Glad some people liked stop-action-thug-floating-dancing Davy! I wanted to put something special up for my 21st birthday, and I’ve wanted to do something like this for a long time. I took all the pictures on the 10th, it took me about an hour, then about 2 hours or so to put it all together on Christina’s apple laptop. I set my camera up on a tripod and used my camera’s remote trigger and the 2 second timer to take about 440 pictures, deleting about 20 or so for the final product. The hardest part was the floating in air where I had to jump up a lot and try and freeze myself in the air. I would start the 2 second timer, count “1 mississippi… 2 mississ *JUMP!* and do it about 5 times in each spot until I felt satisfied that one had been taken at about the right height so it looked okay. It was also obnoxious when I was sliding into the bathroom, though, and I had to move the Hello Kitty boom box onto my back then reach my arm around backwards out of the bathroom and shoot my camera with the remote control. The video isn’t perfect or anything but I’m happy with the way it turned out. Thanks for all the comments everyone!
A group of about 14 of us went out drinking in Shinjuku at an Izakaya for my birthday on Friday, the day after, and then we split off and half of us went to karaoke afterwards which I haven’t been to for a surprisingly long amount of time. It was great fun, and damn Ilmo’s girlfriend is an amazing singer.
A small moment: One of the subways was particularly crowded that night and I was pushed by a wall of people onto this girl’s lap and struggled for a few minutes before I could get off only to be pushed back on a few moments afterwards. The whole time I thought it was reallllly, reallllly funny and was laughing pretty hard about it while it was happening but she looked fairly unamused and was way too shy to attempt to push me off or say anything. Other Japanese people around smiled.
A lot of my favorite moments come when we’re walking around outside or on the subways with all the other people who have also been drinking. Japanese people are generally very timid, particularly with foreigners, but once they’ve been drinking they are much less averse to saying things to us. Walking around outside at night in popular spots often doesn’t take too long before a drunk conversation gets struck up with Japanese. On Friday I had a battle with one guy where we kept saying things trying to get the other to exit an elevator first. As a foreigner it’s completely okay for me to be stupid so I most certainly did not let him win.
This week and next week are finals here at Sophia University which means that I have to actually do quite a bit of work. I have finals in all my classes that range from 25% of my final grade to 60% and I have 40 pages of papers due and a Japanese oral exam.
And lastly, I just bought my ticket to Tool at Zepp Tokyo which is where I saw Mars Volta (which I still haven’t written about yet). An amazing venue that can only fit 2000 people, and Tool is the first band that I ever really loved and still has a special place in my heart. They were my first real concert that I saw about 6 years ago but it was in a stadium with maybe 20 thousand people and I wasn’t even close to the stage. I’ll basically be hugging the band this time. I am exciteddddd
1 Response to “Birthday + Finals”