the more i study, the more i grow… sideways…

I wonder if feeling fat is normal. I mean is it an emotion that girls normally feel during the day? Do people just wake up and just think, “Geez, I feel fat today?” I mean, I’m by no means obese, I’m not super skinny either, but I don’t think that I’m at a healthy weight or anything. I mean, I think that I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that I seem to gain weight during finals week. Non-stop sitting at a desk studying and snacking doesn’t really do it for my waistline. But more than usual, I feel just fat. I’ve basically gotten over caring about what other people think of me, well to a point. I mean doesn’t everyone to a certain extent think about how they look to other people? A bit of social and self-consciousness is healthy isn’t it? I wonder if guys ever have days where they just feel fat. Or is it mostly a girl thing? I’m sure guys have their own thing to deal with, but is it mostly because of society that girls tend to have these feelings?

My roommate commented a few weeks ago about the mirror in my room. I never thought about it. Most girls have a mirror in their room right? It just seems like a fixture in the female bedroom. But my roommate was saying that he had never really thought about having a mirror in his room. But maybe it was just him. I think my brother had a mirror in his room too. But I do think that it’s true that girls are more image conscious.

But I’m not really sure what to do about these feelings. At this point right now, I’m too lazy, busy and not disciplined enough to exercise on a daily basis and not disciplined enough to go on a stricter and healthier diet that doesn’t consist of me snacking too much. Maybe I need to deal with my gluttony before I deal with anything else. Sigh. The joys of living in America. Oh hail the land of fast food and home of the super-size. Maybe I’ll lose some weight if I move to another country. Excuses, excuses huh?

on crying 1 litre of tears

I seems that I like Asian dramas a lot more than their American counterparts. Maybe it’s because America is really into reality TV nowadays and sitcoms seem to be a little harder to find. I’m not a big reality TV person at all. I’ll watch some stuff, but not a big fan of it across the board. Maybe that’s why I’ve been on an Asian drama run recently. Right now it’s J-Drama. Before I went through a Taiwanese Drama phase, then K-Drama (mostly romantic comedies, which they seem to do so well, that and Korean BBQ…) and now J-Drama.

Speaking about J-Drama, I finished watching 1 Litre of Tears a while ago. Well, that’s a drama aptly named because even if it wasn’t a liter of tears, I think I cried close to it. I cry easily, but in dramas and sitcoms, rarely do I cry in the first episode. Well, I definitely cried here. And it’s not like no one knows what’s going to happen at the end of the drama. I mean, it’s about a girl who has a fatal and incurable disease so there isn’t really much guesswork about what happens at the end. I think it’s because it’s based on a true story and that the way that the actual Kito Aya was integrated into the drama was really powerful. The words that they picked each time from her diary to end each episode set against a black background, the pictures and the ending theme of K’s “Only Human” was really haunting. I liked the fact that while it is a dramatization of her diary and her life, they seemed to want to stay as true to Kito Aya’s life and what she wrote down as much possible.

Kito Aya’s diary 1 Litre of Tears originally published after her death in 1988.

As characters and as actors, besides Sawajiri Erika who plays the lead Ikeuchi Aya, I think I enjoyed Narumi Rito, who plays Ikeuchi Ako, Aya’s sister, and Nishikido Ryo who plays Asou Haruto. I think that the changes that you see these characters go through is amazing and really touching. Ako goes from indifferent about her family and jealous of her sister to one of her sister’s biggest supporters. Haruto goes from someone who doesn’t seem to care for anything much anymore either to someone that puts his all into helping and ultimately loving Aya. Whenever Haruto cried I just cried rivers with him. I’m such a sympathetic crier. One of my favorite scenes is that of her class singing “Sangatsu Kokonoka (3月９日)” which is what they sang at the choral competition as she is leaving class. And I love Haruto telling off the rest of the class for being hypocrites. That and Nishikido Ryo is just too cute.

But I swear I cried so much in the drama. I think everyone who has seen it did. It’s like you don’t have a heart if you didn’t cry in this drama. It was such a depressing drama and inspiring drama at the same time, not only in terms of content, but because I think about my own life and how I am faced with obstacles that are no where as difficult as hers and yet I can’t seem to muster even half as much strength to get through them. I know that relying on myself is impossible, that I don’t nearly have as much strength as I think I do. I’m weak. I know it. But it’s scary to rely on other people. It’s scary to find myself vulnerable and tell someone else about my inner demons. I mean, I even find it hard to tell God sometimes and shouldn’t that be the easiest? I mean, He knows already so I’m just vocalizing them anyways. But I think that by telling God, it would make my worries, fears and problems real. Maybe it’s pride, false pride that I think I can do it without relying on God. Pride that people will continue to see someone who doesn’t have any drama to deal with in their life. Sigh. I think I might be an escaping masochist: always crying over someone else’s pain so I don’t have to cry over my own.

so… where’s the rest of my food?

