. I didn’t want to say that. I didn’t want to make it seem like turning old was such a bad thing—the idea that was maybe she’ll have learned something by being old for a while, and, when she actually is old, make a better grandma. Anyway, as Sophie gets older, she gets more pep. And she says what’s on her mind. She is transformed from a shy, mousy little girl into a blunt, honest woman. It’s not a motif you see often, and, especially with an old woman taking up the whole screen, it’s a big theatrical risk. But it’s a delusion that being young means you’re happy.”
Miyazaki puffed on a cigarette. “Some people may say this girl is a lot like Chihiro. Maybe. But I don’t fear that. I think I’d lose a lot more by trying to avoid repeating myself than by just repeating myself. Some people are always trying radically new material. I know what I want, and I’ll continue with it.” He went on, “I don’t have much patience for calculating and intellectualizing anymore. Nobody knows everything. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. So my conclusion is, don’t try to be too smart and wise. Why does anyone feel the way they do? Why is somebody depressed? Or angry? Even if you do have a therapist, you’re never going to figure it out. You’re not going to solve it. Besides, every trauma is an important part of you.”
Miyazaki cradled the back of his head with his hand. “I’ve done things in this movie I wouldn’t have done ten years ago,” he said. “It has a big climax in the middle, and it ends with a resolution. It’s old-fashioned storytelling. Romantic.” Indeed, “Howl’s Moving Castle” has the first kiss ever in a Miyazaki film, and contains more of an overt love story. “Howl’s” doesn’t have the elegiac beauty of “Spirited Away,” nor does it have the emotional delicacy of “Totoro.” (The Howl character, a vain, reclusive boy wizard who dresses in capes and epauletted jackets, reminded me somehow of Michael Jackson.) But it does have the director’s commanding sense of magic, along with a windy, wildflower-strewn Alpine landscape, and an amusingly cranky fire demon named Calcifer. And the living, breathing, clanking castle is one of Miyazaki’s most marvelous designs: it looks like a giant teakettle bristling with turrets and balconies, and shifts about in its metal skin like a rhino, striding across the countryside on, yes, chicken feet.
The afternoon was warm, and outside the window cicadas were making a racket. Miyazaki continued to look twinkly, but nonetheless he began airing a briskly dire view of the world. “I’m not jealous of young people,” he said. “They’re not really free.” I asked him what he meant. “They’re raised on virtual reality. And it’s not like it’s any better in the countryside. You go to the country and kids spend more time staring at DVDs than kids do in the city. I have a place in the mountains, and a friend of mine runs a small junior-high school nearby. Out of twenty-seven pupils, he told me, nine do their schoolwork from home! They’re too afraid to leave their homes.” He went on, “The best thing would be for virtual reality just to disappear. I realize that with our animation we are creating virtual tings, too. I keep telling my crew, ‘Don’t watch animation! You’re surrounded by enough virtual things already.’”
We walked out to the rooftop garden that Goro had designed as a place where staff could rest and recharge. The studio’s four small buildings are lovely, and are complete with Miyazakian refinements. In some workspaces where he thought there wasn’t enough light or hint of the outside, he had tromp-l’oeil windows painted that depict meadows beneath cerulean skies. The building containing his office—which he refers to as “the pig’s house”—looks like an elaborate Swiss chalet, with a steep narrow stairway made of laminated blocks of golden pine, and a flying bridge with small doorways on either side. Once, Alpert told me, when Miyazaki looked out and noticed a procession of preschoolers walking by on the street, he invited them in, “and just gave them free reign and they ran up and down the stairs and onto the bridge, screaming and laughing.”
