a 100 pound girl

my sister told my mom that she wants to become a vegetarian. i suggested that my mom cook brussel sprouts with squash just for her and no one else. she laughed at what i said and waved me off. i don't think she realized i was being serious. every day at the dinner table, my parents ask my sister if she wants more food and her response is "no" every time. i think they're real worried about her because she's taking a gym class right now and her weight is dropping and she stresses out about school more than she should. once, i caught her standing in the bathroom trying to see how far her jeans would move away from her stomach. i realized that the jeans that fit her in 10th grade are a lot bigger now. she told me she doesn't like eating which has forced me to believe that she's from neptune because no one on earth does not not like eating. there's no such thing. i also think that my mom is going to start hand feeding her so that she can observe the amount my sister eats. did i mention that we're twins who have a 20 lb weight difference?

new moon

i watched new moon on the twentieth of november at the 8:45 showing and i thought it was better than the first. it's improved from twilight but i had a huge problem with the camera work and the background score. first of all, it's kind of weird watching edward standing awkwardly in a corner while bella and jacob talk. they should've just cut him out. then, there were those slow motion scenes that had everyone in the theater cringing and laughing. oddly enough, every scene with the camera work being a fail had edward in them. also, carter burwell did a lot better with the twilight score than alexandre desplat with new moon. burwell's music was eerie and definitely defined twilight. if i were to listen to it on the radio, i'd be able to pick it out (not because i've listened to it 500 times already). yeah, i know desplat did the golden compass score and chris weitz directed that but honestly, who can listen to that on the radio and say, "hey, that's the golden compass!" if you're one of those people then i don't know you. so my point is that summit entertainment should have stayed consistent with the score because even though desplat's music was great, it is not twilight-like.

anyway, the acting skills have improved a lot and even though i like ashley greene, she needs to stop smiling in the melodramatic scenes because they aren't supposed to be funny. i thought kristen stewart has definitely improved as bella. taylor lautner is skilled. robert pattinson is starting to become a convincing edward cullen. the scene where he crushed the cell phone was brilliant.

overall, the special effects were convincing and weitz did a better job than catherine hardwicke but i still like twilight. i was surprised to find out that majority of women who like twilight actually prefer hardwicke's adaptation than weitz's. i can see where they're coming from. i'm a hardcore team edward fan and all of the edward and bella scenes were rushed. i didn't feel convinced about them but then again, i just have to read the book.

right now, i'm counting down the days until eclipse and i hope that david slade can accomplish making it into a worthy movie. it's just six months away.

random thoughts

when you say that you cannot wait for something, somehow that something takes longer to arrive. that's how i feel right now. i'm excited about friday because i get to watch a movie that i've been waiting for for a year now. every year since freshman year, 5/5/07, 7/7/07, 7/2/08 and 11/21/08 have been the best days of my life. although, i think 11/20/09 is going to top that. then again, next year 6/30/10 will once again be the best day of my life.

i also really want a break and thanksgiving is going to give me that. i know that i'll have to work on college applications but i don't think that that'll be too dry of a task. i guess i'll just day dream or talk to my mom if that happens.

speaking of her, yesterday, she almost broke the television. she tried to "reboot" it the way i would have except that it didn't work and when i did it, it was okay. i think she's an insane woman and that's why there's never a boring moment with her. she tries to pick fights with me and does a great job of that but i try not to fuel her fire.

right now, i'm trying to distract myself from thinking about friday. in my head, everything is a mess right now. things are just shooting by and i feel kind of crazed. it's a good feeling though, not something that's going to happen again for a while.

when friday arrives, i won't hyperventilate but i'll be disastrously excited to the point where everything will feel unreal.

a letter

Hey Dude,
How’s Chicago? How’s your parents’ divorce treating you? How is life? On the positive side, you’re not in jail.

I’m sending to you this letter to tell you that I have a problem. It’s pretty small, though, so you can take your time answering. There’s no need to worry like you always do over trivial stuff like losing your job or watching your neighbor killing himself the other day. It happens and you’ll move on. I know I did. But this time, I don’t exactly know what to do and since I practically worship the ground you walk on, I want some of your advice.

I’m pretty sure my mom is trying to kill me. She put rat poison into my soup and I dumped it out when she wasn’t looking which is pretty hard to tell since she always has her eyes open (she doesn’t close her eyes when she passes out). I think she also tried to eat the toe that I’d accidentally cut off after she gave me a knife that I didn’t know how to use. I’m thinking I should move out, you know? I’m thirty and it makes me want to hurl every time someone calls me a mama’s boy. Did I mention that she tried to shove a pillow onto my face and suffocate me last night? But this isn’t the issue I wanted to discuss with you. Just wanted you to know what my dull life was like.

Well, I found out yesterday that there’s an epidemic heading our way into Montana and I’ve been coughing up blood. So I’m kinda scared but not really. Nothing of consequence has ever happened to me so this’ll be a change. Dad’s unconscious right now which is why I’m just stuck with Mom and you know how I feel about her. Her obsession with killing me is distasteful but I can’t blame her. She’s bored. Right now, I think I can hear Dad retching out the window. Mom’s somewhere doing something with snake venom. I can’t tell. I’m busy trying not fall into a heap of mud on the floor. Anyway, I was wondering if you could tell your dad to send me anything to stop all this pain, if it’s not too much trouble.