I must have a little delirious when I wrote the last post because it’s really really really long. I didn’t realize I had so much to say on the topic, and actually I could probably still go about it for awhile. Oh well. Onto today’s gripe.

I’ve never really been a person who reads nutrition labels. It’s not that I don’t care about what I’m putting into my body, it’s just that growing up, I never ate a lot of things that care from packages, and so I was never really familiar with the process. I probably ate some pre-packaged food but for me, the association I have with packaged food are chips, cookies, soda and such, which were things that my mom never bought. It wasn’t until college that I really started eating things in that category. And it wasn’t until college that I met people who were so obsessed with reading labels. My sophomore year in college, I lived with girls who were overly obsessed with reading nutrition facts. I swear that the zeal that they had in reading labels went beyond the normal person’s glance at the number of calories in an ice cream bar. The most reading I did on my food items was the back of the cereal box during the few times that I did manage to eat breakfast before class. They were also obsessed with counting carbs, which I thought was a little ridiculous, since all the carbs they decided to cut out, and then some, was later consumed in alcohol that weekend.

Maybe it was because of their influence, but I’ve been paying a little more attention to the nutrition labels. I always knew that the serving sizes on the labels were sometimes a little ridiculous. But while making lunch a few days ago, I was really hit with this fact. I know that this country has gone on a real kind of health craze. The focus on the fact that Americans are overweight and such has pushed ideas about ideas about diets (cough, cough ATKINS cough cough) and exercise to the forefront. And with that portion control and moderation have become key. I feel like I understand the need for portion control. I have fallen victim to eating half a tub of ice cream in one sitting without thinking about it, and recently with Girl Scout cookie season, it was pretty bad too. But reading the serving size on basic things like bread and eggs, I was pretty surprised and a little confused.

Honestly? 1 Slice of bread is the serving size? So much for a sandwich huh? It’s like my attempt to be healthy by having a turkey sandwich instead of a burger has become a little less healthy. The turkey sandwich is healthier than the burger but it’s like they’re telling me I’ve already had too many carbs during this meal. And don’t even really know how that works with the new food pyramid that doesn’t really relate to serving sizes anymore. Before it was about 10 servings of grains, breads, and carbs a day, but now they talk about them in ounces. I think it’s roughly around 7 ounces of grains for a 2200 calorie diet. I really don’t know how to figure that out. So much thinking.

Here’s another one:

Really? One egg? When people eat eggs for breakfast, don’t they normally eat two? And you can’t really make an omelette with just one egg. The only time I have just one egg is with ramen. Even recently with fried rice and kimchi fried rice I have two eggs. Or in cobb salad, I’ll have one egg. But in everything else, doesn’t one egg just seem a little bit lacking? I tend to think of eggs in pairs. But anyways, onto the most ridiculous and the one that prompted me to write this really long post:

Honestly, who eats just half a package of ramen? It does ultimately point to the extreme unhealthiness of ramen, but really? Half a package of ramen? I understand that portion control is important, but don’t think that eating 2 servings of ramen with more than one egg on top will kill me. But then again, I did feel extremely sick after eating only ramen for almost a month because I was broke. I guess what I’m trying to say is that knowing what you are putting into your body is important, but that people shouldn’t get side-tracked with labels. We probably shouldn’t be eating so much food that requires such intense label reading anyways, aka ramen. But if I have to read labels, probably only eating 15 Wheat-Thins is a good thing, but I’m not gonna stress if I ate 30. But maybe I just want to have my ramen and eat it too.