From the garden, we could hear taiko drums thumping out a dance for a neighborhood festival, and see a flamboyant sunset over the old pine trees that remain in this neighborhood, unlike in so many others around Tokyo. With surprising enthusiasm, Miyazaki brought up the subject of environmental apocalypse. “Our population could just suddenly dip and disappear!” he said, flourishing his cigarette in the air. “I talked to an expert on this recently, and I said, ‘Tell me the truth.’ He said with mass consumption continuing as it is we will have less than fifty years. Then it will all be like Venice. I’m hoping I will live another thirty years. I want to see the sea rise over Tokyo and the NTV tower become an island. I’d like to see Manhattan underwater. I’d like to see when the human population plummets and there are no more high-rises, because nobody’s buying them. I’m excited about that. Money and desire—all that is going to collapse, and wild green grasses are going to take over.”
He said that he’d visited the office tower of NTV, a Japanese television network, the day before: “I climbed two hundred and six metres up, to where the red lights are to warn the planes. You could see the whole city. And I thought, This place is haunted, doomed. All those buildings. All those cubicles.”
Suzuki joined us, and Takahata sat down without greeting anyone, delicately removing an enormous black ant from his pants leg. He said that he’d been reading a French novel in which ants are highly intelligent and can read. Somebody mentioned E.O. Wilson’s work on insects and their elaborate forms of communication.
“How are your frogs, by the way?” Suzuki asked Miyazaki, who explained that he kept them in a pond at home.
“I’m trying to keep track of how many tadpoles I have, but how can I? I can’t write numbers on their backs.”
The three men talked for a while about frogs and dragonflies and cicadas, and how the Japanese grasshopper population is declining because of overdevelopment. “There’s an abandoned house near the mine, and I want to buy it and keep it wild,” Miyazaki said. “Let all the wild grasses grow over it. It’s amazing how much they grow—their living energy. I wouldn’t cut the grass at all, but then there’s always the old ladies who come along with their hedge trimmers and scold you. We’ll have to wait for that generation to die off. Until then, we’ll never see grass like I want to see grass.”
He was not a gardener himself, he said. “Gardening is my wife’s territory. But, when she gardens, it’s like a holocaust. You see a bug? It’s evil. You have to exterminate it. Even the weeds—poor plants—she just yanks them out.” He smiled. “It’s not ecological at all. It’s fascism.” Japan should start a new form of agriculture, he proclaimed, then admitted, “I can’t do it. I’m not the farmer type, so I just complain.”
I noted that he had donated the Totoro licensing rights to a nature trust to help buy up some nearby woodlands and preserve them from development. “Oh, it’s not much of a wood, but we try to do something,” he said. Takahata spoke up: “If you add up all the land you’ve saved, it’s vast.” Miyazaki shrugged.
I asked him if he’d ever want to live anywhere else—he seemed so bitter about Japan’s environmental depredations. “No,” he said. “Japan is fine—because they speak Japanese. I like Ireland, though, the countryside there. Dublin has too many yuppies, computer types, but I like the countryside, because it’s poorer than England.” He mentioned liking Potsdan, in Germany, and the decrepit castle at Sans Souci. “Sometimes I encounter places that I feel as though I saw as a boy. A certain light in an old kind of town. Like in Tarkovsky’s films, that feeling is always there. I felt that way about a town in Estonia that I visited.” Miyazaki added that he didn’t really find travel relaxing; he found walking relaxing—that was the way human beings were meant to relax, and he expressed the wish that he “could walk back and forth to work every day, except that it would take two and a half hours each way,” and then he wouldn’t have enough time to work.
This remark suddenly seemed to remind him of all the work he had to do. Miyazaki turned to leave, and Suzuki and Takahata, along with other staff members, began drifting away.
On the train ride back to downtown Tokyo, I thought about how kind and human Miyazaki’s films typically are, and how harsh he had often sounded in person. I decided to admire this dichotomy as an example of what the social critic Antonio Gramsci called “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” An interviewer once remarked to Miyazaki that his movies expressed “hope and a belief in the goodness of man.” Miyazaki replied that he was, in fact, a pessimist. He then added, “I don’t want to transfer my pessimism onto children. I keep it at bay. I don’t believe that adults should impose their vision of the world on children. Children are very much capable of forming their own visions.”

