Or, be careful when hiring businesspeople to manage a nonprofit.
So the new vice president of our unit read a book called From Good to Great and got fired up with missionary zeal. Having already inflicted it on the senior management, she decided that everyone in the unit should be subject to it as well, and thus I suffered. And this from a woman ( Read more... )

Studying isn't useless! Who would have thought!
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I read, or rather listened to, The Litany of Earth when it ran on The Drabblecast, and I thought it was a good story that I really didn't like. Turning the people of Innsmouth into a metaphor for cultural appropriation and oppression due to government policy, like Japanese internment, meant that it wasn't really deep ones in the story, just fish ( Read more... )

Something interesting that's come up in the course of reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ is that both Aya-sensei and I each have our area of expertise to share. She obviously speaks Japanese natively, but she's nisei--she was raised in America, went to American schools, and so on. She has relatives in Japan and lived in Tokyo for several years, but has spent most ( Read more... )

Thursday we had a friend over to watch Revolutionary Girl Utena, and then after she left I got a bit overwhelmed by my upcoming schedule and the fact that the pants I ordered arrived and didn't fit, and I ended up lying down in a dark room for fifteen minutes while softlykarou did some work in the kitchen.
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Our Seder went really well! Everyone had a good time, and even now, almost a week later, we're still eating leftovers from it. It's also the longest Seder we've ever had--it started around 5:30 with the traditional (for our household) watching of Prince of Egypt and people left just before midnight. I don't think we got to dinner until 10:00, what ( Read more... )

(Bullet = dodged ( Read more... )

I didn't have tutoring today since I have book group (theoretically...there may be technical difficulties that prevent it from occurring), so I asked Aya-sensei to give me another chapter of 世界の中心で、愛を叫ぶ to read since I'd have two weeks to read it. Since I'm getting the whole thing as a scanned-in PDF from her hardcopy, I figured I'd post a page so ( Read more... )

Like I mentioned, I've been reading 世界の中心で愛を叫ぶ and I'm pretty sure that it's helped me identify one of the problems I'm having in trying to learn Japanese--I compartmentalize too much. I have a tendency to want to look every word up I don't know, so I stop when I find something, make a note on the PDF I have of the book with the word and its ( Read more... )

So if you're at all interested in Harry Potter, or know people who are interested in Harry Potter, you've probbaly seen the news about the other wizarding schools. The Japanese one is called Mahoutokoro (魔法所), which literally means "magic place."
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