Bleeding Fiction

(and other places)

I've been pretty busy this week, which isn't much surprising. Japanese class continues to kick my ass. As of mid-day on Wednesday I passed the half-way point for the class, which means it's pretty much all downhill from here. I'm getting a C right now and my hope is that I can keep that grade from dropping further. We'll see.

I've also given up on this whole "working in museums" idea I had. I can't get a museum job I'd want without spending another 4 years in school and the museum jobs I can get I really don't want. Plus, I miss the sort of work I was doing at InterSlice all to hell. With that decision behind me, I thought I'd try to switch programs - maybe into the general International Studies Masters or into the Masters in Public Affairs program. At the very least, I figured I could do the International Development and Relief Graduate Certification.

None of that's happening. My odds of getting into those programs aren't bad, but I'd still have to apply. Which I couldn't do until next year. So I'd be finishing out the Japan Studies Masters before moving on to another Masters, anyway. That's just dumb. So, I'm going to just take it a little easy next year and finish out this Masters and see if I can get myself a job that way. It should work.

Yesterday, I went on a four year overdue tour of the Seattle Underground. It was visually cool as hell; century-old brick vaulting and anchoring masonry accessable through a series of innocuous doors in building faces. I was disappointed only in the limited scope of the tour and in the way the underground came about. The underground itself actually covers an area about 25 blocks on a side, running under pretty much the entire downtown section of the city, but the tour itself only covers about one square block, and you file through it in a line. So I lost a lot of the impact of how massive this area could be. Also, the underground was deliberately created by the city as a way of avoiding tidal floods back in the late 19th century. A lot of the mystery and magic of having an underground city (of sorts) is lost when you realize it didn't come around by accident.

I also bought two albums yesterday. The first was The Shins' Chutes Too Narrow and the second was They Might Be Giants' Flood. I haven't listened to Chutes Too Narrow yet; I've been too amused by listening to Istanbul (Not Constantinople) over and over and over again.

I think that about covers it.