December 04. 2004 23:57

The ways to "relax" while working

Ha! I've completely ditched the diet for the days I'm working on the wagashi thing. I'm too worked up as it is, I'm not gonna go through this without eating a pile of sweets and cakes while I'm at it. Today it's also Chu-hi, the local equivalent for cider. (This Kirin Lemon Chu-hi is pretty strong, the alcohol % is 7 O_o) But after eating about the amount (of calories) a person would normally eat in a day, I was so full I couldn't eat any more O_o Diets are really tricky... You get so used to eating little that you can't eat "enough" after a while. That's actually a bad thing if you're trying to lose weight, because it means your body isn't using any "extra calories", it's used to getting by with the ones you get from eating. So eating "too much" once in a while is good, because then your body will learn to use calories like normally. Yet, I was surprised at how full I was after a "normal" amount of buns O_o

I was also surprised how I could drink about 3 litres of Coke Light (during several days, of course) before I got a headache from the aspartam. My head usually starts to hurt from less than half a litre. Can that be because of the diet? I don't know. Well, now that I've been eating cakes and drinking coke (and not drinking enough water) more than usual, I feel kinda "stuffed" and also maybe "worn out". I actually got stomach problems because I ate those Cream Pans last night. Eating this much unhealthy food doesn't really feel good... Well, it does as long as you have the cake in your mouth, but afterwards, no. Maybe I'm imagining it, but they say the days when you slack off start feeling worse after you've gotten used to eating healthy every day. (I'm not sure if I want eating cakes to feel bad :P)

Why am I lecturing about dieting again? Let's talk about something more interesting. Like how Inu-Yasha's music is really great ^_^ (I'm listening to it right now, so I felt like saying that :P) I've been listening to almost all music I have here during the last couple of days... Well, I'm sitting at my table all day with the computer next to me, it's so easy to make a new playlist with Winamp. The thing is I'm not sure if I really want to listen to music while I work, but then again I don't feel exactly right without listening to it either.

Right now I'm starting to ink the wagashi manga. Or, I would be if I wasn't writing this. But I want to sleep well tonight, so I don't want to start another step with the manga just now. It'd be too much of a bother to take all the inking stuff out, ink for an hour and then clean it all before going to bed... I'll wake up that much earlier tomorrow and do it then.

When I realized how big a hurry we had with this thing, I was thinking about writing it in English, even though it's gonna be in the same book as all the Japanese ones. I talked about it a bit with Dion and decided English'd be for the best, but when I was making the manga, I couldn't do it. It just didn't work. I'm doing the layout right-to-left already, so my mind is bound to making the whole composition Japanese. For a few moments I was thinking about doing it so that you can either put English or Japanese text, whichever would be best, but because the text is written vertically in Japanese, it's impossible to draw the speach balloons without deciding which way you're gonna go. So I ended up spending another few hours with my dictionary and the tutor to get all the dialogue translated. The Japanese text was actually quite a lot shorter than the English one, too, so it freed me of the problem of over-sized balloons... It's amazing how much you can contract Japanese O_o

But now I'm really happy, because with the text decided and the sketches done, the rest is pretty straight-forward. The main reason for all my angst with this project was that I wasn't sure about anything. I wasn't sure if the story I wrote was okay, or if I was supposed to do it in Japanese or English, or if there was something our group was supposed to do together and I didn't know about it, or in general if there was something more to this than just writing and drawing the manga. I still don't know the answers, but when I've come this far, there's really no chance of changing anything anymore. I don't really think there's a problem with my manga, at least anything too big, but it's really annoying when I have no idea about the details of what I'm doing. Well, I'll hear what they have to say next week, when it's the deadline. It's not like the world is gonna end even if they say my manga is complete rubbish ^_^

The christmas decorations they sell here are kinda cute. Actually, they're just like the things they sell in Finland (or perhaps America, maybe they're a bit flashy for Finland), but the fact that christmas is not a religious holiday for the Japanese, that they just do it because it's fun, makes them somehow so much cuter. Much more fun to look at them outside the onvenience stores ^_^ But it really annoys me that it's still like Finnish spring here. I want cold! I want snow! Winter is not winter if it's not cold. Today I was walking without my coat outside... (before it started to rain) And my window is wide open at the moment and I'm lying on the floor in my nightdress. It just doesn't feel like real winter at all.

Yesterday (was it yesterday?) I was especially angsty about the wagashi manga, so I went walking around Iwakura to clear my head. I found lots of interesting places, like a new convenience store right around the corner from here O_o It actually opened just now, a new Kyoto Coop, and I saw the ad with the special opening discounts someone had hung on the fridge, but I mixed it up with the A-Coop. (I went to look for the discounts at the A-Coop and was a bit disappointed when there, of course, were none. But when you can't really read the text here, you get used to not understanding everything, so I was kinda waiting for it.) But I happened to walk right past it then, and now I've been going there for my groceries. (Is it really spelled like that?)

And today there was a small boy, maybe 7 years old, who ran to me and stared at my face when I was looking at the things by the door. I don't think he has seen very many foreigners ^_^ It was very funny, though a bit strange. In Finland his mum would've probably told him off for staring at people like that. Like, he didn't even hide it, just ran to me and stared me into the eyes for a while with a strange look ^_^ If I had thought about it earlier, I would've surprised him by asking him in Japanese if a foreigner really looked that weird ^_^

The main thing I learned about small streets in suburbs in Japan during that walk was that there are lots of dead ends. When I was coming back from my walk, I had to walk a big half-circle before I could get to a street that led back to our dorm. It was pretty interesting, though. I saw more nice houses, a kinderkarten with slides between the floors (if you didn't want to use the stairs, you could just slide to the floor below :D) and a hospital.

Ah, I'd so love to talk about how walks are therapeutic, but it's getting late ;_; Maybe I'll get to talk about it sometime later. Along with the NaNoManga, which I haven't talked about yet, either. And that list of other things I want to talk about :P After this little panic with school is over.