Recently I've been seeing a lot more dead animals than usual - about 6 of them in this past week alone. Most of them were probably killed by vehicles, though it's hard to say, seeing as some of them have ended up on sidewalks and between poles and other objects. But I'm pretty certain that, at the very least, it was not a mailman who ran over the animals.

Why? Well, just the other day I received a letter from Thefalse-tto in the mail. That in itself was a pleasant surprise, since I have not been exchanging mail with anyone for a long time (though I was supposed to have a email pen pal from France but she has not replied to my last email, so I assume that she has lost interest...Or maybe it ended up in spam for some reason and I didn't see it. Hopefully nothing bad has happened to her). But I noticed the date at the bottom of her letter said June 26, and I had received the letter on July 6. In the past I usually received letters within 3 or 4 days, so I thought that did not bode well for the post office...Maybe all the mailmen were taking time off because of the Independence Day holiday...Still, I live pretty much next to the post office, so it wouldn't be that hard to deliver my mail, would it?

Oh, and speaking of Independence Day, I had a rather odd one. On the weekend right before it (July 2 and 3), I could hear fireworks from my bedroom. According to my mother, the amusement park Great America was having their fireworks over the weekend, since if they had the fireworks on Monday, July 4, all the adults would have to go to work the day after, and be all tired and grumpy from staying up late for fireworks. Or something like that. (This is based on her allegations, so I don't know if it's true...) So I kind of assumed that my town's fireworks would follow the same schedule.

Evidently not. The evening of July 4 rolled around, and while I was attempting to sing Black Rock Shooter at home (which did not work out, since I cannot hit the higher notes of the song), I realized that there were some sounds from outside. The sound of fireworks, to be precise. It was very frustrating for me; I've been planning since last year to go to the location of the fireworks so I can take better pictures of them. Wonder if I'll even get to see the local fireworks before I move out of this town. (But then again, maybe I'll live in a big city, perhaps even Sydney, Australia, and see better fireworks.)

Though I guess in China people might not even know about the 4th of July, so if I ever went there on Independence Day, nothing would happen. My grandfather talked to me on Sunday, and I tried to tell him that Monday was a holiday and my parents weren't going to work. He didn't understand. He said that since it was the first day of the week, of course they were going to work. At that point I attempted to send him the Chinese Wikipedia link for Independence Day, but he didn't notice it.

I know that the flow of this post is rather random, but I guess I'll end by talking about the odd dream I had last night. I was at some sort of concert or musical (probably a musical, since there was a vague storyline, I think), and some of the performers were members of a nonexistent Korean band. Thefalse-tto was in the audience too, and she was explaining to me something about how the audience wanted the female member of the Korean band to sing a song about little unicorns that had inappropriate lyrics. Then I remember seeing a guy from that band going on stage and singing a song. Part of the lyrics to that was "Eugene! Eugene!" I'm not sure whether it was the guy's name or if it was supposed to mean something. Maybe, though, it was because I watched Tangled twice recently and Flynn Rider's real name is Eugene...

Labels: animals, china, concert, dream, eugene, family, fireworks, friends, grandpa, great america, independence day, july 4, letter, mail, pen pal, roadkill, songs

I came up with the title of this post based on the lyrics of one of the songs in the anime ROD the TV (ROD stands for Read or Die). Although the song is in Japanese, I believe part of the lyrics mean "nostalgic wind".

On one particular day, I was on the second floor of one of the various buildings we have on my high school campus. If there's one good thing about this campus, it's probably having a second floor. Sure, it's a hassle to get to a classroom on the second floor (and even worse if you happen to have a locker up there - unless you have classes near to the locker), but it does provide a nice view. It's a good place to people-watch. No one suspects that they are actually being observed from the top. (And I noticed for the first time that there are just a few flowers in the square area around a tree. I never really saw it before because I've usually been thinking about something else, or someone has been sitting there, blocking my view of the flowers.)

It was a pleasant day. The sky was blue, even if there weren't any impressive clouds around (I remember last year I was always staring up at the clouds when I ran during PE. A part of me got angry because I didn't have my camera around and would miss good photo opportunities, but another part of me was just glad to see something beautiful). There had been a breeze blowing. I stood by the railing and looked out at the elementary school that is next to my high school. Even if that wasn't the elementary school I attended, it still brought back a wave of longing for the old days. It's hard to remember what it was like to play on the playground every day and still feel like it wasn't enough time; and I try to remember what it was like to actually have SSR, Silent Sustained Reading, every day.

And pen pals, that was something we only had in elementary school... Just the other day, I read the story "Correspondence", about a girl named Henrietta "Henky" Evans who writes letters to a boy in South America. (He never responds, though.) I was thinking that it would be nice to have a pen pal. My mom doesn't understand what's so great about writing snail mail. She thinks it's a waste of time and money (for stamps) to write to people who live nearby. But even that's kind of nice. It's exciting getting a letter in the mail from a friend.

I wonder why we never spent a really long time in school sending letters to our pen pals. We would maybe send a letter, get a reply, and maybe send one more, maybe not. It seems like we never really kept up the correspondence for long. (And since I was young and ignorant at the time, as well as not knowing where my pen pals lived, I had to rely on the school to get my letter to my pen pal.) I really think there ought to be a program of sending letters to a pen pal for older students, like what there was in "Correspondence", not just the occasional time where you have to do it in elementary school. It would give me a little something to look forward to. And I might meet a wonderful friend.

