This is from a loooong time ago, but Hana wanted to know the story, so I'm posting it now.

One day my good friend Brian (who likes to pretend he's a TA, and also likes to jump out from behind bushes) told me about a cake that he had at one of his med school interviews. It was an intensely blue cake that they had prepared for him, and being the good med school candidate that he is, Brian ate the cake... and interesting things happened.

So, as an experiment to verify his findings and also as a birthday cake for our friend, Brian got the blue cookie monster cake.

You gotta admit, it's one awesome cake. I had a little too much fun cutting up the cake.

In any case, four of us friends got together and decided to carry out the experiment. Each of us had a big chunk of the cake, probably about a 6th of the whole thing. I almost gave up many times, but with the strong support of my comrades (or is it called peer pressure), I was able to pull through, in the name of science. However, Brian wasn't satisfied with just the cake, and decided to take it even further and brought out his Coolaid mix. Now that was a lot of fun, trying to eat the powder, failing, and puffing out a smoke of Coolaid mix. I wish I had a picture of that. We had to chase it down with sparkling water that was conveniently in the lounge at that time. Yum.

Look at that expression of satisfaction when I finished off the pack. Although I thought I was gonna get a sugar shock with too much sugar in my system, I took one for the team.

So you must be wondering what the whole point of the experiment was. It was to see if the food coloring that we ate came out with color. Brian told us that the food coloring in the cake and the coolaid mixes with your yummy stomach juices and changes to a bright green color. And the result? Oh yeah.

(sorry, no picture available)

Last night I went out to Tokyo to see my friends from high school. I was initially planning to meet a few of my friends, but I met a lot more people than I thought I would, so I was happy.  It's always nice to see old friends - most of them hadn't changed a bit.  I was the one who changed the most in terms of looks, with my moustache.  But some of my friends already had jobs or had decided on grad school after graduation, so it made me think about my future too.  I laughed so hard throughout the day that my sides started hurting after a while.  Good times, good times...

Last night when I turned on the TV, the first thing that came up was the news of the huge earthquake that shook the entire world.  Even though Japan did not feel the direct impact of the tremor, there were many Japanese tourists who fell victim to the tsunami resulting from the earthquake, and as an island nation, I'm sure that there is a lot to be learned.  As far as I can see, much of the disaster could have been prevented if there had been a way to alarm countries lining the Indian Ocean, since in many places the tsunami hit 2-3 hours after the actual earthquake. If India, Sri Lanka, Thailand had been alarmed immediately, many lives could have been saved. 

This is a picture that I took in Australia.  It's scary to think that a peaceful scene like this could suddenly be changed into a nightmare with a tsunami...

If it wasn't for preparing a Christmas present for my sister, today would have been like any other day, and I would have forgotten all about Christmas.  To put it simply, I didn't have a Christmas date with anyone, and my friends in Japan are a bit too far away to just meet up for the night.  But for some reason I'm not sad that I'm not spending Christmas with a significant other (or the fact that I don't have a girlfriend).  Being home and relaxing is one thing, but just knowing that there are people out there who care about me, even though we can't be together tonight, makes me happy.  Of course it would be better if I could spend time with them now, but I can't expect to get everything.  Besides, we got a new TV today, replacing the other one that we've been using for more than10 years.  It's a huge wide screen, and I can't wait to watch a movie with it. It's really heavy though - it weighed 63 kg with all the packing and stuff, and I was out of breath when the delivery guy and I carried the huge box up to the second floor where our living room is.

I took this picture yesterday at sunset.  It looks alright in this size, but it's actually really blurry.  It was really cold, and so my hands were going numb, and I didn't have a tripod with me...

For the past three months, I was in Australia for an overseas program, studying resource management, the coral reefs, the rainforest, the mangroves, and Australian culture.  I had a really good time there, and took more than 5500 pictures.  So I'll have lots and lots of pictures to put on the webpage, which is nice since I hadn't updated my site for... 8 months? wow. Anyway, I'm back in Japan now where I can use internet, so I shouldn't be having too much difficulty updating all my pictures.

Hopefully I can keep this up, but I'm trying to make this into a place where I can upload random pictures that don't quite make it to my regular photo gallery and talk about it a little bit.  So day it's a picture that I took at sunset.  The original looked quite a bit different from this, but I cropped it and darkened out most of the picture. 

