..Because my internet network is broken. I can't upload any images, which means no artwork for anyone ;_; No photos, either. Right when I get a new camera! It's just typical.

  In light of this problem, I started drawing on Facebook last night. It's surprisingly fun, though not exactly the most versatile of mediums, haha. XD I mean, all you can change is the brush width, colour and opacity. XD But! A friend has shown me to an oekaki BBS where I can draw more, so hopefully I will have more things to show you guys until the problem gets fixed! Though gods know when that will be. For the moment these are just 20-second things I did on friends' Facebook profile pages:

This one is on my profile page. Uhh.. Don't ask what's going on. I've just been seeing Jun slapping a lot of people recently. I guess he's not happy about the lack of strawberries Ohno's talking about. ...I'm not mental. I like how Jun turned out, though. XD

This one was a request by Zoey, and it's up on her Facebook profile page. She loves Ryo, and I'm obsessed with WeeeeK, so this just kind of came out... XD

And this.. Well.. I don't really know. XD I drew this on another friend's profile page. She likes Jun!

Sorry I can't post you guys better drawings at the moment. u_____u I'm really happy that I am even getting back into the habit of drawing at all, though. It's a Good Thing. Shame I can't draw anything more complex than an oekaki right now though XD

きたーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーーア！

  So the tales were true after all, and I did get a camera for my birthday! --Ignore the fact that my birthday isn't until November 2nd, for a moment-- I am impatient because I never had a 21st birthday present from my parents since I was in Japan. At the time my mother offered me a new camera, but we had no way of getting it to me since she didn't want to send it in the post, and I wanted to wait until I came home.

  To be honest, I was kind of expecting her to buy me another Nikon. Not that my last digital camera was Nikon (it was Canon), but I have a really nice expensive Nikon I use only with black and white film back home, but it was just never used enough once I got my hands on a digital camera. I ended up with the camera I was looking at while I was in Japan, the Olympus E-410. I played around with it a little today, reading the manual, and I think it's great so far. It's a real step up from managing with the limited scope I had on my previous digital camera, but it's also small and not too heavy. I have tiny hands and hated lugging around my mother's really big, clunky DSLRs whenever I was at home and had the opportunity to borrow them. I haven't really had much of a chance to take photos of anything, yet, since I have no carry-case and well.. There's nothing at home worth taking photos of. XD Hence obligatory in-the-mirror shot seen above.

(Messing around whee. I told you there's nothing to take photos of in this apartment!)

  I'm excited though. I lost all of my drive to take photos after my hard drive crashed and I lost a year's worth of photos from Japan. I just didn't feel like going out to take more, since I couldn't replace the ones I'd lost. Plus by that time my camera was already becoming more trouble than it was worth to take out. The batteries died after an insignificant number of shots (anywhere from maybe 20 photos to as little as 3 or 4), the functions were limiting what I wanted to do. Photos in low-light, under electric lights or at night were completely out of the question. The one thing my old camera was very good for was macro shots, which pleased me because they make up a large portion of the photos I take, but it's going to be nice to see what else I can do now. I just gave up taking my old camera out at all.

I should probably post these here for the enjoyment of people who will like it. I can't seem to draw tonight, though I was trying to get back into the habit since I came back to uni and had a little time for it. It's been so long since I did a full-blown piece of art like this. But at least I have been doodling in the meantime, a little. And it's the first time in.. A long long time I've drawn anything fandom-related. You guys might like it, though.

Ohmi

Iliketequila

Well, more like Day 0 and Day 1 put together!

  Happychan and I have a project! We're going to blog about our days in Tokyo one by one until we go home :) And the first day falls to.. Me!! Yesterday evening we set out for Nagoya station after my final stressful hours of sorting out my apartment. I have all my luggage with me to go home on the plane with next week so it wasn't an easy trip to the bus. The bus journey itself was fine for Happychan - who can sleep like a log anywhere! - but it was really uncomfortable for me and I kept waking up every 15 minutes to change position, despite the fact that there really wasn't any position that was more or less comfortable than the last one.

  I have to mention how difficult it was to carry my suitcase up the stairs, because I remember Happy saying I had to mention it in our write-up. My suitcase seems to weigh about 5 tons, though god knows why. I have my Wii and my PS2 and my clothes in it, some miscellaneous Arashi-related stuff.. My DVDs. It really shouldn't be that degree of overbearingly heavy. It took us about 15 minutes just to get it up the stairs between the two of us!

  In any case, we arrived in Tokyo station at 5am this morning and we've been on the go ever since. After some breakfast which cured me of post-bus-crankiness, we set off to explore a bit! I took Happy to Ebisu Garden Place where we played at 花より男子 for a while. We went to Harajuku where we took photos of the NewS billboards like silly fangirls, sat in Yoyogi park for the morning chatting about our boys. We went shopping for a little bit and then moved back to Ueno (somehow on the way missing Aibachan's sexy new poster for 忘れられない人, how did that happen!?) for karaoke!

  We did our usual three hours of karaoke, though I think my throat was suffering a little from my night of almost-no-sleep on the bus. We sang all of the boys' new solos in one go! :D It was fun, we'll go again before Wednesday I'm sure. We're both totally addicted to karaoke together!

