updates

blah!  much to update y'all on.

so, i'm going to make a list and summarize.

1.  sports festival!  ...last monday, was it?  unfortunately, it was raining.  but they didn't cancel it, so we had to have it in the rain.  ha.  it was wicked cold.  especially because we weren't allowed to wear sweatshirts during the cheer competition.  basically, there are six teams, and each team had designed a t-shirt for everyone to wear.  ours (we were team 2 because we're class #2) were bright yellow.  1 was white, 3 was pink, 4 was green, 5 was red and 6 was blue.  we looked like skittles.  but anyway.  our cheer was kickass.  it was SO COLD but so much fun nonetheless.  and we got pom-poms.  so that made it all better.  but don't worry, it wasn't like suburban-highschool-football-cheering.  it was more like.  crazy dance cheering.  yay.  

we also sucked hardcore at the huge jump-roping event.  whatever.

2.  moving.  we moved to a bigger apartment with more user-friendly bathrooms.  ahha i'm not even going to go into detail there.  but yeah.  this one's really pretty and white and modern, and very bright.  i like it.  and we're on the 22nd floor, and a lot of the surrounding buildings are pretty short, so if you go out on the veranda you can look over and see the city.  it's pretty cool.  plus, the best thing is that the subway station is less than 2 minutes away.  literally, you leave our lobby, walk about 50 feet to the escalators, take four escalators down, and you're at the station.  sweet.

3.  clubs!  AHHHH.  to play volleyball, or to not play volleyball!  i worried about it ALL DAY today.  because seriously, i can't make up my mind.  i'm definitely playing badminton, i'm just worried about volleyball.  because okay.  i'm really weird and i HATE games.  i lovelovelove drills, but absolutely despise games.  and so when we're doing drills, i have so much fun and i want to join.  but when we start playing games, i'm like aggghhhhh can i leave?!  and i have fun during practice, but afterwards, when i think about the next practice i'm going to go to, i kind of weirdly dread it.  i dunno.  it's weird.  i think it has something to do with the whole crazy age hierarchy in japan, which i will describe more fully in the next post.

4.  okay.  i know it's totally a line, but i actually really miss the "intellectual stimulation" one gets at brearley.  not because i'm being all pretentious and i'm-smarter-than-all-these-people and shit, but because literally, i need to do more work.  more literary work, to be precise.  because i have more than enough science/math-related issues - i understand NOTHING about physics (mostly because the japanese physics vocabulary is really confusing and because our teacher sucks and has gone against everything i previously thought was true about physics), and i just got a 41 on my math quiz.  WOOOO!  but it's okay, cause the average for our class was a 21.  and the worst grade was an 8.  yeah, ICU gives out a lot of D's and F's.  it's like.  normal.  getting an A is like.  unheard of.  weird.   but.  my english lit class?

DEATH.DEATH.DEATH.DEATH.

it's so un-challenging i want to scream.  again, not being pretentious.  i mean, it's not anyone's fault, because even though it's the top-level class, there are kids who've been overseas for 15 years, like me, and kids who've only been for 2.  so i mean.  there's not really much you can do about it.  but seriously.  we're reading the crucible, which is set in 1692, soo...the language is different from modern english, right?  but no big deal, right?  WRONG.  nobody understands it, and we spend our classes making character lists, explaining what ACTUALLY HAPPENED in the last page, and "translating" words into modern english, such as: "what would 'aye', 'hearty', 'parlour', 'sport' (as in, 'it were just sport, uncle!') mean in modern english?" 

i am literally dying to write an analytical english paper.

gahhhhhhhhh.