The end of an era....

Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:29:13 GMT

Well, actually it's more like the end of the quarter, but hey, these past 10 weeks have felt longer than 10 years.

I just turned in my LAST (oh how good that feels) paper for my lab an hour ago after staying up all night. Final page count: 41 pages. That brings the grand total of pages written for this lab to: 140 pages, give or take a page. I'd hang them up on the fridge, but I don't have a magnet strong enough ^^ But yeah, the funny thing is, although I wrote 140 pages and spent a little over 100 hours in the lab, I still feel sad that it's over. Before taking this lab I asked someone what it was like, and he told me "It's a class you'll do more work in than you've ever done before, but you'll love doing every minute of it." While I'm not sure I loved EVERY minute, I think I understand what he meant now. Our professor is so wonderful that she single-handedly balances out all of the gripes I've ever had against UCLA (and there are many). We had a party this Tuesday and she actually encouraged us to bring alcohol (0.0) But yeah, she got teary eyed during the party, and said she would miss us all, and we had to keep in touch with her. Oh, and she promised to write letters of recommendation for all of us, which is so not normal. On top of that, she had an awards ceremony and made sure everyone got an award for something - although some of the categories were pretty unusual ;) Incidentally, of all the people in the lab, my partner and I were the least likely to win the main "Star" award, since it's given to the group with the best lab results, but by some strange twist of fate, we won, and so our prof. gave us these really nice silver pens and certificates. But yeah, since the lab had relatively few people in it, and we spent so much time together, all of us really bonded, and we were all saying how we'd cheer the loudest for each other during graduation, and then we all had champagne and toasted ourselves - hehe, some toasted a bit too much ^^

Ok, I think I've been at the computer too long since I can't stop seeing double, so I'll just stop here :)

The joy of a good read

Sun, 13 Mar 2005 18:23:30 GMT

I just finished reading 'Howl's Moving Castle' and all I can think of is "Why didn't I read this sooner?!" and "Thank God for Miyazaki!" It's been so long since I've read a real book, and then for it to turn out so wonderful makes me feel especially happy ^_^ I want to post a review of it, but then I don't think I can be objective about it. Actually, I'm positive that I'll just end up gushing & blabbering....But really, the book is really THAT good, IMHO. The characters, in a very strange, disconnected way remind me of Jane Austen's and Wilkie Collins' creations. Both writers let you experience the characters in the same way....I'm at a loss for the right words, but what I'm trying to say is that, despite their flaws (and in the case of HMC, the fact that they're magical), you feel as if you know them intrinsically. Hmmm...what a strange grouping of writers - Jane Austen, Wilkie Collins, and Diana Wynne Jones ^_^

Anyways, now I just can't wait to watch the film....*sigh* July is too far away. Thank goodness I can at least listen to the soundtrack, which incidentally is very, very good (especially 'Sky Stroll' and 'Wandering Sophie'). Thank you Sharon! :)

In other news, I have to give an oral presentation on Tuesday and I'm terrified at the thought. It's sad, but it takes me having to give a lecture to appreciate teachers. My talk is only for 10 minutes, and only once, but if someone told my my job description was to give a lecture for at least 1 hour regularly, I'd cry. My silver lining is that shortly after my presentation we're having a party, so I'm hoping the food next me will keep people distracted. Well, what happens, happens.

Must not sleep.....

Tue, 25 Jan 2005 20:21:30 GMT

Must try to stay awake....*head clunks onto desk*

I've been up all night writing a paper, but must stay awake for my lab, so I thought reading LJ would help. Really, bingblot and toriem update too often! You're making me look bad! Anyhow, I finally finished reading your entries, but my brain is too fried to come up with coherent written responses, so I'll have to call you both sometime soon. Oh, thanks for the quiz, Sarah!

You scored as Remus Lupin. You are a wise and caring wizard and a good, loyal friend to boot. However sometimes in an effort to be liked by others you can let things slide by, which ordinarily you would protest about.

