You're Asian, you must be smart, right?

Just started tutoring again. Of course my students don't contact me when school starts for them again, but instead call me the day before they have a huge test that they need to cram for. Nothing wrong with that, but the silliness of it is kinda endearing.

Started lion dance again as well. Kristin is coming back with a vengeance, starting us up on regular conditioning and running. I have been saying that I need to bulk up a bit, so it's a good opportunity to do so, but damn if the second day after isn't painful like a bitch. And our lion got a makeover, so now it's all pretty and shiny and..., pink. Pictures will probably go up eventually.

The new quarter of kung fu also just started. There were just three new students signing up for the quarter, but it looks like a lot of the new students from last quarter are continuing as well. The big problem with the kung fu thinger is that a lot of students will sign up for a quarter or half quarter, get bored/pained, and then leave. So, it's always nice when students actually stick around and join the fold, which happens with maybe one student every other quarter. It's kinda like in the beginning of The Shawshank Redemption when they're taking bets on which new inmate is gonna break first, except we've yet to actually start betting.
I also finally ordered a sword bag to carry my broadsword around in, so I can bring it with me to practice. Carrying it around in the open, even though it was sheathed, was awkward in more than a few ways. For one, there's really no good way of holding on to it, and secondly, the library security guards always looked at me reeeeeal funny when I walked in with it.

So, my communications class.
We have to do this "cultural presentation" thing where we talk a bit about our family history, a bit about us, the subcultures we feel we belong to, the subcultures you identify with and get along with, along with subcultures you don't identify with, don't get along with, or aren't comfortable with.
I had to sit through like eleven of these on Friday, but there were two that were particularly memorable.
One guy went up there, talked a bit about his family, blah blah blah, said he considered himself very religious, hard-working, liked cars a lot, hated rap because it gave him a headache, loved country and classic rock. He said he couldn't relate to/felt uncomfortable around foreign people, people with accents, physically disabled people, mentally disabled people, he also "couldn't relate to lazy people and homeless people, though they're kinda the same thing anyway", that he'd "never seen a hard-working homeless person", and that comment shocked me so much that I really don't remember what else he said. Oh, and he was super conservative, if you couldn't already tell.
The next guy goes up, this Vietnamese dude with indie thick-rimmed glasses, dressed in the emo-kid uniform. Starts talking about his family too, and blah blah blah, and then talks about how he identifies strongly with indie kids, gamers, freaks, outcasts (because he grew up some place with "fifty percent Asians, fifty percent Latinos, and was too white to hang out with the Asian kids, and didn't know enough Spanish to hang with the Latinos"), was a strong atheist (at which point he pointed at a picture on his poster of Jesus playing soccer with kids and said he "loved this picture because it confused him so much. I mean, Jesus? Playing soccer with kids? C'mon, what does that mean?"), was more or less a vegetarian, considered himself largely socialist, felt that "capitalism promotes greed and gluttony and brought out the worst of competitive nature in humanity", and similarly felt that talking about money was very impolite. He had a huge gripe about college kids who were living on stipends from their parents and complained about being "starving college students", also hated those who actually were from lower income families and environments and spent frivolously on unnecessary things, and there was a lot more he complained about, but really, I stopped listening about halfway.

Now, the main reason this is worth mentioning is that later in the quarter we have to do a partner project presentation thinger, where you are ASSIGNED a partner from class and have to do some sort of presentation about some books or something. Also, in lecture, the professor mentioned that in this class we should expect to be taken out of our comfort zones in terms of people that we will be having to work with and deal with in the class. I'm guessing, hoping, that those two guys are gonna be paired together for the project, because that would be the most awesome presentation in the world. I think they might just collide and explode upon being assigned to the same group. Either way, this may well end up being an interesting quarter in that class.


As for other crap, school is blah. Work is piling up not-so-slowly and my labs are getting bitchy. Internship and career fair is next week, I gotta start getting ready for that. Rie, a TA and friend from Japanese class is coming to visit for a month in less than a week. Looking forward to seeing her again. My second host family sent me back a Christmas postcard sorta thing. Turns out Asami has been doing well in France, considering she only started studying French after she got there. I swear to god that girl has some sort of eidetic memory though, given how fast and how well she picks up language, so she's probably nearly fluent by this point in time. Which reminds me how poor my own Japanese is given how many characters I have to look up just to read this damn thing.

Anyway, time to get cracking on the ridiculous amount of work I have to do in the next few days. I need more three-day weekends, blah.