(no subject)

I have mixed a CD of J-pop music, including Dragon Ash and the Gospellers, because most of the teens around here listen to rap or soul music, and also because Japanese people rapping is funny. Not because they're bad at it, but because of the weird sense of cultural disconnect.

I have assembled a bunch of manga from various libraries and the work-safe portion of my personal collection.

I have found origami diagrams for a throwing star; I have cut rounded ends on 90 strips of paper so that fans can be made. I have face paints and a chart of cool and noble-sounding kanji, appropriate if you were the kind of person to get a kanji tattoo. I went all the way to Toyo Shokuhin in Cary for some crab chips and shrimp chips and Pocky.

This, in the desperate hope that someone will show up tomorrow for a little manga program.

Program attendance is not so hot at this library, and this is the first one I'm doing all by myself. So. Fingers crossed.
If no one shows, at least I will have shrimp chips.

(no subject)

In Japan, I was sufficiently stressed from being thrown into the deep end with classical Japanese that I ended up buying a fair number of manga and finding them too hard and giving up on them way too soon--such was the case with Ima Ichiko. Last night I got to thinking, hey, don't I have one of those manga piled away somewhere? And I looked through my plastic boxes of bunko volumes and there was the first volume of Hyakki Yakou Shou. (I still buy way too many books I don't read, of course. But it gives me something to discover later. When I'm readier).

Yay. It's as delighfully creepy as I remember, and this time I actually understand what was going on.
(Wait--did she say that she had to dress up as a girl when he was little? That's what the causative implies, but, uh, she IS a girl.... oh, wait. No.)