Yay! I’m finally done with second quarter! I had to turn in an essay today, so I wasn’t finished until the last day of final exams but I still feel good that it’s all over. I had dinner over at Matt’s house today, and the food was so good. They had beef stroganoff and rice, together with a salad, homemade bread and pork chops. The beef stroganoff had a mild yet rich taste, and I thought that it could be served at a restaurant. Thanks for having me over Matt!

Next week I’m going backpacking in Yosemite, but I didn’t bring any really warm clothes or camping gear with me from Japan, so I’m going to borrow them from Matt. It’s going to be cold in Yosemite, so it’s important that I have really warm clothes. I didn’t know that it’s not good to wear cotton clothes to a winter backpacking trip. Apparently when cotton absorbs water from sweating, it loses its insulating ability and actually makes you colder. I don’t have any non-cotton shirts either, so I have to borrow shirts too. Now I have warm clothes, hiking shoes, backpack, and a sleeping bag, so I’m all set for the trip. I just have to get my cold better...

It’s this time of the quarter again... Finals! Last week was “dead week” when supposedly no assignments are due and time to study for the final exams. In reality professors don’t care whether it’s dead week. They have assignments due anyway. So last week and this past weekend I was studying most of the time to get my homework done, and to prepare for finals. That’s why I haven’t been updating my page lately...

I finished two finals today though! Yay! I had an English final from 8:30 in the morning. English here is called introduction to the humanities, or IHUM. My roommate also had an IHUM final, so we decided to have a war cry before our test. It went like this - “IHUM, IHUM, IHUM, Yaaaaaaay!” Come to think about it, it sounds really stupid, but I got pumped up for the test =). The test was three hours long, but my study session that I had with a friend of mine on Saturday turned out to be very useful. I felt like I knew the material, and I’m pretty confident about the test. The other final was just turning in a final paper for my writing class and I just needed to revise a rough draft, so that wasn't too bad either.

Now I need to get ready for my chemistry final exam on Wednesday! Ooooh yeah...

I found it interesting that many people here have obsessions with ninjas. For those of you who don’t know what they are, they’re the Japanese secret service agents in the Sengoku period. They’re typically known as wearing black clothes, throwing ninja stars, and having a sword. Pretending to be like a ninja was a fun game to play in elementary school back in Japan, but I never imagined that so many people would know about ninjas over here. It may be because of this one website that’s dedicated to explaining why ninjas are “so cool.” For some reason many guys know about this website. It contains some graphic violence, so I’m not going to put a link to the page, but look for it if you’re interested. I guess the secrecy and the apparent apathy of ninjas when carrying out their mission seems like an exotic concept for Americans.

This week is the week before finals week, otherwise known as “dead week,” so a lot of people were procrastinating their studying. For some absurd reason, some of my friends wanted me to dress in all black and jump down from the ceiling and scare people. I actually managed to stay on top of a door in a certain way that people walking under couldn’t see me. I was dressed in all black, with a beanie, turtleneck, gloves, socks, sweatpants and shoes. The only part that wasn’t black on my whole body was around my eyes. I kind of looked like a ninja, and it was pretty scary... Even though the scaring part didn’t work out so well, we had a good time making jokes about how ninjas are “cool.”

As a dorm, we are recommended to do one community service activity per quarter. Since we hadn’t done anything, and final exams are coming up in a week, I decided that we had to do something this weekend. During the week I found an organization called ‘Save the Bay’ that preserves native plant species in the San Francisco Bay area on Saturdays. I tried to get people from my dorm to go, but everyone except for 4 guys said that they were too busy studying. The place we had to go was about 8 km away, but no one out of the 5 of us had a car, so we decided to bike there.  

This morning, one guy didn’t show up, so only 4 of us headed off. The tire of one of the guy’s bike was flat, so we went to a gas station to fill up the tire with air. Apparently he put in too much air, because when we stopped to see why his tires were making weird noises, his front tire exploded. The explosion sounded like a gun shot, and there was smoke coming out of this tires. I felt sorry for the guy because he couldn’t go with us, but I couldn’t stop myself from cracking up. The bike ride took about 30 minutes, and we were 30 minutes late, but they were starting the planting right when we got there. Don’t you think we’re so determined to serve for our community

Our work was to pull out the non native plant species that are taking over the native ones and plant saplings instead. I thought that the planting would be more fun than pulling out the weeds, but actually the weeds were pretty large plants and it was fun to yank them out of the ground. One of the many kinds of weeds was tubular, with roots longer than we could dig out during the 2 hours. We used large shovels to dig the roots up, but it seemed like the roots were never ending, because we could not find an end. The whole project was a good experience.

