end of finals and such...

on thursday i had my last two finals.  chem was crazy easy and modern japanese was...in a word, death.  but oh well.  anyway.  i'd expected to feel liberated when the bell rang to signal the end of the modern japanese exam, but i felt oddly unsatisfied and restless.  maybe i'm starting to actually care about how well i do on exams and things.  i studied pretty hard for these finals, but it wasn't nearly enough.  the weird thing is, though, at ICU, i measure my success on a test by how many problems i left blank.  meaning, if i left less than a quarter of the answers blank, then GREAT.  i know that's probably unheard of in brearley terms, but it's pretty much impossible to be able to answer every question on a test.  so yeah.  

whatever, i'm gonna work harder next term.  (or so i tell myself...)

thursday night, we had a badminton dinner.  exams ended at around 10:30, and dinner wasn't until 4:45, so we basically had 6 hours to kill.  yeeshk.  my friend yurika and i decided to wander kichijoji (two stations away from school.  one of the main hangouts for young, "hip" people).  there are all these little stores on the street, as well as some big department stores.  walking around was fun, but ridiculously tiring.  after wandering for about three hours, we decided we were way too exhausted and retreated to the arcade-type basment of this department store, where we fooled around with a purikura machine.  purikura machines are my new obsession.  i realize it is a totally narcissistic and toolish thing to do, but they're SO MUCH FUN.  and in my defense, i don't like the ones where you just stand there with your friend and take cutesy, prettified pictures of yourself ("prettified" because purikura machines have light settings that can make your eyes look brighter and bigger, or your skin look clearer, or whatever).  those are lame.  but i love the ones that have the cool backgrounds.  a lot of the machines have green backdrops and green "stairs"that disappear, and you can pose so that when they put the actual background in, it looks like you're surfing, or riding an elephant, or whatever.  yeah i know that was really hard to understand but it was extremely difficult to explain.  i apologize.

anywhoo.  i also had to buy a few things, so the kichijoji wandering session was good for that as well.  my class is doing secret santas (no debates over secret "santa" or secret "snowman" this year haha), so i had to buy a gift for under 500 yen.  500 yen is basically nothing, so it was a very challenging task.  i ended up buying a pair of really fuzzy ducky socks and a peach-scented gel pen.  luckily the girl i'm buying my secret santa gift for is really really nice, so it wasn't too hard to pick something for her.  i'm really glad i didn't get one of the boys because well.  boys are impossible to shop for, especially for under 5 bucks.  

my mom's also doing secret santa at her holiday party/get-together she's hosting tomorrow at our house, so i had to buy something for that too.  this one was even harder because i had to buy something for under $10 that would appeal to everyone (man/woman/boy/girl), because we're picking presents at random.  i bought an edamame plant.  haha.  hey, DIY edamame is awesome.

friday, the badminton team went to disneyland.  the number of people there was mind-boggling.  seriously, it was totally absurd.  the lines for the really popular rides like splash mountain was 120 MINUTES LONG.  jesus.  ridiculous.  and what was even more ridiculous was that we actually waited on line for 2 hours.  hooooly crap.  but we ended up going on about 10 rides, which wasn't too bad.  plus i got to go on the merry-go-round.  wheee.  but nobody would ride on alice's teacups with me.  i was extremely upset.