naega jeil jal naga~

So, turned 21, had a party, was poorly organised as usual. Now bizarrely it's back to work (sort of) on a summer scholarship. What's that, extra work, why???? And yet, I have enjoyed it so far, despite the lack of a break after exams.

I feel like that's okay though since in reality I took a break to go and see the Kpop Festival in Sydney...in the middle of exams...well, no one ever said I was smart, and the festival was AMAZING. Next stop Backstreet Boys =)

I feel like there are some things I ought to mention here, like for one the fact that our netball team has now in fact won a few games (not many I admit). It turns out that if you recruit people that are athletic and can actually shoot goals, winning games becomes easier, who would have thought.

As for why I'm writing this now instead of sleeping, who knows? No one reads this except me, and I just read it because I'm a narcissist. When I'm not reading my own blog, I'm staring at my own reflection. Or listening to Kpop. Or watching Kdrama.

In fact, after mourning the end of Protect the Boss, a fantastic drama that I enjoyed for the writing (wow) and I can say that for real since the only hot guy was Jaejoong apparently but I think he looks a bit like girl. Nothing wrong with that mind you, I'm just trying to make the point that I am not shallow.

I kind of ruined this by getting hooked on Flower Boy Ramyun Shop. It's pretty pretty boys. Other stuff happens too and it's actually not bad writing at all, but we all know why I'm there, and it's because of Lee Ki Woo. That sexy bastard.

I wouldn't mind that for Christmas, but alas, I figure I will have to be content with what I imagine will be a gift card. Still, the joy of Christmas trees and Carols are something I can enjoy. Just tonight I went to have a look at the Christmas lights down the street. How nostalgic of me.

Now I really do need to sleep. Hopefully I have suitably drained my brain with this riveting tale of scooters, vacation and fall, allowing my dreams to be happy and non study related so I don't wake up feeling tired and nerdy.

So...

Well this is awkward. It's been a while I guess, and you could say I've been pretty busy. With what you ask? Well, here's the low down:

1) homework - I have to say that I have never been so happy to finish assignments. I even finished this one about 5 minutes before it was due instead of five minutes after! Accomplishment! So now it's straight into exams =(

2) a new found love of K-pop - you know I've loved K drama for a while, but korean music never really hooked me until one of my friends showed me a youtube video of a boyband. I was so impressed with the way they um... marketed themselves, that I decided to check out their music, and after that I was forever changed. It's like the 90's have come back into my life and I've never been happier =)

3) football - and by that I mean soccer. Not traditionally a football fan but was conned into supporting Barca FC by an obsessed friend, and from there, things just got out of hand. I now have favourite players (PK, biscuits and Lolita...that's not their real names...) and I have woken up at 4 to watch a game. That's dedication.

4) Netball - not watching but playing...and losing. Our ever-losing netball team has stepped up and started a training regime, featuring any and all of us trying to shoot goals. It's not worked so well. Although last game we did score 18 goals total (our best score yet) and I scored three (one more than my previous match record. we're improving.)

5) Books - oh so many books that I love have come out. Which one to read first?

6) Korean game shows on which boy bands appear - don't ask. It's enough to say that there is nothing else like it and that I am going to Korea. That is all.

7) k drama - of course. Just completed the highly rated Secret Garden and enjoyed it, although it tapered off towards the end. I don't know if you know this, but in a drama, having kids = lame.

Aside from that, I attended a surprise wedding. One minute it was an engagement party the next minute they were saying "I do." Congrats guys =)

Books, Books, Books...and Papers.

So, guess what I've not been doing lately?
It's blogging. I haven't done it for a long time. What a dramatic begining this is.

It's to be expected I guess, I have had Uni staring up again, and so by dfault it becomes important that now, with less time on my hands than ever, I spend double the amount of time I normally do with my head in a book. And by books I mean novels, not textbooks.

I've been re-reading old favourites like Kushiel and Black Jewels, and starting new series' which could prove to be interesting. I have so far found some okay books that looked like they were going to be terrible, which is probably high praise for me since the only books I've ever loved are the aforementioned trilogies. I also am very fond of Isobelle Carmody, a great Australian author and I have a soft spot for the irritating yet quaint Traci Harding, although every new book of hers seems to fall under what my friend and I like to call the 'Harding curse'.

But I digress, my point is, between attending lectures, going to the gym and for some reason believing I could play netball, I haven't had much time to sit and write on a useless website that I can almost guarantee will be read by no one until I make some tremendous spelling and grammar errors at which point everyone will read and laugh. <-- hows that for a bad sentence ;)

So I have a lot that I should write about, and yet, I will write only tiny amounts about relevant topics and far more about random things. Like that funny Lionel Ritchie poster at Uni that says "Hello?" *picture of Lionel's face* "Is it me you're looking for?" and has little bits of paper underneath that you can take. It's things like that that make Uni worthwhile. If your reading this, Lionel Poster Man/Woman, know that I love you and your postery witt.

