Class and whales

I had class today. I think Thursdays are the worst day for me because Japanese class is focused on conversation and it's constant participation and quickly memorizing things and thinking on the spur of the moment. I also had a heck of a time doing my little bit of listening homework because the one computer lab had a class in it and the one computer that was open in the other room refused to accept my password even though nothing had changed since the last time I used the computers. I ended up having to go to the tech support people again and reset my password and then change it back again. For some reason it worked after that but I now had to wait for a computer to open up in the computer lab. In the future I think I'm just going to copy the audio tracks to a flash drive and do them on my own computer. I already got the files of one disk from Maggie. Unfortunately we're probably going to be switching to new CDs before too long and I'll have to copy those too.

For lunch today and on Tuesday I went to a nearby bunch of stores, like a small mall, and got cheap instant noodles to bring back to Kirari and make with the cup noodle vending machine's hot water (the vending machine is more expensive than going to the store and gives you less). Then I spent a good two hours watching Udon for the movie class with Maggie and coming up with discussion questions for Tuesday's class where we'll watch the first half of it again with the rest of the class. Unlike the last movie we watched, this one wasn't that great. The first half was particularly crappy, clichéd, and meandering, and though the second half brought it back to alright-ness, it was too little too late.

Unrelated to anything, the cell phones we have do some weird things with texts. Like.. texts aren't just texts. They are often animated and by default the words appear a letter at a time and people often add animated emoticons or other symbols that pop up in between (like an ok hand sign). There's also a lot of other emoticons that seem like they'd be very rarely used. For example, Alan sent Dai a text today with a whale emoticon at the end and we all pondered what emotion a whale could possibly convey. I suggested it was somehow related to obesity. Chris, one of the British guys, came up with the explanation that since we're in Japan, it probably meant "impending death" or "awareness of one's mortality" (because of Japan's whaling ships). As an example of when one would use such an emoticon, he suggested "I just found out I contracted cancer of the bowels. *whale*".