On the way back we stopped at a Chinese restaurant and had some dim sung. The Peking duck was good, and the dessert with sesame and red bean paste was also delicious! Even though we had to bike 30 minutes to get back, I was happy from the good meal. I’m easily pleased with good food =) The nice weather also helped to make me happy.

As a part of our “Asian-ness” of our room, we had a rice party in our room today. Now, that sounds weird doesn't it... My roommate got a rice cooker a while ago, but it was our first time making rice. Tim was really hungry, so we ordered Domino’s pizza too. And you know, when you have pizza in your room people smell it across the hall, and just wonder into your room. Since we had rice, we also made some green tea (ah yes, more Asian-ness) and our party was rolling. I ate the rice with some shredded dried pork that a friend of mine had. Others who were scared of the pork ate the rice with soy sauce. Some girls walked by our room and saw our room with 6 people and all the food, and said “aw, that’s so cute!” (Apparently everything not normal is ‘cute’ for girls...) I love our room...

Have you ever heard of the ‘Yatta!’ song? It’s this song made in Japan by this comedian group called ‘Happa Tai.’ I had heard about it when I was still in Japan, but I never really listened to it because I just thought that it was a weird thing that the comedians were doing. It wasn’t too popular in Japan either. However a few months ago someone asked me whether I knew the ‘Yatta!’ song. I was surprised to know that many people my age in the US actually know the song. Weird things from Japan are popular over here... The music video for the song can be downloaded from many English sites, and some guy in the US even made a flash animation that parodies the original song. The flash is pretty funny, but I’m concerned that many American people are going to have the wrong impression of Japanese people because of the weird music video and flash animation. For those of you who haven’t met Japanese people: We aren’t all like that! You can find the animation at albinoblacksheep.com. (If you dare...)

I don’t know why college guys (maybe just at our college...) are so immature. It’s less prevalent this quarter, but for some reason many guys make jokes using the phrase “your mom!” For example, when one guy lost in a ping pong match, the one who won said, “you suck at ping pong!” and the other would retaliate by saying, “your MOM sucks at ping pong!” or something like that. I must say that even though it’s pointless most of the time, when said at the right timing, it actually is pretty funny. But either way, it’s inappropriate and unfair to bring in somebody’s mother into a stupid conflict like that. This quarter our RA’s took control, and specifically told us not to make “your mom” jokes any more.

I never made these “your mom” jokes, and I never intend to either. I wonder whether other colleges have problems with immature guys...

Alright, now that all my complaining is finished, I’ll talk about more of the exciting stuff (well, it’s exciting for me).

Last week we decided that a large portion of our room would be a “no shoes zone.” We have an area to take off shoes, and a tape that divides that area from the “no shoes zone.” People were surprised at first when we told them to take off their shoes to enter our room, but by now most of them have gotten used to it.

And to make our “Asian-ness” complete, we got a low table yesterday!! Even though I was exhausted from working on an essay for the whole night, I woke up from my nap and assembled the table. Our low table in the “no shoes zone” makes our room quite distinguished from the others. We even have cushions to sit on. (Are we Asian or what? =) Last night I served tea to one of my hall mates, Charles who never had it before. It was quite amusing to watch him frown in reaction to the bitter tea, but he was being polite and tried to drink a large portion of the serving.

Today my friend and I were working on our chemistry problem set on the table together. I always wanted the table so that I could do my homework together with others. I’m looking forward to playing card games, eating, and having engaging conversations around the table. In other words, I’m excited!

I’m sorry for those who came to my site for my diary. I had a really stressful and busy week, and I couldn’t keep updating my page for the past few days.

This week was a bad week for me. For the first half of the week I had to study for my chemistry midterm exam that was on Wednesday. (which I didn’t do too well on...) I also had an essay due on Friday. It wasn’t that I was procrastinating, because I already had a rough draft done at the beginning of the week. But when I showed the draft to my teacher, he said that the thesis statement didn’t fulfill the requirements. And I had showed him my thesis statement in advance too! I was very upset by that, but I couldn’t do much until Wednesday night, because I needed to study for my midterm. So I stayed up all Thursday night to rewrite my whole 6 page essay. That wasn’t fun... But the good thing is that I got 13 hours of sleep last night! It was probably the first time this year that I slept more than 12 hours. I feel pretty good now, though I’m probably still in sleep debt.