What I don't love, is my own sense of humour, which leads me to laugh at innappropraite moments. Take for example my tutorial this week, in which we discussed reinforcement and punishment.I kept laughing when people asked what I deemed to be poorly thought out (read: stupid) questions. Highly innappropriate and an awful thing to do, but no one really noticed until I came out with this gem:

Tutor: What's an example of Positive Punishment?

Random Blonde Chick: A smack.

Tutor: good.

Random Curly-Haired Guy: Wouldn't that be reinforcement?

Me: laugh hysterically.

Random Guy that Always Comments Annoyingly: Why would it be reinforcement?

Me: It was a joke.

Random Curly-Haired Guy: No it wasn't...

See I'd thought he was being particularly witty and making a (quite clever) S and M joke. Get it, because you like getting smacked so it reinforces the behaviour. But no, he just didn't understand the concepts. Whatever.

I told my friends about it too and I was like "isn't that what you would have thought?" and they were like "no". huh. That, ladies and gentlemen, is why you shouldn't read Kushiel before going in to a tute. I also thought when the tutor was talking about addiction problems and mentioned that "it's something teenagers do all the time on the weekends" I thought she was talking about sex addiction. And then everyone else was like "binge-drinking." huh. Seriously, I'm not reading that book anymore.

Here's something else crazy, in the past 2 days, guess how many spiders have landed on me?

5. Five spiders have landed on me, the ultimate arachnaphobian's nightmare. Is arachnaphobian a word? I not, what is it? Arachnaphobiac. That's a bit of awesome right there.

But anyway, this spider thing was causing me great distress, so instead of reading the academic papers I was supposed to, I watched St. Trinians 2 and read fan-fiction. It was at that point that I decided to try and write a book again. It'll last for a few days, where I'll write and think it's okay (I never aim for good, I only need tweens to like it after all and their not fussy) then I'll read over it again and notice that it's really really awful. Re-end of writing career.

Anyway, I really really need to do some homework now, so I'll have to bid you farewell, and as well as that, bid farewell to my friend Em who is going to Europe next week (Have fun...bitch.) and to both Jess and Em I say Happy Birthday!

The Shoe Game

I was reading my favourite blog-esque thingo (I don't know what it is classified as, not being up with online lingo and that) and it inspired me to write this blog about an important part of my life. The blog 'Hyperbole and a Half' is awesomely hilarious all the time, and one of the most recent posts was about playing games in childhood, Allie explaining that she used to play 'Wolves' with her friends. Wolves, it seems, was just like hide and seek, except one person hid and ws sought by the wolves, who then viciously attacked the person in hiding.

My childhood game was absolutey nothing like this. Although there was one involving similar levels of pain, but I'll get to that a little later. First I want to talk about The Shoe Game. This probably best exemplifies me both as a child and now; when I'm bored, I make things up to do with what I have around me and force everyone to join in.

The Shoe Game came about on a day when everyone was too lazy to play chasy (not abnormal) and there were no places to hide for hide and seek. We decided to make our own superior game, which we played for many years to come.

I decided it would centre around shoes. This is because we all had shoes and they were there and so that's what I thought we'd use. That's how my head works, creatively lazy. So we all took off our shoes and put them on the trampoline, which was the place that we held our meetings.

We decided that one person would start of as 'it'. They had to go and hide the shoes around the yard and could freely go anywhere in the yard except for the trampoline which was a safe base. All other people started at the base, and the object of the game was for them to retrieve shoes without being tagged by the 'it' person. The game is won only when the team retrieves all shoes and has no members tagged out.

Here's the illogical twist:

When a person was tagged, they join the team of the 'it' person until their team mates can afford to 'buy' them back - with shoes. Nice, huh?
The 'it' person was allowed to price the caught person at as many shoes as they believed them to be worth in ability (anywhere from 1-4 shoes) and the team could choose whether or not to pay it.

The problem with this game, aside from the impossibility of either team winning (although I shouldn't say that as once the team actually managed to triumph and also once at a declared end time the team had no shoes making 'it' the winner) was that it doesn't work for kids.

Have you ever tried to convince a kid to change teams (in the non sexual preferecney way)? Once in primary school a bunch of kids were forced to change sports teams from Waller (blue) to Sheean (green), named after Collins class submarines in case you were wondering...

Anyway, all of the Waller kids, after complaining non-stop, threw all their events on sports day in an effort to help Waller win. Kids are one-team people. So you can understand that it was super difficult for kids to switch from being part of the team to being 'it' in the shoe game. Not that it really mattered, since the game was stacked a bit in the it persons favour, but it was a bit of a silly concept to put into a children's game.

Similarly, quickly everyone became worth 4 shoes. Once one kid cheats, all kids cheat. And eventually someone does. Hell, honesty rules never work in any way with kids. My sister used to cheat in every game of Monopoly, so I would cheat too. I didn't really need to, I normally won through strategy, but it was the principle of it.

Anyway, despite its flaws, we loved The Shoe Game and played it happily for many years, and I thought memories of such a game should be preserved. To show how much I haven't changed, recently when bored with my cousin over Christmas, he and I decided we would invent a card game. It started out as a simple game of luck; cards were flipped over one by one and whoever flipped over the five of diamonds was the loser (there was no reason for that by the way, I just picked a random card).