</td>

Remus Lupin

80%

Hermione Granger

70%

Ron Weasley

70%

Albus Dumbledore

65%

Harry Potter

60%

Severus Snape

55%

Draco Malfoy

55%

Sirius Black

50%

Ginny Weasley

40%

Lord Voldemort

Your Harry Potter Alter Ego Is...?
created with QuizFarm.com

Round 2

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 04:27:00 GMT

I just finished watching some of the post-debate commentaries, which frankly bored me to death. All those in Kerry's camp felt that Kerry won, and, surprisingly enough, those in Bush's camp felt that Bush won. Is there no better way to analyze the debate than to interview Karen Hughes? Anyhow, my own reaction was that Bush was much more energetic, or rather he screamed more than usual. Actually, he was downright rude to Gibson when he flatly ignored the fact that he was talking, and launched an angry counterattack to Kerry's response. I loved his reference to the "Internets" and the fact that he would not appoint a supreme court justice who was in favor of slavery. Brilliant. The last question was interesting. Bush was asked to name 3 mistakes he had made, and he responds by first talking about "appointments to boards you've never heard of" and then interpreting her question to really refer to Iraq, in which case he can't come up with a single error. Well, I'm glad to see that 71% say that Kerry won the debate on msnbc.

I was reading some blogs on cnn.com and found this really funny boxing-match style account of the debate:

Bush receives from Ron Horshman: why did he block importation of cheaper drugs from Canada. Invokes the name of a drug discount card user from "Missoura." Favored pronunciation of natives. Point to Bush.

Bush again leaps off stool. Gestures at Kerry. Kerry isn't looking at him; Bush swing hits air. Kerry off the stool, "We did something you don't know how to do: balance the budget." Stinging blow. Point to Kerry.

Bush receives from Robert Farley about prospects of a draft. Says he's heard rumors on the "internets." Bloggers can be heard howling over the multiple. Minus one point to Bush. Stumbles in claiming he's replacing troops with weapons and equipment and unmanned vehicles. They'll save "manpower and equipment."

Josh Groban Concert

Mon, 23 Aug 2004 18:26:41 GMT

It's official - I now have a bigger crush on Josh than I ever thought possible. He's cute (in a hobbit way), has a great sense of humor, and he was patient with me even though I was babbling in front of him (*hangs head in shame*). Oh, and he also happens to have the most perfect voice known to man. *swoons* I don't think I'm making much sense, but I'll try.

The concert was wonderful from start to finish, and I couldn't believe it when Josh said "thank you, Anaheim" - it ended waaaaaay too soon :( Its funny but I think hearing Josh perform live made me appreciate his songs even more, and somehow they sounded better than on the cd. Anyhow, the opening performer, William Joseph, was amazing too. He played really nice piano pieces that ranged from phantom of the opera style to rock to soft sentimental, but I liked them all (except "Grace," which was kinda dull). And he told some very funny stories too, which is always a big plus with me ;) But then, after the intermission Josh came at last. *swoons again* I don't remember the exact order of the songs, but I know that he began with "Oceano," which made me really happy, since it's one of my favorites. But oh! the backgrounds were all so pretty, esp. for "My December" (MUST GET THAT SONG!!!).

Hmm...Josh was really...well I can't think of the right word for it...but "uninhibited." He was always rambling, making strange noises, joking, telling us that he loved us, dancing, playing the drums, etc. I got the impression that he had a little something right before the show :) Oh, and he plays the piano & drums really well, so that's one more reason why he's perfect. *swoons yet again*

Just for fun

Sun, 30 May 2004 22:10:10 GMT

Hmm...my paragraph is strange. Although I do kinda like the middle - yay for LOTR! ^_^

Directions:
1. Take five books off your bookshelf.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph

It was admitted by all her friends, and also by her enemies - who were in truth the more numerous and active body of the two - that Lizzie Greystock had done very well with herself. He believed that the One had perished; that the elves had destroyed it, as should have been done. What was in their minds as they created these images? What new devilry? I leave it to be settled by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.

