I was reading sentences to help students study for their test tomorrow, and one of the sentences came from one of the book's dialogues about E.T. and the sentence was "they flew as high as birds" or something like that and I ended up saying "as high as a kite"....Freudian slip?

also I've been noticing some stuff after watching several different anime shows. If you are willing to say that anime can give you a look into japanese cultural views because it's not as constricted as other shows because it's animated and often off the wall, well then...yikes.

Since WWII most Japanese have become pacifists, which makes sense having had two nukes dropped on you have millions of young men dead in china and asia. On top of that, nukes often play into the...subconscious of japanese popular culture, often randomly making appearances in anime for some sort of disaster. But furthermore, oftentimes the USA is portrayed as some belligerent bully. One show I finished up had the USA's military working in conjunction with a large corporation spreading a virus around the world that the USA had the antidote to so it make money / gain influence. Another show just skipped the pretensions and just chose to be xenophobic by having Britain and America join together with other english nations, for the 'New Empire of Brittanica' and conquer the world, subjugating japan and renaming it Sector 8. WTF? For a nation that's so international, it seems pretty weird to have such negative images. I guess the anime creators just got lazy and fell back on easy prey: big scary pondering America.

yesterday one of the first year classes studied how to write in cursive; and exercise I found superfluous. It was really difficult for the students, and the teacher even mentioned that they'd really only do it for signing their name. hell, I haven't used cursive in over a decade, once the teacher's told us it wasn't mandatory anymore. Oh computers, what a lifesaver you are.

Tomorrow is a test day, so basically I have to come to school and I have no classes all day. I wish I could take a holiday for it since I don't have ANYTHING to do, but I don't wanna burn one of my 20. Even worse is that had it been ok, I could have just gone to kyoto a day early. Sigh.

On the bright side I've been getting lots of work done in regards to studying japanese. :-)