So according to IMDB, Guy Ritchie is directing a new Sherlock Holmes movie, starring Robert Downey, Jr. as Sherlock Holmes. OH MY GOD YES. So I look further—who's playing Watson?

Jude Law!

Y'know, I was also super-excited for that BBC Holmes a few years ago, with Rupert Everett. I thought he would be the perfect Holmes. But I was pretty disappointed. Everett's Holmes was dull, glazed, and vaguely icky. He got the "depressive" part but not the "manic" part. (It's for this same reason that I don't even like Basil Rathbone's version either—blasphemy, I know.) Sherlock Holmes needs a real detail-oriented "actor's actor" to fill him out with delightful tics and texture and stuff. So RDJ!! I am confident that he will play Holmes true to the bipolar, quirky, charismatic opium addict he is in the books. (The character of Irene Adler is in it too. Omigod omigod are we going to have a romance? I am going to love this movie. I hope.)

Anyway, the point that I wish to impress upon you with this post is—Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law.

I'll be in my bunk.


Fake edit: The Guardian says: It will not be the Sherlock Holmes on film many remember - the suave Basil Rathbone to the bumbling Nigel Bruce - but a new big budget action movie will be faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories, its director Guy Ritchie said yesterday.

YES.

[Downey] went on to admit the character was 'just such a weirdo.' He added: 'as a matter of fact Mrs Downey said that if you read the description of the guy - quirky and nuts - it could be a description of me on some days.'

YESYESYES.

I think they get it. Pleeeeease don't let me down, guys!


Actual edit: Oh gee, I was so excited I forgot that Downey isn't even British. Hmm. Oh, well, we have Brits, Yanks, Canucks, and Aussies faking one another's accents all the time in movies these days. I'm sure it'll be fine.

偉い日本会社には受かるはずがないことはよく知っている。基本敵な条件に不満だし。（例えば、募集が在学ままの学生を対象する。私は今から学生じゃないのにね。）でもね。でもね！そわそわして止められない！

これをなぜ書くのでしょうか。それはなんか、語り合えば気が済むかと思ってね。

まっ、すぐ合否をわかるはずだ。考えれば、これは［安心］な努力だった。だって、断られても、技術が足りないとは限らないもの。断られた理由は、外人だからとか、地位が違うからとか思える。自信がかかってない。

とは言え、ガッカリすると思うけど。

自分の国で、受かる可能性のある会社に応募すればいいのに。

So I finally saw The Dark Knight last weekend and don't entirely know how to feel about it.

( Read more... )

Thoughts?

Mmm, okay, not much has changed since my last frantic post (a very belated thank you to everyone who commented, it meant a lot), 'cept that I'm done with art school. Still trying to get my ducks in a row regarding jobs, personal growth (er, well . . . ), and living sitch. Been working off and on for the translation job, but that's finite and sporatic and I need to be looking for arty jobs, 'cept that I want to put some more work into my portfolio/reel first, so . . . Yeah, still in that awkward frustrating in-between period. But this won't be forever. I don't know if a person ever really knows when they've "arrived," but once I have gotten at least one relevant paying job, some big question marks should disappear from my life.

On a different note, I am currently obsessing over the completely charming Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog(thanks, unforth!)—not easy when there's only about 42 minutes of it. Before, I wished I'd seen some Doogie Howser, M.D., because it's a cultural touchstone—but now I'm kind of glad I didn't, 'cause if I had been too familiar with Neil Patrick Harris as a child actor I would not be able to see nor appreciate how heartbreakingly cute he is as a grownup. And that last point I really cannot overstate. <3

Dammit, I'm supposed to be on a media diet until I finish my thesis film. So I better do something drastic before I end up watching 13 MORE episodes of Oban Star Racers.

Wow, it looked like a nice spring day about 15 seconds ago. I've never seen a snowstorm blow in that suddenly. Annoying, but kind of awesome.

I just washed my face with nail polish remover instead of astringent.

That should give you a good idea of my mental state.

I met a former boss at an animation event thingy, and he asked me how my thesis was going. I told him, "Pretty stressful. . . . But if it weren't, I wouldn't want to do it."