Books used in order:
1. The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope
2. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R.Tolkien
3. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
4. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
5. Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

School, School, and........More School!

Fri, 23 Apr 2004 16:44:32 GMT

I should be volunteering right now, but I'm ditching so I can go to a review session at 10, and work on my mountain of reports before then. I worked on them for about an hour, then decided that lab reports are overrated and took a break.

Where to begin? Well, I knew this quarter would be tough, but I really wasn't prepared for the nightmare waiting for me. I literally have NO free time, and every hour of the week, from 5 am to 11 pm is booked solid. For the heck of it, I made up a nifty little song about the quarter:
11 physics assignments, 10 "midterms" (why do they even bother calling them midterms when you have one every week?), 9 lab reports, 8 protocols, 7 quizzes and paper presentations, 6 am vanpool(can't think of anything else with six), 5 hours a week of voluteering, 4 hour labs, 3 final exams, 2 hours with Jack-the-tutor, 1 lab practical exam, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Its a very catchy song.

Organogenesis is interesting, but I think I've already had my fill of Drosophila (damn that stupid fruit fly). Comparative lit. is strange, because I've never been in an english class for 4 years, so went through a sort of culture shock during the first two weeks, wondering why there wasn't any lab manual for the class. Physics is physics, but at least I've had this professor before, and optics is much easier than electromagnetism.

But Of all my classes, I dread lab the most. I thought labs were bad enough at the lower division, but at least there the TAs made an attempt to help you, and gave you a pretty good outline of what to do for each step. In upper division labs the TAs just sit and watch you struggle, and all you have to work with is a thin manual that says "step 1 - do an enzyme assay. step 2 - do a protein assay." How do you do an enzyme assay?!? Why is my solution hot pink?!? I come out of lab each week feeling drained and 2 inches tall. The worst lab was the first one, hands down, even though it was the easiest. I followed the procedure, did everything right, and when I went to take my readings, I get a systematic error. I had just gotten my readings, and was puzzling over them, when suddenly the PROFESSOR (where did he come from? why is he HERE?!?) pops up behind me and takes a look at my data. My face immediately went on fire, and stayed that way for the next three hours. He was really nice, and tried to help me find out where I might have made a mistake, but it didn't help when he asked me to repeat the procedure in front of him. My hands started to shake, and I couldn't even pour the solution from one tube to the other. Then, he decided that one of the TAs should help me, so he yelled across the room (with the whole lab watching) " Dora, Sarah needs help. She's getting a systematic error in her readings that I can't figure out. Can you work through the procedure with her to make sure she doesn't make any more errors?" and then "Don't worry Sarah, Dora will help you, and then you'll be a pro at assays." I didn't think it was possible, but my face managed to get redder. It turned out that the error I made wasn't in my procedure, but before taking my readings I blanked with air instead of water. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I now consider it a good day when I only have to repeat entire procedures once. On top of that, most of the people in the lab are waaay more experienced with techniques than I am. Hopefully things will get better once we work in groups...nice BIG groups full of SMART people....

I really do think I'm losing my mental alertness though. Last week I walked straight into the men's restroom, turned red, yelled sorry, and ran out. Yesterday, I spent about half a minute trying to open the door by pulling, until my lab partner told me to push. Today, I was working on my report, and wrote down that my error was 500% instead of 0.5%. Pretty soon I'll be like Paul and start humming the scooby doo intro song during class.

In other news, my mom and I have come to the conclusion that the only way I can get into med. school is with a perfect mcat score.

Sigh.

Long Live Jane Austen! ^_^

Sun, 15 Feb 2004 19:01:23 GMT

Happy Belated Valentine's Day!