Thanks and take care,
Marlin Tokagawa

PS- Why haven’t you been answering any of my letters? Did you die or what?

the future of journalism

Personally, I never read anything from newspapers anymore. To me, it seems more convenient to read news stories from the internet. Newspapers don't give me the chance to read about everything I want. If I want to read about the events in India, I can say for a fact that I will not find any information about Indian politics in the Herald Leader. Also at the moment, reading articles online do not cost any money. As the amount of people subscribing to hard copies of newspapers lessens, there will be more employees working for online newspapers.

We are definitely creatures of habit and we do not want to see newspapers vanish but as technology becomes more advanced, it will be the only option for spreading news. People no longer have the excuse to say that they do not have access to the internet because everywhere you go, the internet is there somewhere.

Of course, there are disadvantages of having just online journalism. Right now, anyone can read articles for free which will eventually change. Not having hard newspaper copies is almost as if people are trying to take journalism as less serious. Topics covered are sometimes ignorant to their audience's responses. Articles online seem to be less researched than those in newspapers and if this continues, people will never receive the truth.

In short, journalism is changing in many ways for both the better a(if you would rather read articles online) and the worse because it seems that there is no other option.

twilight craze

it's been almost four years since i was first introduced to twilight by my sister. i hated it then because i'd read new moon first. i stayed up until 2 in the morning reading about bella having hallucinations, all the while wondering why she just won't get over edward. i mean, he's just a teenage boy who breaks up with her because he's a vampire. it's teenage romance. her life's not going to end if some boy breaks her heart.

after reading four hundred pages, i put the book down and claimed that i would never pick it up again. bella was too clingy for me. two weeks later, i did pick up the book just to read about the author and noticed she has a website. my curiosity was piqued and i read the first chapter of midnight sun and enjoyed it quite a bit. edward's mind seemed to be much more interesting than bella's. so i decided to give twilight a chance because i couldn't imagine how a vampire who wants to kill his lab partner ended up falling in love with her. i realized that i might have judged new moon too harshly.

that night, my sister went to joseph beth and bought me the book. i started reading it and couldn't put it down. sure, stephenie meyer isn't the best author in the world and she can't write plot very well but she has great characters (even if some are 1D). i became extremely intrigued and reread new moon. it gave me more insight into bella's character and i realized that i hated jacob black, something that didn't happen during my first read of that book.

eclipse hadn't released then. that book would arrive august 7, 2007 and it was only february. i found myself counting down the days until its release and when i held it in my hands, i couldn't let go of it. i read aloud the passages that would make my sister blush. i threw the book at the wall during chapter 23 and i hated jacob black more than ever.

around april or may of 2007, i had the whole twilight lexicon information memorized. i'd read every outtakes and excerpts. i hunted stephenie meyer's posts on the forums. and during all this time, she was discussing making twilight into a movie with summit entertainment.

i remember in december 2007, i was trying to get to stephenie's website but couldn't because the traffic was so heavy. i realized it had something to do with the movie: either edward was cast or bella. so i decided to go to my second most visited website and found out robert pattinson was going to play edward cullen. at first, i didn't agree but i wasn't one of those people who signed a petition against him. i knew that the vision of edward i'd had in my head wasn't real and i was just happy that the book was going to be made into a movie.

now though, i feel somewhat regretful about the movies. they take away from the books. robert pattinson, kristen stewart, taylor lautner, edward cullen, bella swan and jacob black have all lost their identities. people seem to have forgotten what the actual books are like. they only care about the movies which have overshadowed the books. even fan fiction seems to take away from the characters. most people, when i read a few stories on fan fiction, can only remember that edward is handsome and that bella has brown hair and "chocolate orbs". i cringe at that.

i wish i could go back in time when i had the twilight book, dogearred and torn, stuck in my backpack and hardly anyone knew about it. the book's popularity seemed to skyrocket right before the first movie released. now on websites all i hear about is "robward cullenson" and how robert pattinson is great because he's so awkward and that edward wouldn't exist had it not been for him. also, i was shocked to hear people who watched the movie before reading the book that the movie was sooooooo much better than anything stephenie meyer's written. when i first heard people saying things like that, i wanted to punch the wall. now though, i realize that they'll never be able to experience my excitement.

i'm as much of a fan of the books now as i was four years ago. i just have the movies to make twilight that much better for me because i get that visual aid i'd wanted.

i am a girl

during the sixth grade, i went through a phase where i decided i was a boy. i had short hair, wore a collared shirt tucked in my khakis and had an extremely low voice i used when i was playing "hello judge."

yesterday, i could hear my mom screaming into the phone. "how do i put it in? which hole does it go into?"

i had to resist the urge to laugh. had i not known she was talking about a phone cord she wanted to plug into the receiver, i would assume she were having strange conversations with strangers.

well anyway, after a while, she became frustrated more than she already was and tossed the phone to me. the guy on the other side asked me if i knew my name and told me exactly what he'd told her. as he talked, my mom screamed some more at him from across the room and i could tell he was sweating his armpits out.

after ten minutes, he asked me if i were my mom's son. i didn't say anything. he asked again. i didn't say anything then either. when he asked a final time, i told him i was my mom's daughter, all the while wishing i could tell him i was my mom's boyfriend (that would've been real insane).

he stuttered out his apology, "oh, i'm so sorry. it's just that you sound so much like a boy it's crazy."

that was definitely not helping his situation and a blow to my ego. that's when i decided my sixth grade wish was starting to come true.

when i'd told my mom all of this, she just laughed and laughed and said that she thought i spoke like a man too.

the worst part about all this: this wasn't the first time i'd been claimed i was a boy by a random stranger.