List of songs I’d love to sing.

Inexplicably, a post that’s somewhat normal. Songs that I love and that I wanna sing.

1. Makka na Chikai

2. Jewel by Ayumi Hamasaki

3. Reset

4. Take Me Faraway by Oh-chan

5. Rain by Oh-chan

6. God knows I’m too soprano to sing this.

7. Confrontation, from Jekyll and Hyde. If only I was a guy. Oh, if only I was a guy.

Musical Theatre

1. The Children of the Wind from Rags

2. China Doll from Marguerite

3. In Short from Edges

4. Say That We’re Sweethearts Again from Meet the People

List of console (and PC) games

that I will buy after I become famous and wealthy and can actually afford to buy games like these.

1. Sims 3. (PC)

2. Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance. (Gamecube)

3. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. (Wii)

4. Grim Grimoire. (PS2)

5. Saiyuki: Journey West. (PS)

6. Deus Ex. (PC)

7. Pajama Sam 1: >something about not being afraid of the dark<

8. Anything with decent Ho Yay in it.

9. Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Hopefully all of those games and consoles will be hopelessly old and obsolete by the time I have enough money to buy them (number 7 already is, kinda) so I can pick them off one by one off amazon.com for less than RM 10 per console/game. Yes, feel free to dream on my dear.

List of books

that I will buy over www.amazon.com after I go back to the good ol’ US of A.

1. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell
2. A Song of Ice and Fire
3. Check out Guy Gavriel Kay’s books.
4. Carol Berg’s books.
5. Steven Brust’s Vlad series. Also, House of the Jhereg.
6. These.
7. Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction
8. And these.

9. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.
10. Lord and Ladies.
11. Maskerade.

Once I completely master Japanese to the 100%th max, I will celebrate by buying the entire original Eyeshield manga series in Japanese. High quality paper and ink. It’s gonna be totally awesome. Also, F. Compo, City Hunter, and anything else by Tsukasa Hojo. And Negima. And everything that CLAMP’s ever made.

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~korenman/wmst/identity_pol.html

is a fucking failure.

Well this interesting.

When I’m dressed up, I tend to make eye contact more often at people. Weird effect. Example of environmental determinism, eh? Hehehehehhe.

MY SCHEDULE IS INSANE. AAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Tomorrow, Tuesday:

Make copies of Working callback songs and monologues.

1. Acting III. Prepare for coaching session, take notebook and pencil for someone to take notes for me.
2. ENG 92, and meeting with Professor Spaulding after. Talk about short story. Talk about publishing opportunities. Talk about internships for English majors.
3. Return Working script. Go to tap.
4. Costuming Lab.
5. Practice Working songs and monologues.
6. Dinner.
7. Readings.

Wednesday:
1. PSY 26 essay due.

Thursday:
1. Talk to Dr. Taylor about Physical Science AOI. Talk about adding psych as a major. Talk to Dr. Faux about Physical Science AOI.
2. Talk to Dr. Conley about AOI and registering for subjects.

Friday:
8:30 am Walk down to the Kinne Center to meet with Ashley Nichols.
10:00 am PSY 26: Human Evolutionary Psychology.
11:00 am Informational meeting for Writer Critics event. HOW 309.
12:00 pm New Methodologies for the Study of Causal Choice: Enemy Identification in a Video Game. OLIN 206
1:00 pm PSY 122: Sensation and Perception.
2:00 pm Costuming.
3:00 pm Costuming Lab.
5:00 pm Callbacks for Working
6:00 pm Dinner.
7:30 pm Go watch cabaret in studio 55. Starts at 8pm, get there early to ensure you have a seat.

Notice that there is no time for lunch. Remember to get a packed lunch or something, like a sandwich, to eat while walking from PSY 26 to informational meeting. You have ten minutes, which is more than enough.

The Expanding Circle

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/199704–.htm

….

Love me? Love me? Love me?

Yandere

Why the male obsession with sexualized, insane females?

This phenomenon needs investigating.

The Evolutionary Theory of Yaoi

Does it exist? Fuck YEAH it does.

Warrior Lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution, and female sexuality

I thought I would be the first person to look at yaoi from an evolutionary psychology perspective, but noooooo. Apparently fellow slash fan Catherine Salmon has already gone down that road, thoroughly, with the publication of her book Warrior Lovers: Erotic fiction, evolution, and female sexuality. Well it’s slash, not yaoi, but there are enough similarities to warrant celebration.

I was stunned, absolutely stunned when I found out that this book was IN DRAKE UNIVERSITY’S LIBRARY. I mean. Holy cow. I thought I was the only one who would look at slash that way (well, at least from a researcher’s point of view), but instead a book on evolutionary slash theory has been sitting right here, right opposite from where I live, for god knows how many years!

I want to do empirical research on yaoi. I can imagine myself researching yaoi for the rest of my life. Perhaps I should get in touch with Catherine Salmon and ask her if she wants more people to join her research endeavors in slash. With my extensive experience of reading and writing yaoi, and my passion for and increasing knowledge in evolutionary psychology, I am positive that by the time I graduate with my BS in Psychology, I will be more than fit enough to be a contributing member on such a scientific endeavor.

Is it pathetic though, that when I saw Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker on the back of the book endorsing it (apparently it’s part of a series), I SQUEE-ed out loud and hugged my laptop screen in an attempt to derive comfort from/express my adoration for them? Maybe it’s because I feel unloved and unaccepted as an atheist.

My parents are still convinced that there is some form of a god, though they haven’t been religious in ages (our ancestor altar is gathering dust), but I won’t – I won’t explain to them why atheism is the only rational position on religious, because they’re going to die in a couple decades and I want them to have peace of mind when they die.

