(no subject)
Apr. 23rd, 2002 03:53 pmi rarely say please but almost always say thank you. i guess i'm one of those 'ask forgiveness, not permission' types. :)
so i only had three pages instead of the >5 that i was supposed to have of my livejournal paper draft, but it was okay. we just exchanged them in class and gave each other pointers, we weren't graded or anything. and i have a better outline now, so maybe i can actually make sentences out of my thoughts. i felt like gir last night when i was talking to tobey, partially because of his new icon. it was just intensified by the fact he kept telling me to focus.
japan was fun. we discussed the questions we had relating allison and golden, and got into some really interesting discussions. apparently the word for the nightlife (mizu shobai), the word for taking virginity, and the word for aborted fetuses all have the word 'water' (mizu) in them. we weren't quite sure what to make of the connection, but it was definitely interested. i had forgotten we were supposed to do questions, but i managed to come up with a reasonable one.
then we talked about memoirs of a geisha. it took me about halfway through, when things started seeming a bit too literary, to realize that it was a novel and not a biography. it's a really good novel though, and i liked it a lot. kotaro felt cheated when he found out it wasn't true. apparently this book has led people to believe that they now understand japan completely, despite the fact that it's a fictional account of the life of a geisha in gion in the 1930s. hardly mainstream japan - the geisha culture is exotic to the japanese themselves. juliana and i were getting frustrated that it seemed like linda was blaming some fault or trick of the book for the fact that so many people claim they understand japan because of it. people are dumb, and it really has very little to do with the book. also, it seemed like attempting to explain japan, unless you're japanese, inevitably leads to exoticization, which linda claims isn't true, but i'm not quite sure what the boundary between good explanation and exoticizing explanation is. also i think neither juliana nor i think there's something especially exotic about japan in the eyes of the west; the west exoticizes anything that isn't exactly like them. hell, we even exoticize our own culture - what about celebrities?
so yeah, that was interesting. and juliana gave me starbursts. i still have to write my presentation response, but i'm not feeling particularly worried about it. i'm going to email bob and see if we can talk about the theories of self i should mention in my lj paper. definitely using mead's multiple personality stuff.
so i only had three pages instead of the >5 that i was supposed to have of my livejournal paper draft, but it was okay. we just exchanged them in class and gave each other pointers, we weren't graded or anything. and i have a better outline now, so maybe i can actually make sentences out of my thoughts. i felt like gir last night when i was talking to tobey, partially because of his new icon. it was just intensified by the fact he kept telling me to focus.
japan was fun. we discussed the questions we had relating allison and golden, and got into some really interesting discussions. apparently the word for the nightlife (mizu shobai), the word for taking virginity, and the word for aborted fetuses all have the word 'water' (mizu) in them. we weren't quite sure what to make of the connection, but it was definitely interested. i had forgotten we were supposed to do questions, but i managed to come up with a reasonable one.
then we talked about memoirs of a geisha. it took me about halfway through, when things started seeming a bit too literary, to realize that it was a novel and not a biography. it's a really good novel though, and i liked it a lot. kotaro felt cheated when he found out it wasn't true. apparently this book has led people to believe that they now understand japan completely, despite the fact that it's a fictional account of the life of a geisha in gion in the 1930s. hardly mainstream japan - the geisha culture is exotic to the japanese themselves. juliana and i were getting frustrated that it seemed like linda was blaming some fault or trick of the book for the fact that so many people claim they understand japan because of it. people are dumb, and it really has very little to do with the book. also, it seemed like attempting to explain japan, unless you're japanese, inevitably leads to exoticization, which linda claims isn't true, but i'm not quite sure what the boundary between good explanation and exoticizing explanation is. also i think neither juliana nor i think there's something especially exotic about japan in the eyes of the west; the west exoticizes anything that isn't exactly like them. hell, we even exoticize our own culture - what about celebrities?
so yeah, that was interesting. and juliana gave me starbursts. i still have to write my presentation response, but i'm not feeling particularly worried about it. i'm going to email bob and see if we can talk about the theories of self i should mention in my lj paper. definitely using mead's multiple personality stuff.