And I'm thinking that applies to all areas of life, or at least mine, at the moment. Tumult is better than stagnancy.

It's how you know you're alive.

But, fuck.

I guess I should update so people don't think I'm dead. You know, looking back over my entries, I realized that pretty much all of them are prefaced by some meta comment like "Well, I guess I should update this thing" like someone is twisting my arm to do it. It's probably pretty annoying to read. And here's a meta-meta comment. So I dunno. I try to write as economically as possible, too, so I'm sure I always sound a lot more dour than I really am.

Anyway (and all my paragraphs start with "Anyway!") somewhere near the end of my winter break, the old translation job comes back with an offer I really can't refuse. So my thesis lies fallow for a few weeks. I have to meet my advisor after the break and become terrified of facing him. Luckily, he understands, so I guess I've bought myself a couple weeks. The awesome thing about my advisor is that I can walk in with almost nothing to show him, and he can still fill out the entire time with useful and relevant advice. But yeah, I'm feeling so torn between these two career directions. . . . Becoming competitively good at either of them would be a full-time job. I don't know if you can be a good artist without working as one all the time, and I don't know if you can get fluent in Japanese without immersing yourself in it. Well, if I cut out aimless time-wasting, I might indeed give myself enough time to have two full-time occupations.

My website has been down because of credit card mix-ups and I've been dragging my feet in fixing it. I guess I should do that before the Drinking and Drawing event on Wednesday.

I was going to update the other day after spending all night at the studio (literally . . . I slept on a desk) and then going to the campus computer store for some Guitar Hero and triumphing at Knights of Cydonia. I guess I was too tired to update then. So anyway, I've been spending my days and nights, when possible, at the studio working on my thesis. It's still going to take a lot of work to blast through my backlog. I animated out a couple shots, but my advisor wasn't too happy and wanted me to rough out everything before tying down the individual shots. I'm not happy about breaking my momentum, but I suppose he's right.

On the Japanese front, I finished this weird little scifi novel a while ago about a spacefaring cyborg cat, and started on a murder mystery that . . . also has a cat in it. Named Holmes. It remains to be seen whether he'll actually solve mysteries. That and I made an awesome find at BookOff--Star Trek: the Q collection. 12 episodes, 3 series, 4 discs, 15 bucks. Japanese dub: priceless. (BookOff seems to have drastically lowered the prices on their CDs and DVDs.) So I have the audio rips on my iPod to juice my listening comprehension while I drill kanji on the subway. The actors have way more range and nuance than most American dubs. It's like listening to, y'know, real actors, and makes a great radio drama. Actually, Star Trek (early TNG, at least) works really well for this because it's so stagey and exposition-heavy. And this dub makes John DeLancie sound gruff rather than lispy, which for me is an improvement. I've heard that watching dubs of shows you're already familiar with is good practice, and I'm finding it FANTASTIC.

Just that my old 3G iPod is so full that I'm having to trawl it for things to delete in order to make room!

Had a cool time at Halloween parties wearing the medieval garb I still have from salmonpi. Thanks so much! :3 Everyone asked about it and I told them all what an awesome seamstress she is.

There was a point a few weeks ago when the animatic for my thesis had really come together and I got pretty excited about the project. I just have to shed the time-wasting habits I've saddled myself with. Pretty much I just need to get the hell away from the Internet.

I have been cooking more for myself and it's pretty cool. I haven't bought frozen veggie burgers in months, and I have a few stand-by recipes that I really like. It's actually pretty addictive to make stuff.

Haven't been back out on the bike yet, arrrgh. On the bright side, I have been burning through my Netflix queue on the stationary bike. I was planning to start riding to and from my advisor meetings, but now those are happening after dark and I'm not sure that's so wise. Aside from that, I only have a class in the zoo on Monday, followed by a class downtown, and the timing is probably just a little too tight for riding between. I'm also queasy about chaining my bike outside. Not that anyone would want to steal my midget bike, but it is shiny and inviting.

