Sakura of DOOM

The boy has managed to find a video game that even the hand-eye uncoordinated me can play. Also, it's incredibly addictive. It's this weird little game called Katamari Damacy, and I really mean weird. The whole goal of the game is to roll around this thing called a katamari and gather stuff up (magnetically? who cares!). Yeah, that's it. I mean, there's a goal -- you're supposed to get your katamari to a certain size by a certain time, but that's it. And all I have to do is use the little joystick things on the Playstation controller to roll the ball around and pick stuff up. It's really horribly addictive. And it's got these weird Japanese kitschy/retro graphics with psychedelic colors and some weird guy called the King of the Cosmos and music that's a sort of blend of people singing "Katamari mambo!" and swing and electronic.

Really weird, but really fun. Plus, it's horribly amusing watching your katamari grow from several cm in size to a few meters (so far). I can't decide which size I like better... the small size is fun because you get this ant's eye view of a house and pick up thumbtacks and butterflies and marbles and stuff, but when you get bigger, you start rolling into more places and picking up people (who run away screaming) and cows and fences and become a giant, Godzilla-like ball of destruction! Hee, maybe I am enjoying this too much ;).

Other than that, we ventured out to Wal-Mart this weekend because we needed knives (no forks or spoons, just knives), which apparently only Wal-Mart sells individually. I hate Wal-Mart. It is suburban hell. Shopping carts filled with screaming babies in every aisle, people walking everywhere, too much noise, too much stuff, all of it is messy because everyone is just tossing stuff everywhere. Ugh. And giant lines at the register in which you swear to yourself that you'll decapitate the next screaming baby you hear.

And the boy had this assignment for his negotiations class in which he had to negotiate a price for something at a usually non-negotiable place... no flea markets or used bookstores ("Hey!" I said about used bookstores. "We are not price negotiable unless the stock is damaged!"). He ended up getting some slow selling plants from Summer Winds, so now we have even more plants. Yikes. Mostly he's taking care of them, given that I am not that great with plants. Well, I ordered more minis (my last ones were killed off by spider mites, powdery mildew and then negligence), so maybe I will be inspired to be nicer to them. But he came back with three hanging baskets of something with small purple flowers, mint, oregano, chives, and basil. Apparently we will now have an herb garden, despite the non-cookage on both our parts. Oh well. They smell nice.

Sat. was the boy's birthday, which was a great opportunity for me to spend way too much money to buy the rest of the Cowboy Bebop DVDs (we had DVD 2). So hopefully Cowboy Bebop watching will commence soon! I love that series. And we headed up to his parents' place. I think I am getting more used to his parents now, though there was a brief freak out point in which they were mentioning marriage and kids. While it's generally accepted between me and the boy that marriage is somewhere there in the distant future, my brain still sort of went kablooey because eep, in-laws and kid discussion and wedding planning and my god the clashing of two cultures. They were mentioning something about them paying for the reception and my family doing the wedding, and my brain went, "But I think in Chinese society, it's the other way around!" (though I might be confused). Weird. But we got lots of free food to take home (chocolate-covered strawberries! roast beef! cheeses! apple crisp!). And I now feel like it's autumn because their house is decorated that way. The boy's mom is very big on house decoration.

ETA: On the subject of Katamari Damacy, I would just like the add the small note that I rolled over a cow today. I cannot possibly describe just how happy that made me, but it did involve much yelling ("Hee hee hee hee hee look at me I rolled over a cow hee hee hee hee hee!") and laughing so hard I almost fell off the couch.

Was seriously considering not getting out of bed today until the maintenance guy knocked. Then I had to get out and get dressed. Hopefully he will fix my light sometime.

Good news: second interview at the bookstore tomorrow morning. Got my roses. Got my DVDs (Chicago and Two Towers).

Bad news: rather pessimistic about the bookstore job... two of the roses' root balls were really disturbed during shipping and completely came apart as I was transplanting. So now one of them is having trouble standing up straight. Already fed them transplanting food, but does anyone have more advice on how to get them more at home? They looked so sad with all the roots dangling out =(.