It quickly became a very complicated game of luck. Every diamond became worth a particular point value, and points were accumulated until the end of the game (the 5 of diamonds). Later, random cards had arbitrary 'powers' like King's switch (switch your cards with another player) and Eight's mate (tell a mate to do something non game related for you) etc.

There was no logic to it and we only remebered it by writing the rules down. And yet, it wasn't only fun to create, it actually turned out to be absurdly fun to play (for as long as one can play a game with no apparent ability to use strategy). So there you go, the things that work as a kid still work as an adult, I guess.

Oh right, I said I'd tell you about my equivalent games to wolf pack. Well the first that comes to mind is the game 'closet' which I used to play in primary school instead of going to classes. Basically one person is put into a closet, then those blocks that schools have (the ones covered in cloth that are used for drama and such) were piled up against it (all of them) and everyone else sat on the blocks. The person in the closet simply had to try and get out. For the record, I was ace at this game.

The next game was a pool-based game called 'the coil', centred around a large blow-up coil shaped pool toy. There were two teams - usually boys v girls - and one team had to cling to the tube and the other had to get them off. Some people pulled at the other teams fingers or tickled or pinched. Not me, I was a clever child. I held people's heads under water for short bursts, gradually getting longer. Water torture as a child. classic.

Last but not least is a game involving jelly crystals. By now you can probably guess what I called this game. For thos morons out there, I called it The Jelly Crystal Game. This game features a person who lies down and then opens their mouth. Others then pour jelly crystals until a) they cough and reflexively sit up, or b) their mouth overflows. They then have to eat the crystals in their mouth. Photos are a good idea for this game, and while icing sugar is a viable alternative to jelly crystals, it also turns to glue when wet and is far more difficult to clean.

A window into both my childhood and current life right here. Don't pretend you aren't a weirdo to. Most of all...

don't pretend you don't want to play =)

New Blog

Why on Earth would someone create a new blog, when they don't even write on the old one, you ask? Well, I felt like it. See this blog is for my occasional incoherent ramblings, wheras this new blog will be about my one shining ray of light; Asian Drama.

Why do I need a blog dedicated to asian drama you ask? Well, this is why. After recently becoming addicted to Korean drama, which ties in nicely with my 3 year obsession with Japanese drama,I was appalled to note that whilst there is a very nice website called dramabeans which (helpfully) reviews Korean drama, there doesn't seem to be any of the sort for Japanese drama. Not that I have the capacity to write something as extreme as dramabeans...

I simply thought, there is a void that I can fill for myself and myself alone, because, as previously mentioned, no one bar myself reads this blog. Still, there is a sense of satisfaction at creating something potentially useful to someone, as opposed to simply random drivel my head comes up with or, as I generally prefer, constant, vicious complaining.

Unfortunately, very few people (my friends included) have any interest whatsoever in foreign television, let alone the obscure J and K dramas I love to watch, so a new blog where I can complain and celebrate all I like is just the ticket. I'm sure by now my endlessly patient friends are tired of hearing the next crazy plotline that entrances me like nothing else on Earth can, so this is my solution.

Aside from this new revelation, not a whole lot has happened in my life, except for my country of residence turning into a natural disaster zone, featuring flooding, cyclones along the east coast and bushfires along the west. Never have I been so glad to live in the boring South. I guess boring really does have its upsides, I feel like I'm having an arguement with someone over their boyfriend:

"I don't know why you stay in Adelaide! It's so boring."
"It's not boring it's safe!"

But anyway, it's a massive tradgedy, with many people losing loved ones and homes, particularly during the initial flooding of Queensland. It was a scary time for myself too, as one of my close friends had decided to travel to her previous home in Towoomba just before the floods struck, leaving her in a potentially perilous situation. Luckily she was fine and returned to us safely.

The government is taking steps to rebuild after this extreme devestation by proposing a natural distater levy, a tax to help rebuild Australia. However, there are many people who disagree with such a tax, my good friend Tony Abbott, opposition leader, leading the charge (I'm so hilarious). Tony thinks that the government doesn't need to raise money to help people, he thinks they should simply scrap unnecessary budget items, such as the National Broadband Scheme. He has even offered to 'help' with said budget cuts. How generous.

And let's be honest, who wants current technology anyway, right Tony? certainly not me. Considering Coalition policy leading up to the election was to scrap the plan, it's not surprising they are continuing on this path. They must have realised their only voters are old people who don't know what the internet is.

Anyway, through all this disaster, I've been donating money in between numerous holidays and fun-filled get togethers with friends. I travelled to the Grampians, Port Vincent, Port Elliot and Renmark, all in the last few months. I've also been to the movies, played laser skirmish, been to the gym, had a movie night, hit the town, gone kneeboarding, attempted wakeboarding and, as previously mentioned, filled my empty days and night with asian drama.

It's times like these you can't help but feel pretty damn lucky.