A Week In Summary

This post is full of links.

I am the only municipal JET in Kamoka right now. The other two ALTs and the CIR are off visiting family or Australia, making good use of the down time between the end of the school/fiscal year and the new one coming in a couple of weeks. This leaves me a lot of time to do nothing, which I have done with a voraciousness and determination unmatched by all but the most diligent slackers.

I have collected more Craigslist Missed Connections ads for further mockery. I have looked up doing my taxes. I have asked my Ganbatte Times coeditor to write an article on doing taxes, which he did. I started to fill out all of the information on TurboTax, but then I got a little confused and gave up. I printed out information on my taxes. I learned that "snuck" is dialectal and "sneaked" is the correct past tense of "sneak."

Fear not, parents and friends my parents' age. I have done some mildly productive things, as well. I did my dishes. I washed my sheets (after I let a neighborhood tomcat into my apartment and my sheets smelled like cat butt). Takemura-san and Miyake-san, my supervisors*, asked Teresa and me to help with some stamping and organizing of papers, which we did with glee. I did some research of purple prose for that book I'm writing about vampire wizards and girl pirates.

I was subsequently distracted by one of the worst, most purple of prose descriptions of a woman I've ever read, plus one snarky artist's rendering of that description. This is a link you want to follow, people. Sample quote: "'You are quite beautiful, Princess Bronwyn,' Spikenard sang, with his sardonic grin and eyes as violet and as hard as amethysts."

I imagine that Spikenard has Grape Kool-Aid mouth and sardonic eyes.

Another quote: "Her buttocks were fresh-baked loaves; they were ivory eggs; they were the eggs of the lonely phoenix. They were a fist."

That sounds like an playground insult. "You're a stupidhead egg butt, Jimmy Jones!" Don't feel sorry for Jimmy Jones. He has a fist for buttocks.

Then I started scouring the internet for reviews and examples of the worst romance novels to be found. This search brought me to the "Studies in Crap" column on pitch magazine, which featured the following: http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2010/12/unicorn_vengenance_studies_in_crap.php

In case you didn't read the title of the book, it's Unicorn Vengeance. Read that title aloud to yourself, slowly, letting it sink into your brain, and then click through to the article. I had to pretend that I was sneezing into my scarf at work so that I didn't look like I had free time on my hands.

If you try to find other reviews of its kind elsewhere on the Internet, be forewarned that your time is wasted. The best I could find were the worst romance novel covers and the worst quotes from romance novels. It made me wish that someone else would make it his or her life's work to read the worst romance novels ever written and mock them. I'd do it, but I have my pride, you know. Any volunteers?

All this writing has made me thirsty. I'm off to refill my water bottle and do some lunges in the bathroom to get the blood flowing back into my lonely phoenix eggs.

*Today, April first, is the day when all the staff changes around, so Takemura, that big brotherly gem of a man, is no longer my co-supervisor. Now it's a lady named Kobayashi (Little Woods) who speaks English well. The end.
--
Laurel Ryan