Hmm...Valentine's Day wasn't too bad this year. We went to visit my aunt, and watched a dvd of my cousin's wedding, so that was fun - "How did you all behave? Who cried most?" *grins* You know I couldn't resist adding that, esp. as the Queen of Knightley Land ^_^

The rest of the time I spent reading some of LOTR and Cecilia, and making a preliminary list of all the Jane Austen books/movies/music that I have, which was really amusing. I never realized I had so much, and at the same time was missing so much :) The funny part is that now I feel inadequate, since I realize that I don't own so many things I feel like no respectable Janeite can be without. So I made a separate "Jane Austen Dream List" with everything I could find at amazon related to her (minus a few things, like really terrible sequels & movie adaptations - if I owned THOSE I couldn't call myself a respectable Janeite :)

Now all that's left is to get my hands on a really really big pile of money....~_^

Reading ROTK again

Mon, 01 Dec 2003 00:17:25 GMT

Yes, I should be studying more, but in my defense, I can only concentrate on these subjects for so long, before the words start swirling around to create a crazy, (& more importantly) unreadable mess.

So, I was reading ROTK to freshen up on things before the movie comes out, and I don't know why, but reading it this time was even more emotional than my first time. I think the first time I read LOTR I was just blown away by everything, and the impact of all the characters, and what their actions signified, didn't hit me as strongly as it did this time. Particularly Aragorn. I've always loved Aragorn, but I really started thinking about how many hardships and tests he went through (& passed with flying colors ^^) to become king, and how it must have felt for him to be raised as an orphan with a race very different from his own, to be held in derision and fear by those he risked his life to protect, to have self-doubt gnaw at him always, to be denied the hand of the woman he loves because he is not considered worthy enough (although I can come up with a very good solution to THAT problem ~_^), and so many other things.
And then I was thinking about all the newsweek articles on ROTK, and thought about how they said that the, wait, I don't want to spoil anything, but the houses of healing scenes were going to be severely cut short, which is where one of Tolkien's most eloquent scenes took place. Oh, I was reading that part where Eowyn meets, well, if you've read the books you know who, on the ramparts, and I just loved that description of them:

"And so they stood on the walls of the City of Gondor, and a great wind rose and blew, and their hair, raven and golden, streamed out mingling in the air. And the Shadow departed, and the Sun was unveiled, and light leaped forth; and the waters of Anduin shone like silver, and in all the houses of the City men sang for the joy that welled up in their hearts from what source they could not tell."

What I wouldn't give to be able to write like Tolkien...or be able to write period for that matter ^_^

Anyhow, just some random observations on how much I love Tolkien's works.

In other news, I had a decent Thanksgiving, but alas, I was not destined to eat turkey that night. Well, I guess that's just the way it is when more than half of your family is vegetarian. The next day we went to a wedding, which was very simple, but nice, and the bride and groom were really sweet. It was so cute to see them eating together after the wedding, and shyly feeding each other cake. mushy mushy, fluffy fluffy. The only thing I didn't get to do was go to borders, which is where I really really really felt like going to, since its been so long since I last went. I seriously need to go soon, before my withdrawal symptoms get out of hand. ^_^

My New Home

Fri, 28 Nov 2003 01:06:43 GMT

The Queendom of Knightley Land

Motto: "Our Taxes Are Lower Than Sweden's"
UN Category: Democratic Socialists
Civil Rights: Excellent
Economy: Struggling
Political Freedoms: Excellent
Location: the South Pacific

The Queendom of Knightley Land is a tiny, safe nation, renowned for its strong anti-business politics. Its compassionate, intelligent population of 5 million are fiercely patriotic and enjoy great social equality; they tend to view other, more capitalist countries as somewhat immoral and corrupt.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent, socially-minded government stops and the rest of society begins, but it concentrates mainly on Social Welfare, although Healthcare and Education are on the agenda. The average income tax rate is 48%, but much higher for the wealthy. Private enterprise is illegal, but for those in the know there is a slick and highly efficient black market in Automobile Manufacturing.

