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久しぶりにMemeage!
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ontogenesis, reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Please post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you.
My words were: Self-awareness, reviews, piercings, relationships, and [a word of my choice]. Hmm.
Self-awareness is perhaps one of the main keys to life, provided that it is accompanied by a modicum of attachment. I've known some people who've got the self-awareness thing down: "Wow, that made me really angry." And once they've recognized that they're angry, they move on.
Me? I've got the initial bit down, but I still take it too far more often than not: "Wow, that made me really angry...that really sucks...I can't believe this...OMGAIDAD_KFJDASUPERNOVA!!!"
Reviews are something I originally started writing because after my last stint in Asia, I was so overjoyed to have ready access to English language books on myriad subjects that I pretty much ate, read, and slept. (Seriously, I think I read 28 books during my first week back.) I'd been keeping a list of all the books I'd read cover-to-cover for years, but figured I might as well start jotting down my opinions too. And the longer I kept at it, the more opinions I had. So three years later, here I am writing thousand-word book reviews of my own volition. Thanks, all of you guys for reading them!
Piercings are something I would have even more of, except you can only put so much metal in your face before you really start freaking out the elderly Japanese ladies. I've got seven rings in my ears and one in my nose; I'd like two in my left eyebrow as well, but see above. I'm always a bit bemused by the reception they get, even among liberals (For instance, in The Body Project, Joan Jacob Brumberg, who is quite objective about all other forms of body adornment, states repeatedly and without any qualifiers that people get multiple piercings to signal that they are sexual deviants. Um?) I had all eight of mine done because the mood struck me; I certainly wasn't trying to fit any kind of look or make some deep statement about my personality.
Relationships are something I am much, much more pragmatic about than most people, to the endless chagrin of my Jpop, Jdrama loving acquaintances here. I don't think true love is forever (at least not in its intial form), I don't believe that there's a One True Love out there for everyone, that love will solve all your problems, that it's the main point of living, or that your partner can fill all your emotional needs; and most of what many women find hopelessly romantic (judging by Jdrama or Hollywood romances) just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary heartache due to people not talking with one another at best, and emotional or physical abuse at worst.
That said, I like well-done love stories as much as the next person, have really, really close relationships with many of my friends, and like hanging out with and talking to other people in spite of the fact that I am freakishly introverted. Make of this what you will.
And finally, the word of my choice is genki. God, how I wish English would get with the program and adopt genki already. It is an intensely useful concept, and one for which English, with all its synonyms and nigh-synonyms borrowed, stolen, or outright coerced from myriad other languages doesn't have a single term that approaches genki's meaning. For once, I would just like to be able to tell my friends and family back home that I am genki, and get on to the rest of the conversation.
That will be all.
ontogenesis, reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Please post them in your journal and explain what they mean to you.My words were: Self-awareness, reviews, piercings, relationships, and [a word of my choice]. Hmm.
Self-awareness is perhaps one of the main keys to life, provided that it is accompanied by a modicum of attachment. I've known some people who've got the self-awareness thing down: "Wow, that made me really angry." And once they've recognized that they're angry, they move on.
Me? I've got the initial bit down, but I still take it too far more often than not: "Wow, that made me really angry...that really sucks...I can't believe this...OMGAIDAD_KFJDASUPERNOVA!!!"
Reviews are something I originally started writing because after my last stint in Asia, I was so overjoyed to have ready access to English language books on myriad subjects that I pretty much ate, read, and slept. (Seriously, I think I read 28 books during my first week back.) I'd been keeping a list of all the books I'd read cover-to-cover for years, but figured I might as well start jotting down my opinions too. And the longer I kept at it, the more opinions I had. So three years later, here I am writing thousand-word book reviews of my own volition. Thanks, all of you guys for reading them!
Piercings are something I would have even more of, except you can only put so much metal in your face before you really start freaking out the elderly Japanese ladies. I've got seven rings in my ears and one in my nose; I'd like two in my left eyebrow as well, but see above. I'm always a bit bemused by the reception they get, even among liberals (For instance, in The Body Project, Joan Jacob Brumberg, who is quite objective about all other forms of body adornment, states repeatedly and without any qualifiers that people get multiple piercings to signal that they are sexual deviants. Um?) I had all eight of mine done because the mood struck me; I certainly wasn't trying to fit any kind of look or make some deep statement about my personality.
Relationships are something I am much, much more pragmatic about than most people, to the endless chagrin of my Jpop, Jdrama loving acquaintances here. I don't think true love is forever (at least not in its intial form), I don't believe that there's a One True Love out there for everyone, that love will solve all your problems, that it's the main point of living, or that your partner can fill all your emotional needs; and most of what many women find hopelessly romantic (judging by Jdrama or Hollywood romances) just strikes me as a lot of unnecessary heartache due to people not talking with one another at best, and emotional or physical abuse at worst.
That said, I like well-done love stories as much as the next person, have really, really close relationships with many of my friends, and like hanging out with and talking to other people in spite of the fact that I am freakishly introverted. Make of this what you will.
And finally, the word of my choice is genki. God, how I wish English would get with the program and adopt genki already. It is an intensely useful concept, and one for which English, with all its synonyms and nigh-synonyms borrowed, stolen, or outright coerced from myriad other languages doesn't have a single term that approaches genki's meaning. For once, I would just like to be able to tell my friends and family back home that I am genki, and get on to the rest of the conversation.
That will be all.
WORDS!!!
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Incidentally, if you can get your hands on United States Foreign Policy: Politics Beyond the Water's Edge, the authors explain pretty much everything about IS that had me boggled for *years* in the first two pages. You have no idea how hard I'm sobbing as I type this.
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But check out the book anyway if you can and have the time. It is really cool + we can be IR geeks together!
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