Labels: correspondence, elementary school, high school, letter, lost art, lyrics, mail, memories, nostalgia, pen pal, rod the tv, second floor, song, view

I'd known this phrase from reading books, but I'd wondered what it meant. Well, finally I got around to looking it up. If you say butter WOULDN'T melt in someone's mouth, it means the person keeps a cool demeanor, and is not "warm" enough to melt butter. Usually this phrase applies to women. Sometimes it means that the person is quiet, meek, and has a sweet temper instead of emotional coldness. Whew, this phrase kind of confuses me. It's not like "barking up the wrong tree", which I believe means that someone has got ahold of the wrong person (ex. Someone stole a watch, and the person who was stolen from bothers a person who they think stole it, but it was someone else who stole the watch).

I was playing Animal Crossing (as I do every weekend, to make money to pay off my house mortgage) when I was talking to one of my neighbors. He said to me, "This may sound surprising coming from me, but letters make me nostalgic," after he showed me a letter (which was actually written by me, using a different name XD). Another neighbor said he'd heard about something called "e-mail" on TV (remember, this game was created 2001 or 2002) where people could send messages to people in other countries.

This reminded me of how I used to keep in touch with one of my friends from first grade. She moved because her parents lost their jobs and couldn't find a good one in California. So now she lives in North Carolina. We used to exchange letters and postcards, and it was nice to communicate that way. There's something charming about writing letters. But now almost everyone uses email instead, so I communicate with long distance friends through that instead. It doesn't have the same feel, though, and oftentimes people don't respond to my emails for a very long time. Or never at all. So I almost wish that my language arts teacher would make us have pen pals far away, like in another state or country, except we could write whatever we wanted. I mean, the skill of letter writing is started to be lost. One of my friends asked me what you need. (Well, the Dear -soandso-, and the ending which could be Sincerely, Best Regards, Yours Truly, XOXO, etc. is obvious. But I mean the address, the first and last name of the receiver, and things like that. It seems like people don't even know that anymore. I'm extremely disappointed)

I've eaten a lot of sweet foods these days. My dad brought back cookies and egg custard tarts. (Apparently someone was trying to kiss up to him with the egg custard tarts) My mom brought back a chocolate chip cookie as well, and then last night my dad's friend's family (they come over a lot ever since they moved to my town) and my mom's old Shanghai classmate came over. So we served cheesecake. I got first dibs even though I'm not a guest. Ha! I picked a chocolate chip cheesecake. They're all pretty good - the flavors were plain, chocolate chip, tuxedo, and triple chocolate. However, I will need to do some serious work in PE to burn it off. By the way, if you aren't sure what an egg custard tart is, here is a picture.

Labels: animal crossing, butter, cheesecake, chocolate chip, cookie, delicious, dessert, egg custard tart, email, food, letter, mail, melt, plain, sayings, scrumptious, tasty, triple chocolate, tuxedo, weight

I don't remember the phrase exactly anymore, except I know Gill (an angelfish) and his gang (other assorted fish, all of them living in a fish tank in a dentist's office in Sydney, Australia) said that when they were making Nemo (one of the main characters, and he's a clownfish with a mutated fin) one of them. If you've watched the movie Finding Nemo, this may ring a bell in your head. For some reason I kept thinking of it lately. I guess it's because when I'm playing a video game, Animal Crossing: Wild World, I keep on catching clownfish when I'm fishing in the ocean. (It's too bad you can't go swimming or own a boat in that game, but oh well.)

Lately my parents are talking to my dad's friends a lot because my family is planning a trip to Australia this summer. We're going for a pretty long time, a couple of weeks, I think. Though it is shallow to think this, I always wonder if I'm going to get Internet access, because I don't want to get behind on role-playing on one of the websites I visit (by the way, role-playing is kind of like writing a book, except each of the characters is controlled by a different person, so basically it's a group effort. Role-plays can be anything from a pack of wolves running from humans, to vampires mingling with humans - sometimes it's too much like Twilight, so I only join ones that aren't using Twilight characters - to depressed people going to a summer camp). Also, I don't want to miss making money on the Internet, even if it's fake money. I guess I am too used to having a computer around all the time. Or maybe I'm just a worrywart.

Something happened on Tuesday in math class that I didn't expect. On the part of the board where the homework assignments are written, the teacher was writing down "No homework" on our side of the section (one part is for the Pre-Algebra 7, or regular math, and the other side is for the Algebra 1, or advanced math). There was a lot of surprise in general since usually we have homework every day, unless it's the day before a long vacation, or we just took a test. It turned out we were taking a test which doesn't affect our grade to judge how much of the Algebra curriculum we knew. I know I must've failed miserably since I didn't remember most of the stuff. So today my teacher said some people scored really high, but some people weren't retaining the things they'd been taught (she must have meant me XD) and she was worried about it. She started talking about how we needed to remember all these things in Geometry, since Geometry is different from most of the other math courses we'll take, and so on, blah blah blah. (Note: I don't mean to offend anyone with the last three words)

In the mail, we received a letter from the BestFriends Animal Society addressed to my mom. It was saying how they were trying to give homeless animals homes, and they wanted her support to help make their goal possible. My dad and I could hardly believe it since my mom is not too fond of animals. She thinks cats are kind of useless and that big dogs are scary. We get all sorts of other weird things in the mail, especially flyers advertising the store called Express, and how it's having sales on women's jeans and things like that. It's always addressed to some random person called Eun M. Ji. (By the way, please don't Google this person or anything like that, or it'll ruin their privacy) I wonder why we keep getting them. Did this "Eun" purposely ask Express to send mail to us?

Labels: algebra, animal crossing, animals, australia, exams, express, finding nemo, geometry, internet, mail, math, movie, roleplaying, RP, vacation

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