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I have an International Perspectives class that doesn't start for another week, which leaves me with a nice 5-hour gap in my schedule on Wednesdays. Which normally annoys me, because there's only so long you can hang out on campus at a time without getting bored--and there aren't that many quiet reading nooks around these days.

But. It does mean that I have time to go to the (little) mall and get myself some Katamari!!

(There's University Mall, which is really tiny and does have a games store, and I'm hoping it'll have it, because it always takes me 3 or 4 hours and $5 to get there-and-back from Southpoint).

KA-TA-MA-RI!

Simple pleasures for simple minds.

Too bad I won't get to play it until tomorrow at least; work shift from 5-10 today. And I still have 2.5 hours to fill.

...Yes, even I can't manage to fill 2.5 hours in a big research library. Maybe I'll find a dictionary and pretend to read the Chinese newspapers.

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The other news is that I've decided to get on my own case about something again--in this case, the fact that I don't read half as much fiction as I used to. And, truth be told, I haven't been that much of a fiction reader since middle school. In high school I read the books that were assigned to me, and manga. I had my big science fiction phase in middle school--that was Anne McCaffrey, Orson Scott Card, and Douglas Adams. I read and loved books after that, but sporadically, and started far more than I finished.

Whenever I get on my own case about something, I set up a Systematic Plan. I am very good at keeping to Systematic Plans for about two weeks. And then, well, who knows? I keep them up, or life interferes, or I keep them up half-heartedly while skipping days now and then, or I give it up as never a good idea in the first place, or I skip a couple days and let myself forget about it because truthfully, I don't have room in my life for a lot of extracurricular self-improvement. But the Plan this time is for 1000 pages a month. So far I have polished of The Brothers Karamazov and am working on Fudoki by Kij Johnson. My own fiction is going through a neglected time--I need to figure out a new schedule for myself, because I watch too much TV, and there's too much TV I actually like, and I need my nights for homework, too. Mornings. I think I'll have to write in the mornings. (As for the costumes, I intend to finish them in one huge burst this Thursday-Sunday; I can't work on them in little bits. But they're so close to being done that I'm not horribly horribly worried).

I haven't been working on Chinese at all since I switched to a job where I couldn't listen to my mp3 player all the time--I need to remind myself to do that while I'm home. I'm very reluctant to switch to a great extent to reading and writing until I have the oral stuff down a little better, because it'll make my pronunciation more terrible than it already is. I did read a sentence from a book today. It was a good long sentence, too. It took me about an hour to read that sentence, but I'd rather read an interesting sentence than a bunch of easy ones.