P.S. Ramen tastes better if you rinse the noodles and then make the soup separately before adding the noodles again. The soup doesn’t get all starchy and thick. That way you can eat twice as much ramen before you feel like throwing up… 😉

music and bad lyrics… plus some more J-Pop to go around

I’ve always thought of lyrics as an important part of music, something that can either add to or take away from the piece as a whole. I think most people will agree with me that sometimes lyrics will either make or break a piece. However, nowadays, it seems like that even if your lyric penning skills are subpar, if you put the lyrics over a catchy beat, then you can get away with almost anything: the chorus of Mims’s “This is Why I’m Hot” comes to mind. Then there are awesome songs that I really don’t understand the lyrics to, even though I could recite the words off the top of my head: Oasis’s “Champagne Supernova” comes to mind here. I understand the individual words, but I don’t think I really grasp what the lyrics actually mean. My knowledge of the English language doesn’t really give me a leg up here; they might as well be speaking another language. Unfortunately, many times I find myself not listening to the words anyways. I always seem to have music playing so I don’t think my daily life is ever really quiet. Most of the time I’m listening to my iPod while I’m studying or walking to class and not really listening to the words of the song. I hear it, but I’m not necessarily thinking about the meaning behind the words 24/7. I think that’s why I can listen to foreign language music and not be too bothered by the fact that I don’t understand what they’re saying. As long as the song is catchy and I find it entertaining, it normally stays on my computer’s hard drive.

But recently, I feel like I’ve been confronted head on by the fact that I really don’t know what these various artists are singing about. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been listening to a lot more J-Pop and so the fact that I don’t know the words is made much more obvious. I makes me a little sad that I can’t understand what HOME MADE Kazoku is talking about in their songs. After googling the lyrics some of their songs, I really want to be able to hear what they’re rapping about. Especially since they’re a hip-hop, funk, and popish trio, their songs are really lyric and beat based. I got the beat, but miss out on the lyrics, which I find great since I find them to be a little more poetic than some other stuff. I’ve been listening to “Take It Easy” from their “musication” album non-stop.

About a month or two ago, I got a copy of NEWS’s new album “pacific”. NEWS is a J-Pop group made up of six guys who sing, dance, act and do other boy band things they seem do so well. Track 8 on the album is entitled Chirarizumu (チラリズム) and composition wise, it’s a fun pop song, it’s catchy and sounds like classic bubble-gum pop to me. Since I don’t understand Japanese, I finally decided one day to google the lyrics and attempt to find out what in the world they’re actually singing about. HAHA. I was so shocked when I found out the song was about an adolescent (I hope…) boy’s desire to peek up girls’ skirts. WHAT?! Knowing that now, I can’t listen to the song in the same way. You can’t. There’s no way. There’s just something vaguely disturbing about guys (they’re all over the age of 20 now mind you, and this album was released November of last year, so they were definitely not adolescents when they sang this song) singing about their desire to perform lewd conduct over a super happy, super innocent and clean sounding track.

Lyrics wise, it really amazes me what you can get away with nowadays. Maybe I was just young and so wasn’t quick to pick up on hidden meanings and double entendres, but I feel like things have become much more explicit. I mean compare Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” to Akon’s “I Wanna F*ck You”. No clever and sometimes cliché analogies, Akon doesn’t really even attempt that but rather he gets straight to the point. I mean, you can’t really get anymore explicit than that.

I’ve been shocked by explicit lyrics more than once, but the most recent occurrence was once again located within the realm of J-Pop. I was listening to KAT-TUN’s “cartoon KAT-TUN II You” album and found that I really liked the back beats on one of the tracks. The singing, if you could call it that, was pretty bad, but I really liked the beat so it was a kind of perfect walking-to-class-while-listening-to-your-iPod kind of song. So when I had some free time, I figured that I would google the lyrics. I really don’t know what I was expecting. The track is called “Make U Wet” for goodness sakes, so I had to have guessed the content of the song. So I googled and surprise surprise, it was what I thought it was. But the thing is, the lyrics are so explicit that they’re just hilarious, like rolling-on-the-floor, good-thing-I-swallowed-my- orange-juice-already-or-else-my-macbook-would-be-orange, I-can’t-believe-they- convinced-him-to-perform-it funny. I can’t even convey how amusing they are; you would have to google them for yourself to really get the full effect. But besides it being really funny, I find it a little scary that adolescent girls in Japan, and in America apparently, listen to this stuff and just eat it up. They watch their concerts and scream in glee when their idols make a move to take off their clothes. It’s like softcore porn for adolescent girls. Scary. I wonder how the guys in the band feel. I’m sure it must feel great to be loved by fans and everything, but I wonder if they ever get tired of taking off their clothes to satisfy the desires of adolescent girls.

J-Pop is taking over my life…

So I guess this would be my first official rant here, not that my last tirade didn’t count, but I guess I just saw that one as an intro of sorts.