  Karaoke ended at about 3pm, and seeing as we'd been going since 5am we were a bit tired. So, we headed back to our hotel where we settled into the room (free internet access! Woo!) and relaxed for a bit. Relaxed a bit too much if you asked me - we both ended up in bed for about three hours! It's not our fault :< Cute image though ne? Both of us in pajamas at 4pm in the afternoon, exhausted and asleep in the little bed? XD

   This is pretty much what we look like now, in our silly hotel-brand yukata in our tiny hotel room! We're going to sleep in a bit, since once we'd woken up from our nap we went for dinner (中華料理！We had ハイコーロ yummy and 餃子　too.) and then I had a couple of drinks in Captain's honour at Hub, where I got harassed by a scary guy who stared at my breasts the ENTIRE time he was talking to me. Sigh. But I did a shot of tequila in Ohno's honour, and got silly tipsy and talked about embarrassing things. But luckily Happy was just as embarrassing about Sho even though she wasn't drinking. I shan't say any more, because I promised I wouldn't unless I really ran out of things to say.. So wait for it in the future instead. XD Hehehe!

  Right now it's time for us to sleep so that we can enjoy our fun-packed day tomorrow. I won't spoil the plan for you so that you can enjoy finding out later, instead! Next update will be from Happychan on her Vox :)

  Hello! I am on the train on the way back from my impromptu Nagano trip right now. It's dark and there's an old woman sitting next to me casually ignoring me, so I can sit and embarrass myself watching Gの嵐 or whatever in peace.

  However! I am not doing that. At least, not right now. Earlier on today when I was looking at my phone's calendar to work out a couple of dates, I realised that I have two weeks left in Japan. Two weeks to the day. It's kind of hit me hard; I mean, I always knew I was leaving at the end of August but I also feel a bit like my life here has just begun. All the friends I've made in the past few weeks, while I've lost some of them to other countries and other obligations, I still feel like I'm only just getting stuck in. I mean.. It's a weird feeling. I have about four or five free days left to get everything done in.

  I am ready to go back for a while. Not for too long, but am ready to go back. I'm looking forward to seeing you guys, though in a way it doesn't feel like I haven't seen you for months, more like I just stepped out of the door a couple of weeks ago. I'm looking forward to seeing my parent's beautiful new house... Oh, I know I've written about this before, but give me a break. I just realised I'll be back in England in just about 15 days time. I want to read Love It! I want to eat salt & vinegar crisps! I want to move into our new flat in Liverpool and play Arashi until the neighbours complain! I want to see my fish and my cat! I want to get my mother to watch more jdrama with me!

  There are things I am not looking forward to, as well. I don't want to have to put up with chavs. I don't want to have to do my oral dossier or deal with anything to do with JMU. I don't want to pay through the nose to go anywhere on the train and have to spend hours and hours of my day just to do it. I don't want to deal with London's tube system. I don't want the wind and the rain, I want to be able to wear whatever I want out and not have to worry about everyone wanting to steal my stuff and/or stab me up. I am going to miss Happychan and Robin and Michelle and Renee and Zoey and everyone so much I don't know how I am going to deal with it. But there are things to balance it out so I can at least find ways to enjoy my time. I miss my lovely housemate, though we haven't really been anything you could call housemates for the past year.

  Okay, so this is the one bit of emo I will allow myself, because it involves a friend and not just me. But I don't know how I will handle parting with Happy at the airport. I feel like we've shared so much together these few months, and it's been a short time but it's felt long. I don't know when we will see one another again, though I want to more than anything. And I am tearing up writing this right now - on the train, in public! Fuck, wait I didn't notice I was listening to 虹.. [censored], Nino, [censored]! Stop it! Sorry. I don't mean it. But bad timing. Really bad timing.

  Right, let's try this again. I am going to have trouble with that parting. It makes it better that we will be together until the moment I leave, but it also makes it worse. めっちゃ切なくなる。I felt bad today when I had to say I realised I have two weeks left. Like I'm just making a point of it, so now the days can be counted down instead of just springing up on us at the end. But, it makes it a lot easier to think that there is England at the end of it, things waiting for me, as well as it being an end.

  This isn't actually what I wanted to write about at all, so sorry that went on for so long! What I really wanted to say is that I have really grown up in the last six months, or maybe a bit longer. But it keeps hitting me at moments when I don't expect it. Normally I wouldn't be the one to try and deal with anything on my own, or for other people, for fear that I can't do it properly. But today I did things I would never have done months ago. I went from the one who needs help to buy my Japanese cellphone to the one taking someone else by the hand and getting it set up for them. And in the past, if I wanted to do something the furthest I would get is to say "I want to do this!" and then let other people research it for me, other people find out what I should do, and then tell me if not even do some of it outright. Today I found myself asking about applying for jobs - when I have to do it, when the deadline is, how to go about it, what qualifications I should stress. Somewhere along this year I became an adult in my own right, and I'm not sure when it happened.