Crime is totally unknown. Knightley Land's national animal is the oliphaunt, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its currency is the austen.

Heehee!

On a related note, here's a humorous state motto for California:
"By 30, Our Women Have More Plastic Than Your Honda"

You can see more hillarious fake mottos here:
Learn Your State Motto

Middle Earth is Sooo Much Cooler than California

Sun, 23 Nov 2003 02:44:04 GMT

Well, I just finished watching more of the TTT:EE dvd, mainly the appendices, and all I can think of is that the entire cast & crew were absolutely off their rockers. I mean, the level of dedication they had is unbelievable. Case in point - when designing Theoden King's armor, they even embroidered/pressed in rohan horse motifs on the INSIDE of the leather arm braces, just for the sake of authenticity & to make Bernard Hill smile. Here's another example - when John Howe, one of the two main conceptual artists, agreed to work on LOTR, he packed his collection of medieval armor and weapons in his suitcase so that the design team could have base models to work from, and nearly missed his flight to New Zealand because of it, since the customs officers were understandably suspicious. lol, can just see it now, poor John Howe explaining to customs "but officer, I need these to make sure middle-earth is as realistic as possible! What do you mean you haven't heard of middle-earth? Don't you read?!" Anyhow, so he makes it to New Zealand, and begins work, and what do you think he does during breaks? He goes to the roof of the workshop with other members of the design team, put on makeshift helmets, and swordfight with each other using real swords they've designed. For fun.

Sigh. I want that kind of job.

Lol, I had a fun moment today. As background, I was helping my aunt with her thesis earlier this year, mainly typing it, and my cousin would also come by on weekends to help. Well, one night we were having fun editing a certain section on a myth about some goddess named Inana, and cracking all sorts of irreverent jokes about her and the myth (we were rather tired, and the myth made no sense, so we affectionately refer to it as the Inane Goddess and her sidekick Ereshkigal - I'll never get the spelling right). Then we came across an odd sentence that needed to be split up and we needed to come up with a connector for the new second sentence, something like "nonetheless" or "in addition to," and my cousin was asking me for suggestions. We both were kind of brain dead, and we couldn't think of anything really fitting. Finally, as a joke I told him to type "Later that day" as the connector, and we laughed a lot over that, since I got that from the simpsons episode where the grandpa tells the story of how they came to America, and it soooo did not fit at all with a psychological analysis of this rather ancient myth. The funny thing is, I didn't think he'd actually type it, but he did, and my aunt didn't notice it, until she got it back from her editor a month later, who underlined and circled that part in red and put a big "?" by it. My aunt changed it on her own, and meant to ask us about it, but never got around to it until today, and I was just cracking up when she told me that. ~_^

Ok, long story over, must now go theonering.net, being the proper geek that I am, and make sure nothing new has come up between now and this morning. And yes, I've been aware of the fact that I need professional help for some time now. ^_^

Dabbling in Poetry

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 19:39:29 GMT

Lol, my haiku is strange. Its actually pretty fitting for my lj, since I post so rarely - but I'm trying to change all that, really I am! See, I've posted twice in the space of 5 minutes! ^_^

Hooray for Christmas & Bookstores!

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 19:33:17 GMT

I went to the bookstore yesterday, and, even though I always feel good at bookstores, I felt especially warm & fuzzy last night. I think its because there were so many christmas related displays up, and they all got me thinking of what gifts I wanted to get for everyone, since gift-giving is one of those things that makes me feel genuinely happy. Anyhow, it was fun looking at all the new books based on ROTK, especially the photo guide, which though poorly written, has the skeleton outline for the movie. Some of the changes they hinted at disturbed me, because most of them were designed for the sole purpose of giving arwen a bigger role and more screen time. First of all, I'm not sure about this, but I think that they're going to portray arwen as becoming gravely ill, and wishing she could see aragorn one last time. Second, when aragorn reveals himself to sauron with the palantir, sauron will try to scare aragorn by showing him a vision of arwen dead or something. Sigh.