Was going to go to the Natural History museum late today and draw dead animals, but they close at 5:45. Lame! It was to help with my thesis project, which is about Martians, so I wanted to get some good up-close-and-personal critter anatomy studies under my belt.

Looking forward anxiously to the JLPT in December--now, does anybody know what I'm talking about or am I just talking to myself here? It's an official Japanese language test for non-native speakers. I signed up for a tough level and expect a spectacular flameout. I've just been boning up on vocabulary and whoooo do I feel outclassed. Anyone else out there taken the JLPT, or planning to take it?

I have been gifted a kiwi! Now my plums have company.

Missed my bike trip on account of leg crater and consequently having had no time to train. (It's much better now, and healing so quickly you can almost watch it closing up.) There are still some benefit rides in the city in October, and maybe some smaller outings I can go on. Oh, well.

In my zoo drawing class yesterday we got to go backstage at the Reptile House and draw the herps that are out of circulation or off season or something. It's so relaxing there, away from the bustle and disruptions of the public part of the zoo. And you can get up fairly close to the animals. We're using this interesting kind of calligraphic watercolor sketching technique. It's fun.

I did some cooking last week and have been enjoying the results. I point to that as my primary accomplishment for the past week. I still haven't entirely been able to dive back into my thesis. Which is what I'm going to set about doing once I finish this entry.

Online application for taking the JLPT in the U.S. is due October 5th. Anyone here taken it before? 3-kyu would be a breeze, and 2-kyu would be a big stretch. Although I found, when I took some online quizzes, that I was getting a passing grade even with most of my answers being educated guesses. That's no real way to take a test, though, and I'd probably get murdered in the listening comprehension section. Still, it would be a good goal to study toward.

I decided to get cracking on the shul-shopping, and went to a so-called Yom Kippur "learning service" with an organization that seems to be targeting young professionals in their 20's and 30's. Well, friends . . . there was a mechitza (divider between male and female sections--somewhat hardcore Orthodox, from what I understand). I might as well have turned around and walked out, because I spent the whole time stewing over the insult of having been "sorted" immediately upon entering. And the "learning" component amounted to not much more than being alerted to the page number during a 50-page span of silent davening. Finally, the yizkor included prayers for fallen IDF soldiers and martyrs--a little more politics in my religion than I'm comfortable with--and when we got to the part about G-d "judging the corpse-filled nations," I felt like I was looking through a funhouse mirror. I don't remember THAT being part of the call-and-response in any service I've ever been to before.

It's too bad, because the people (well, the guys) looked like a nice bunch of 20-somethings and 30-somethings. . . . Who'd have known they were so conservative? The women were mostly pretty frummy. I felt almost scandalous with my short hair and short sleeves. I know there still might have been individuals worth talking to, but I felt the need to flee after the morning part of services. I was so discouraged that I didn't keep the fast--and I don't think I've broken it since I was 13. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board. There must be a reform congregation in Manhattan that's socially liberal but still traditional and not too hippy-dippy. I just want to reconnect with a Jewish community, and now I'm re-evaluating if it's wrong to use the religious stuff to do that if it's something I'm not that into inherently. =\

Also, gauze is out, and I miss that little chunk of leg and want it back.

About a week after the stiffness from my sprained/fractured? big toe went away completely, I got what seems to have been a spider bite (infected, for bonus points) on my calf. The doctor says it was either that or flesh-eating bacteria, but probably the former. It started out like a mosquito bite but grew over several days to look like a moldy purple chestnut sitting on a big crimson doily and oozing duck sauce. Today I went to a surgeon and he carved out the whole thing. I can't see how deep the crater is because he stuffed it with a tangle of gauze ribbon.

Amazing! My life is normally pretty vanilla, but in the span of a few weeks I've managed to get crippled twice on the same side. If there has to be a scar, I'd rather have gotten it through doing something cool rather than passively, but I guess there's honor in a spider bite, if not much glory.