  ...I'm still a kid at heart, though. I am named after Aiba after all, and your glasses are not safe around me! I can and will laugh louder than you, I will find childish things hilarious for hours, and I can enjoy myself in the smallest, simplest ways. I'm going to bounce the entire way to the Arashi concert next week, and I am going to be the person screaming the loudest in the entire venue. I'm not growing up any time soon, I've just become an adult. They're two totally different things. :)

Yesterday was our "graduation party". I think both of these words need to be in inverted commas respectively, since firstly we've not finished yet so it can't really be called graduation; we still have another week of lessons and then final exams. The word "party" seriously needs to be put in inverted commas, because instead of involving a lot of fun, perhaps boozing and cavorting, it involved giving a powerpoint presentation.

  In fact, I've already commented on the irony of the whole thing - I had to wear traditional Japanese dress and give a powerpoint presentation wearing it. How strange is that? Not only that, I was wearing a yukata that looked like it was straight out of old Edo. I felt extremely strange. I won't talk too much about the graduation - it wasn't stunning and since I've already sat through one of them it was just a case of enduring it to the end.

  Once again Helen and I got treated as though we are one unit and not two seperate people, which was weird - everyone else had to give a presentation on their time in Japan. We are all paired up - two Chinese students, two English students, two French students and two American students. However, while everyone else gave their presentations alone, ours was given together. You really can't seperate us! What was worse (or better?) was how afterwards we got comments that we were like "manzai" - a Japanese comedy duo. It really stuck in my mind because well.. It was so true. We are. We were constantly bouncing off one another and laughing throughout our presentation, though who cares how good or bad it was. The last slide was pure genius though, I have to say - so much that we were worried about even showing it. It consisted of this photo, and then a gif of Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles flying in from the bottom of the screen. It made everyone laugh, but I don't think even they are sure why. Top marks for being offensive!

  I stole this image off Helen, since she uploaded it before I did, but this is a photo I took on my phone before we did our presentation of the two of us. God, ignore how bad I look XD There's a typhoon over Japan right now, and to avoid panda-faced-ness I haven't been wearing makeup or doing my hair before I go out. Plus I just look terrible in general there. XD Helen looks lovely, though!

  Unlike some of the other leavers, I didn't cry or feel sad during the graduation. In fact, my feelings are a bit mixed. Firstly I know I have another month and a half here before my stint in the UK. However, my overwhelming feeling was... this isn't the end. I am going to do this again, and better. There will be many more times like this, so I'm not sad. Just determined. This time is precious too because it will never come again - and I am truly thankful to my university for all of the things I hate about it, they have helped make this year in Japan what it really was. But I know I will be coming back next year, as soon as possible, in whatever capacity. And I know I can make it even better than this year was, too. For all the things that didn't work out the way they should have this year, I know there will be times that outshine them in the future, because I'll make them. :)

I have to admit.. I don't like Facebook or Myspace (though I have an account on both of those places so that when people link me I can actually access the pages) but other than that I have a complete addiction for social networking sites. I use Livejournal and Vox like there's no tomorrow (and I have been using LJ now for over 6 years... Scary thought) and I end up having accounts on various other places that I check slightly less frequently.

However I have never gotten into such a simple site so fast as I did with Twitter! The concept is so simple.. It's like an archive of tiny, 140-character text messages designed to display what you're doing or thinking at that very moment. Everything you add gets added to a chronological public timeline, meaning that reading the public timeline is just like seeing a huge stream of consciousness from around the world.. Very fascinating stuff for someone like me. I am mostly using it to babble thoughts in Japanese and English at the moment with a lot of fun. But there are people form all around the world using it in all different languages.

I think what really made me think "wow, this is cool" about it was when I checked it in the morning yesterday and saw lots of messages from people in Japan saying things as simple as "good morning" or "I'm off to work now". The idea that people can type these things in before going off and someone else will read them and acknowledge it is really nice to me. Some of my friends really value their privacy and can't understand my enthusiasm for it, but persoanlly I really like the idea.

If any of you guys have an account or are interested in it, by all means add me! Here's a link to my profile on there. Japanese or English is fine. (o^.^o)

Sorry I haven't updated much recently. I have been feeling really busy over the past couple of weeks with work and social things... Haven't had much of a chance for the stormy boys either, other than the usual (reading news, watching 宿題くん and Bambino, that kind of thing) so I haven't really had a lot to write about. I will fix that, soon!! Hope all of you are well and happy.

Official site link here.

On this occasion, the members and the staff humbly regret to have to make this kind of announcement.

Since we feel we should do our best to all contribute to her share, to all the fans who supported us from our debut and the companies related to us, please continue this support hereafter.

　　　　　　　　　　　　　AAA members & Staff

Two days before the Nagoya concert I have tickets for. I will definitely report on the atmosphere afterwards... It's not as though she hasn't been on hiatus twice, nor as though the members haven't been doing her share of the work for a long time now (including during the Delicious Gakuin play). But still, it will be interesting to see how this pans out. Will AAA remain a 7-member band now? Will they audition new females? Only time will tell.

Seriously, is this what I spend my time thinking about? What I spend my spare time doing? I am clearly crazy.

Yamakurobee

2 comments