Oh, I can finally play closer on my computer, so now I can hear josh much more often. For example, I'm listening to him right now, and "when you say you love me" is currently playing. ^_^ I was trying to think of music videos to go along with the songs, but so far I haven't been able to come up with anything, except maybe for "all'improvviso amore." Be sure to tell me if any inspirations dawn on you!

Also, I'm addicted to make snowflakes thanks to Sharon. Goodness, some people are so good at this! I was just drooling over the flakes in the gallery, and then cringing when I saw my pathetic creations by their side. Must improve now!

Lastly, I just saw the trailers for Troy and Hidalgo, and I soooooo want to see both of them! But, until they actually come close to being released, I really want to see Love, Actually. The cast alone was enough to make me want to see it, but then the trailer was really good too, and of course, since Sarah loved it, I think I have a pretty high chance of loving it too ^_^

Two posts in one day?!? The world is coming to an end! Repent, sinners!

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 04:50:20 GMT

I'm partly writing another entry just so that Sarah will throw a tizzy or plunge into a fainting fit ^^

However, as you can see, I have been productive these past ten minutes giving my lj a much-needed makeover. Tell me if you like it!

I'm supposed to be working on physics problems right now, but I'm not getting very far, so I think I'll just have to bombard the secret-wise-old-man-in-the-dusty-room-in-the-corner-of-the-basement-floor (aka physics tutor) with questions tomorrow.

On a side note, I'm too kind and generous (no comments from you, Sarah), since the birthday present I bought today for Sean is MUCH nicer than what he gave me on my birthday. Of course, being perfect Me, this does not bother me at all, since I possess an almost saintly state of mind at all times.

Peace be with you all.
^_^

There is a really big, fat cat in my backyard staring at me

Wed, 12 Nov 2003 00:11:11 GMT

Heehee, excuse the strange entry title, I just wrote the first thing I thought about, although there is a big fat cat in my backyard staring at me ^-^.

Well, there's no point in me saying that I'm even going to TRY to try to write more often, but I will try to update at least once every six months (always realistic, that I am ^^).

I went to best buy today to get josh groban's new cd, Closer, came home grinning like an idiot, and then my mood took a sharp downturn when i realized that my computer did not share my love for josh. In a matter of seconds, I went from chastising myself for being so happy over a cd I'd already heard online, to transferring all such chastisements (amplified a thousand fold) onto my computer. What happened was that when I put in the cd, instead of having windows media player pop up, a screen advertising josh's new website popped up. I closed that, and then nothing happened. I went to my computer to open to the disc directly, but all the disc was showing on it was the ad. Funny though, since the cd works on all my other cd players. I have to conclude one of the following:
a) I am too mentally challenged to play a cd on the computer.
b) There is something wrong (either physically or mentally) with my computer.
c) This is some big conspiracy concocted by "Them" for some nefarious purpose that I have yet to uncover.

Frankly, I prefer choices b & c, but then that's just me ^^.

As for the cd itself, I really like it, although I need to go through it a second time to figure out which songs I like best, but they're all so pretty, and his voice is so perfect in all of them.

What else? Oh, I finally got around to using an icon for livejournal (huzza!), but I couldn't find the ones that Sarah made for me *pout*, so I had to look around. I found one legolas icon I liked, but not much else, but I did find a few good calvin & hobbes icons that were cute, so they'll do for now.

Hmm...I actually did do some work today, much to my surprise. I saw my brother doing his homework, and a wave of guilt/inspiration came over me, so I was productive for as long as Sean was productive, which, unfortunately for me, wasn't very long, since it only lasted for a little over half an hour. Sigh, I need to live with Joanne...~_^

Must wrap up now. I'd write more, but my aunt just brought over one of my favorite Indian snacks (sharon might remember the name of them ^^), and the will of my stomach dominates all (its the reincarnation of sauron i tell you!)

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