Edit: Oh god it's a wad of gauze INSIDE my leg with a loose end trailing from INSIDE my leg this is so gross D:

I've been bubbling with stuff to share, and now that I'm here writing I'm not sure what to talk about. It's been surprisingly hard to unstuff my head and get back to where I need to be to work on my thesis. I've been out there experiencing the big wide world and now I have to cram myself back onto the page drawing silly little critters. The hope is that having exposed my visual centers to some new stimuli will enrich my work.

It's weird how nostalgic I feel about a trip that lasted less than three weeks and that happened only two weeks ago. I miss running into the convenience store in the morning to grab a yogurt before getting in the car. I certainly miss the food. I just got some noodles and various sauces at Sunrise Mart and have made a resolution to try and actually cook sometimes instead of eating out of a plastic wrapper all the time. It may have to wait until the Rosh Hashanah leftovers have cleared the fridge.

Other resolutions I've made: get out more, doing more different kinds of activities. There's a cool life-drawing meet in Williamsburg I'm trying out, and it was kind of life-affirming to remember that I have another bike trip coming up next week. Only problem is I obviously haven't been keeping up with my biking recently; for some reason, since I got back home I've been feeling like jogging instead of biking. It's been good for my strength and endurance but I'm anxious about my coordination and steering. Right now I don't quite trust myself to ride on a country road. Guess I should get out on the bike a couple times next week.

Anyway, the above resolution is important because this year I only have class a couple days a week, and my best friends from class live outside the city and so I don't get to see them often. So I need to avoid becoming a hermit. One good way to approach that is to go draw more in public places. But also I'm feeling a little suffocated by the usual media geek type of activities (basically, consumerism) and feel a newborn desire to broaden my horizons and meet people who aren't other art students or geeks. Being "in the zone" with your observational drawing can make you feel connected and involved in your surroundings, but I'm also feeling a little chary of plunging myself into sketchbook solitude.

Also: read more books. I stall on every fiction book I try these days, and I seem to be reading newspapers more than anything else, so I am lining up some nonfiction. I have had some weird deep-seated aversion to nonfiction in book form--books are for STORIES!--but I'm realizing it need not be so. Currently: Letters from a Woman Homesteader. Next, perhaps: Arctic Dreams.

And: become more conversant in music. Take the songs I like, look up the bands, maybe actually learn the names of some of the members. Get more of their music, on CD's with actual booklets rather than on iTunes. Read the booklets. Etc.

Also, I'm looking at the JLPT test in December. Apparently in the U.S. the deadline for registration is early October. I'm sure I can past the level 3 test, but level 2 would take work, which I'm not sure I have time for. But it would be nice to have that certifictation before next year. And it would give me something to study for.

I guess Hebrew review, American Sign Language, and Middle Egyptian are on indefinite hold.

Phew! I finally have my pictures up on Flickr. It would've happened a lot sooner too if I'd realized that it was just Safari that was making Flickr act slow as molasses.

www.flickr.com/photos/12929231@N06/page11/

(Copy/paste plzkthx, I like to keep my identities separate and don't want Google notice the clickthrough.) (Also, this starts you on the last page, because in Flickr everything is backwards and the chronology goes back to front, i.e. Alaska is my first picture (going to Japan) and the Hello Kitty airplane is my last (leaving).)

Anyway, I'm totally new to Flickr so I barely have any contacts yet. Anyone who's got an account, speak up or add me and I'll add you. I have a handful of pictures that I restricted to friends-and-family viewing just because they're silly or not the most flattering shots or not of general interest. So if you have to see me handling a samurai sword or sitting with a paper-mache cat, holla.

Feeling a little out of sorts, disconnected. But I guess I always feel this way when I'm between things--like between the end of a job and the start of school, or vice versa. Maybe I'm a little Japanese-esque, in that I always need to belong to a kumi.

Anyways, here's kind of a shout-out to kudasaru and unforth because I had an awesome time hanging out with each, in Kyoto and Tokyo, respectively. kudasaru pencilled me into her crammed schedule and we bummed around the Manga Museum and Takarazuka City together, and at the end of my trip I stayed with unforth in her new Tokyo digs and we checked out various neighborhood attractions and saw the Takarazuka Cosmo Troupe perform a snazzy double bill of Valencia no Atsui Hana and the indescribable (truly) Cosmic Space Fantasista. What also would've been cool is if they could've met, but it was not to be. A good time was had by all, and I really enjoyed just seeing them again.