So onto the topic of the day, and one that I’ve actually been thinking about for a while: J-Pop. For those of you who didn’t know or who hadn’t guessed, J-Pop is an amalgam of the words “Japanese” and “Pop”, so essentially Japanese Pop music. When I think of J-Pop, I mostly think of the American equivalent of bubble-gum pop. I actually find that I tend to term all Japanese music J-Pop unless I know for a fact that it’s considered J-Rock or Hip-Hop or whatever. For some reason genres such as alternative and electronica don’t seem to exist when I think of Japanese music. But I digress.

My obsession lately within J-Pop has been of the idol boy-band variety. And again, for those of you who didn’t know, the idol culture in Japan is a kind of fixture in entertainment media: guys and gals churned through the entertainment industry as singing, dancing, modeling, acting, and everything-else-in-between entities, who by the way, have to look dang good doing it. It’s like the Mickey Mouse club, except bigger and very much alive. Granted I was on the boy band wagon in my high school days, good ol’ Backstreet Boys, N*SYNC, 98˚ and whoever else popped up during the ‘90s, but this extreme fascination with J-Pop boy bands has left me a little confused. While I do have Japanese music that does lean towards rock and alternative, in terms of percentage, J-Pop seems to dominate my Japanese music while American music is taken over by alternative and rock. I don’t hate pop, but I don’t particularly like pop, so why do I seem to like it so much in another language? And here’s the kicker: I don’t even understand Japanese. I understand a few words here and there, but it’s not enough to string together a coherent sentence.

I think what really perplexes me is that it’s the boy band variety of J-Pop that I like and not something else within J-Pop. Why?! They’re cheesy, have stylists that apparently worked with Liberace, are decent singers, but nothing to write home about, and usually have embarrassing choreography. The lyrics to their songs are also sometimes really laughable, but that’s a whole other post, and yet I still find myself watching their videos, their concerts (cheese galore…) and listening to their music. So excuse me while I YouTube some more videos of NEWS, KAT-TUN, Kanjani8, and Tackey & Tsubasa. Geez, even their names are cheesy…

Sorry, I couldn’t resist and had to post some pictures…

foray into the world of blogging

In starting this blog, I think I have almost come to the full realization of how scary blogging can be. I didn’t think that starting a blog would be such a daunting process; blogging always held a strange portion of fear for me, but I never thought the actual process of starting a blog would be so difficult. I’ve always thought of myself as an extremely private person and so the prospect of publishing thoughts on my life and the environment around me for people to read, provided anyone reads this, was scary. I would be sharing things with people that I couldn’t see when I didn’t even share some things with people I did see. Being judged by people I didn’t know was also scary, but I’ve come to believe that being read and potentially judged by strangers isn’t as scary as being judged by people I knew. I wouldn’t have to physically see the strangers the next day and constantly think whether or not they thought a certain way about me. I also think that I’ve just matured and grown up a little and thus can say that peoples’ opinion of me don’t really bother me too much. Of course it would bother me if a large population thought that I was a jerk, because that would probably mean that I was being a jerk, but I at the end of the day, I don’t feel the need to answer to those that might not agree with me. So yay for essentially not caring. Now I just sound like an insensitive jerk… that and my inner monologue and random conversations with myself look stranger in print than I imagined. They just don’t have that light, fleeting, and almost cotton-candy like texture when they were just thoughts floating through my head. I think that’s the first time that I’ve compared thoughts to cotton-candy…

But seriously, starting a blog was daunting. And here I mean the actual physical process of filling in the form to sign up for a blog. It sounds weird, but it seems like it would be an easy process, right? I mean, isn’t that how it’s sold on every blog host? Things like, “it only takes a minute”, and that it’s a “simple and easy” installation (I was going to say “so easy a caveman could do it” but that’s for GEICO). And it was just so amusing why it was so daunting. Provided that picking where to blog took a while, but it was deciding on a name that took forever. It’s like you don’t want to be generic, but at the same time you don’t want strain yourself and get so literary to the point that even you don’t understand what the heading means. So after thinking about the title for what was probably way too long (and the tagline mind you, that’s what really killed me), all I’ve come up with is this pretentious sounding title set against a pretty picture of the ocean. But I’ve thought for too hard and too long to go generic, so the title is here to stay. Would this blog be the same with something more generic? Probably, but I think I secretly (or rather, not so secretly now) like it. But that just might be the part of me that thinks it’s a poet talking…

Well, I can feel it now. This is probably going to become a lounge for all the random thoughts that come to me during the day. Now instead of letting them grow in potentially strange ways in my head as I converse with myself, they’re going to hang out here. And if this blog is going to be representative of what goes on through my head, I think the focus of this blog really is going to be hazy.