I think I might be finally settling into a routine here as I get used to all the new classes and schedules. I was surprised to find during the summer that I am a creature of great habit, and am never happier than when I can do the exact same thing every day at the exact same time and preferably in the exact same way.
I'm planning on dropping that Japanese Culture class where the teacher made me read and all that because I couldn't understand a thing in today's class. I figured out that this session was a biography of this one guy who wrote the textbook that we were to use, but after that I was pretty much just staring blankly while pretending to understand.
Japanese students are so lazy that they must actually be trying to attack good scholarship as a post-modern protest against education. For example, in the class I just mentioned there were about 14 students. At any given moment, at least three of them were conspicuously sleeping, and at one point about half the class was asleep. In a class of 14 people! The professor really didn't care and just took it in stride, shifting his gaze only to those who at least looked like they were conscious.
As another example, yesterday Ayed and I met someone after looking up a few words in a poly-sci dictionary, as per the requirements of an assignment due today. When we told her what we had been doing, she was blown away that we would put so much effort into our homework as to actually go to the library and spend 5 minutes copying definitions. This amount of work is pretty much unheard of from Japanese college students, as it would take time out from all the drinking.
I learned a while ago that the Japanese word for "superstition" literally means "lost belief," in the sense of having lost its way. That's pretty cool. Additionally, I found out today that the characters for "rot" or "corruption" literally mean "a failure attached to the flesh," which I would say pretty well sums up the Christian perspective on the matter.
I watched "The Ninth Gate" on TV yesterday because I didn't have anything else to do except homework and it stars Johnny Depp. It's directed by Roman Polanski and is supposed to be in the vein of his "classic," Rosemary's Baby. It's basically two hours of endless dramatic pauses, motive-free action and a plot that completely fails to have any justification or reason behind it. Basically, Johnny Depp is a detective/rare book investigator or somesuch nonesense, and he is hired to find two copies of this book on demonology so that his employer can find the nine gates to hell hidden in the books (he already has one, so that's three per the each, for the differently abled) and thereby chat with Satan and get all sorts of powers, which apparently focus on setting yourself on fire. There's this chick in the movie who never gets named but can fly with the power of The Blue Screen, which I think is supposed to suggest mystery and a connection to Satan. If that's the case, every character in the movie has diabolic connections, as every single driving or landscape sequence is shot on terrible 80s-style blue screens. For a movie made about five years ago, that's just pathetic. It ends with Johnny Depp opening the ninth gate by having sex with Blue Screen Girl while this castle is on a cheap computer-generated simulacrum of fire behind them. Then he walks into the gate in a blaze of white light and the movie ends. What are we to think Johnny Depp did with Satan? Have a couple of beers while reminiscing about old times? Play a rousing game of golf? Movies about deals with the devil really need to address why exactly anyone would want to hang out with Satan.