The trip on the whole was pretty much perfect. I mean, on my last night, as I was walking back from eating dinner, I just happened to see a lunar eclipse. Geez, Japan! Also, rainbows seem to have snuck into the corners of some of my photos. All right, Japan, this is getting silly.

Anyway, the trip was also filled with awesome things, which I may write more about as I pull together my photos and things. This is partially for my own benefit, so that I don't forget where everything was taken--as I've pretty much done with my photos from Israel 10 years ago. Does this random backstreet look more like the city of Tzvat, or Akko?

Anyway, obviously I have to go back, if only because I am not sure I can find a good supplier of bottled iced coffee over here, and because I never did manage to eat okonamiyaki during my trip. A longer span of time would be nice. And it occurs to me that once I'm through with school, there's no particular significance to the semester/year cycle. If I can't spare a year from my life, I don't have to--I can go for a month, or a few months. For years I've been thinking that I'm past the point in my life where I could go do this, I'm on a career track that is so important to me and has already been so delayed that I have to stick it through with no more interruptions. But these past couple weeks have made me realize that Japan and Japanese are also important in my life, to the extent that maybe I need to make room for them, too. When I finish school next summer, it may be the ideal time for me to go spend time in Japan before starting a job (if I am so lucky)--if, of course, I can find a job and defer my starting date for a few months. Maybe best to do this before I have a place of my own and have to figure out what to do during the vacancy to avoid paying two rents. I guess I could always sublet. Anyway, as much as I've been freaking out about the unstable, catch-as-catch-can nature of the animation job market, maybe this is the plus side of possible long stretches of unemployment--the opportunity for travel. I'm sure having a broader spectrum of life experiences and influences will enrich my work in some way. Of course, this is all under the laughable assumption that I will be making enough money drawing cartoons to eat, let alone travel. I'll at least need to find some backup form of work that I can take with during trips to support myself. Maybe translation, or maybe I can find some means of doing independent (art/cartoon) work that--ha ha--makes money somehow.

Lots to think about, but no urgency at the moment, I guess.

Home again. Feels weird. I was only there for a couple weeks and a bit, but I think I have some minor reverse culture shock. Too bad, I was getting pretty good at the squat toilets too. And I'm already really missing the food. I'm kind of leery of eating something really sweet and recalibrating my internal palate to American "OMG excess" levels. Maybe I'll just live out of the nearest M2M or JAS Mart, although they are like half the size of a real Japanese conbini. I also kind of miss the musical motif that everything over there has, as silly as it can get to be. I wanna hear the coffee jidouhanbaiki theme song (which it plays as it pours your cup) again.

And of course I miss the ubiquity of the Japanese language, and being around cool people. The latter will get better once the school year starts next week and I see my classmates again.

*Sigh*

I wanna go back. . . .

Well, I just got back to small-town Japan from an awesome weekend in Tokyo with unforth. The only annoying thing was that my big toe was sprained or broken or something from an earlier incident, so I could only limp everywhere. Tonight I couldn't take it anymore, and I went to the local hospital when I got back into town. The hospital was closed, but I found a staff member smoking outside and he called a nurse. She examined my foot (giving the toe a hard SQUEEZE) and said it might be broken, and sent me to a hospital that was open. The doctor gave it a glance, pronounced it an infection, and then lanced the fear of god out of my foot and gave me antibiotics. Well, I had gotten a little semi-infected pinprick on TOP of the main injury, days afterward. . . . But somehow I don't think this pillowy, purple knot itself was caused by an infection. So we will see tomorrow if I am more or less able to walk. One thing is for sure, and that's that I'm going to get this thing X-rayed when I'm back in the States. I don't care if it doesn't make a difference. I just have to know.

One positive aspect to this is that it all took place in Japanese, so at least I can feel proud of that.

holy shit i have so many bug bites i actually cannot sleep because of them. hydrocortizone lotion GO!