In a rather bleak mood now. I don't think I function well by myself, with only me for company, despite being an introvert and rather shy about meeting new people.

The boy is here (again). Apprently he's going to be in Cleveland for the rest of the time doing his internship, so he'll just be hopping over to CA every week instead of back to Texas. This is of the good. He says the company pays for all the food for the business trip in Cleveland, dry cleaning, hotel, internet, everything. And for the tickets here. I am very impressed. Then I calculated and found he is making $25 an hour! I then very briefly reconsidered idealism and owning my own bookstore until realizing that while he's accumulating all sorts of miles and money and whatnot, his job is not interesting and he gets to spend no time doing things he likes. I then very quickly regained my mind.

We went to visit his grandma, and she makes her own jam! She was very nice too when I asked her how she did it, and she lent me some jars and recipies. So now I shall have to find some place that sells fruit pectin (can I get that at Safeway?) and buy loads and loads of fruit! The only regret about that is I'll be tempted to eat all the fruit instead of cooking and jamming it.

My roses have also started to bloom! Well, the Golden Halo and Gala are sending up flowers, but some of the others (Julie Ann) are doing not so well, with yellow leaves. Sigh. Well, we'll see.

My dad is coming over on Wednesday for a business trip, and so he can visit me and my lovely apartment ^_^. Unfortunately, he's going to be busybusy up until the weekend, but he says he'll take me to Monterey so I can see the aquarium. Sometimes (very rarely) I like being a tourist. Then my sister is coming on Sunday just as he leaves, but they'll get to see each other enough to eat dinner together. Then she's going to be here till the 23rd, yay!

And my friend's memorial gathering of people in the Bay Area will be two Saturdays from now. Sigh. None of us could really make it to the funeral in Vermont I figure. It still gets to me, and now I'm more paranoid about driving than ever. It's strange. The older I get the more I figure just how idealistic and starry-eyed I was... it's been hitting me more and more since I've graduated that not everything turns out happily ever after, that people can make choices that screw up their lives and not rectify them in time, and that sometimes, life just sucks and there's nothing you can do about it. This really brought it home, that someone nice and wonderful who was going out for a new job and probably optimistic and happy can have bad things happen to them in the blink of an eye for nothing more than being at the wrong place at the wrong time. And now I'm scared that other people like the boy or my family could just suddenly have something bad happen to them too. It's not a nice feeling.

Yay! Got flowers from the boy, along with my hangers, a USB hub and a cable, so now I can use my new printer. And then (my mail day continues) Golden Fool from thewildmole arrived!!! Very exciting.

I devoured Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch yesterday night, and I loved it. It's a collection of retold fairy tales, with most of the fantasy taken out. Each tale is very short and leads to the next tale through one protagonist questioning another. It's also extremely female -- all the protagonists are female, and most of the secondary characters that matter are as well. Princes are very much pushed to the side. The prose is very straightforward, yet peppered with metaphors that make which fairy tale one is reading apparent from the first page. Part of the joy for me was seeing how Donoghue took the fairy and the fantasy out of each tale and yet had them remain completely true to character. Sometimes there's a twist at the end of them, sometimes not, but she manages to make the archetypes into very real women, removed from the "once upon a time."

I also started Thomas the Rhymer (trying to get library books out of the way before starting GF), and I definitely like it much better than I did before. I also first read it sometime in ninth or tenth grade, and wasn't too good with the slowness back then.

So in the past two days I've gotten two flowers/plant things from the mail. I find it very funny how we can actually ship these kinds of things. And it's just a very strange experience opening a cardboard box and finding something alive in there!

Speaking of plants, I've been thinking of getting potted roses for my balcony... anyone know if this is a viable idea? My window faces the inside of the apartment complex and is shaded over by trees. It's sort of west-ish, doesn't get much direct sunlight.

Baking applesauce bars now...