This makes me think of my aunt, my third aunt, who’s an extremely intelligent, dedicated high school teacher of chemistry and occasionally math. At the same time she’s devoutly religious. How do I reconcile that with the fact that she is one of the most intelligent adults in my immediate family? (My father’s the smartest one of course; he’s in Mensa). I’ve long accepted, on an intellectual level, that religiosity and intelligence are not necessarily incompatible, and I know of the countless famous scientists who are at the same time religious, but it’s a concept that I haven’t, before this, generalized to the people I know, on a conscious level. It’s as if they live in a separate world from the Western discourse community of atheism, evolution, and religion that I’ve been submerged in. Again, isn’t this yet another effect of cultural imperialism?

[This has been one of the more decent posts I've made lately. I am relieved that my mind still has some semblance of order.]

Violence is decreasing.

Violence has been steadily decreasing in humans and Steven Pinker believes that this might be because our circle of reciprocal altruism, as I like to think of it, a circle that began with our immediate family and expanded outwards to include close kin just kept expanding and expanding until the whole world – or something close to it – is included, so we send donations to starving children in Africa and so on. I believe that this expansion of the circle occurs through the media. That individuals we see depicted in the media, through human interest stories and through our identification of those peoples as individuals we connect and sympathize with, leads us to broaden our circle of altruism to include those peoples.

I can use this idea for my term paper. :D

The link between ethnocentrism and the proliferation of monotheistic religion.

Murr.

I wanna get rid of my fallacious thinking. I need to read more and think more for myself instead of regurgitating the views of people that I read. If I don’t then won’t I be the same as people who “know” through “faith”? No, it’s different, because I apply logic instead of believing in something just because some authority is saying it. There is a crucial difference.

Of course independent critical thinking is always a good thing to cultivate.

I need to read more philosophy books. Like John Miller and Daniel Denett. Consciousness Explained, for example. I should try getting that through interlibrary loan.

Updated success list.

Got 99%, highest in the class, for my Sensation and Perception exam.

Got call backed for Working.

Got full marks for all my piano playing tests so far and only dropped a single point today.

Went to a talk by an alumni on her career in psychology after leaving Drake, met Dr. Faux and Dr. Klipec there at the reception afterwards, and they starting telling each other about how intelligent I was and I discussed determinism vs free will with Dr. Klipec and they talked a bit about maybe getting me into some undergraduate research at Drake and then afterwards I went to Howard Hall student lounge to print out my short story for ENG 92 (“Mama”), and happened upon the Writer’s Circle’s discussion session, which I hadn’t been getting emails about because apparently my e-mail is not on the list for some reason, and had a fun time discussing other people’s poems and my own short story.

And then the next day in ENG 92 we discussed my short story along with 4 others from my classmates and the overall reaction was “gory, brilliant, really good writing, loved the descriptions, maybe goes on for a tad too long, can be confusing at points”. One student hadn’t read the story before class and so I gave my copy to her and she was squirming and “EEK”ing and jumping and flinching through the first few pages. AH, THE SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT. Some said it felt authentic, like it could really have happened. Some loved the ending, which I personally disliked on accounts of cheesiness. Some were really struck by the imagery, and this one guy said he jumped at the “kneecap grinding his testicles into a pulp” thing. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

And I’m going to have a debriefing conference of sorts with the professor next Tuesday. Wheeee. I’ve never felt so revved up about revision before. Hehehe.

The current draft sucks, of course. It’s about 40% away from a state of polish that I would find acceptable. But yeah. I got some great comments and suggestions on how to improve it.

I was angsting about how I should have waited to see if I’d been accepted into Yale University or not, because I was on their waiting list, and apparently they have an awesome writing program, where my writing would not be light years ahead of other people but probably the worst, and where my peers would be so much more better than me in terms in writing. Or at least somewhere above my standard.

But maybe this way it’s better for me. You know, to build up my self-confidence. Yeah, rationalization, I know, but I made a decision. And for better or for worse, I’ll have to stick with that decision.

Got an A+ for Assignment Number #1 (The Story of the Banana Girl – cheesy title I know) and AWESOMELICIOUS feedback from Megan.

“Reading this essay was a wild experience for me, b/c I found myself feeling exhilarated at times and profoundly sad at others. I also found myself plagued with doubts, questioning my own complicity in the phenomenon you describe. In short,the piece is eloquent, provocative, engaging, and intense.

Your note indicated interest in publication possibilities. I have a few ideas, which I feel would be easier to discuss in person. Alll of my ideas would require some expansion and revision in order to accommodate audience.

Superb. Really.”

All the pain and blood and sweat and tears that went into revising that essay? Nothing. Poof. Gone. Evaporated.

This is why I write. This is why I live.

Thank god for the workshop. I felt terrible after all the negative comments I got on my first draft but without the constructive criticism I would NEVER have had the awesome results I had with my second draft. I love myself right now.

That’s such a rare occurrence. Usually I hate myself.

Well, usually when I love myself I don’t blog because traditionally this blog has been a dumping ground for my negative emotions. Well, no longer. I need to have happy memories of being proud of being me to counter for all the times I despise and feel like killing myself so that the world is purged of one more useless parasitic human being.

HAHA a weird thing just happened as I was typing up this post; my body shampoo is on my table next to my laptop in a place where I usually put my water bottle and just now I reflexively took up the shampoo bottle as if to drink it. ROFL.

ah.

I cannot explain in words how amazing Mahou Sensei Negima is. I just can’t. It destroys my mind every time I look at it.