Separate Ways

So tonight, I just sort of felt like posting lyrics instead of writing. Hey, its my blog, I can do whatever I want, right? I hope you like it, this is one of my favorite songs from HMB. Plus the real song is great too!

Here we stand, worlds apart

Hearts broken in two, two, two

Sleepless nights, losing ground

I'm reaching for you, you, you

Feelin' that it's gone, Can change your mind

If we can't go on, to survive the tide love divides

Chorus:

*Someday love will find you

Break those chains that bind you

One night will remind you

How we touched and went our separate ways

If he ever hurts you

True love won't desert you

You know I still love you

Though we touched and went our separate ways*

Troubled times

Caught between confusion and pain, pain, pain

Distant eyes

Promises we made were in vain, vain, vain

If you must go, I wish you love

You'll never walk alone

Take care my love, miss you love

Chorus

Hex 168

So apparently we advertised for X-Box at our game today. They paid us $5,000 dollars to make this design on the field that has to do with their new marketing campaign for the 360. It was a circle with a hexagon in the middle with the roman numerals for 1, 6 and 8. I have tried asking some people what this means, and they have given me rather weak answers. Something about a "viral" campaign where they flood the market with something that will peak people's interest, such as Hex 168. So if any of my gamer friends know more about this and would like to fill me in, I would love to learn what is going on. I understand part of it may not be figured out until the 360 comes out, but any new knowledge would be useful. Like, have you even heard of this before?

Anyway, I am rather tired tonight and somewhat irritable. Today we played U$C, which equals the University of Spoiled Children. The score was a slaughter, but we did manage to beat the spread AND not continue the curse of 17. Although I am very frustrated with the Huskies because they can play good football for about 1 quarter, tops, and then it has to be bad. But when they play good, they REALLY play good ... I wish they could just continue on in that vein. Oh yah, and to make my mood worse, we also almost got our rallies cancelled due to some stupid reporter over at The Daily who did NOT get his facts straight. He was writing an article about going to football games drunk and how this was a staple of college life. (hmmm.. interesting, cause I'm in college and I never been to a game drunk, I've never drank at all!) But he mentioned the fact that this debauchery usually begins Friday nights, and he made mention of the band being at rallies. Some stupid comment about how the people in band were the drunkest ones out there, which is totally not true. But whether or not it is true, Brad blew a gasket. He yelled at us for 20 minutes, it was the MADDEST I have ever seen him. Because now lots of people are reading this and thinking the band is a bunch of drunks. Which wrecks our reputation and could possibly have dire consequences (such as putting us on probation with no more travel), just because some idiot decided to write something he knew nothing about. He was the one that reported in a campus newspaper to over 40,000 people that after the games, he is so drunk that he doesn't even know how to get home. Give me a break... it is frustrating that somebody like that could get us in trouble with half truths. But be that as it may, rallies are strictly alcohol free, which is fine with me, and they may not even continue if we don't come up with an agreement that Brad feels is adequate. Grrrr....!

But on to a lighter note before I go to sleep... my nickname is morphing again. Over the Japan trip, my TOC nickname became Victoria Butterworth (TOC being Touch of Class, our official travel attire so the band looks all professional and gives a good image and what not). When we were in the airport in San Fran, they kept calling that name over the loudspeaker, and Lynn decided that should be my nickname as well. Then in Oregon last weekend, the door on the overhead compartment on our travel busses kept hitting my arm/head/hand when I would try to take stuff in and out. Finally I got so frustrated that I hit the door and shouted, "Stupid door!" unfortunately somebody thought I said, "Stupid whore!" So know my other nickname is crack whore. Where the crack part came from I have no clue. But people think it is terribly funny to call me crack whore because, obviously, I am not. Not even close =) And then they started adding secret agent in there. So now my full nickname is something along the lines of: Victoria Butterworth, secret-agent-crack-whore, Sex Pocket. All said together, very fast. Interesting, I know, but such is the pain I must endure for hanging out with band nerds all the time. Goodnight!

My experiences as an offical globe trotter...

Yes, it is me and I am back from Japan. No bird flu, no SARS... although I did manage to catch a relatively nasty cold before I got back. Let me just say that the airplane pressure change when your ears are plugged up is NOT fun! I should be going to bed soon, but I haven't posted in a long time so I wanted to give you guys all something new to read. I will tell a little about my trip, but I may have to save some for later.

I was correct when I guessed that I wasn't going to like the 11 hour plane flight. I was in the middle of the row both times. The first time I was sitting next to some Japanese guy and this guy in the military who is stationed at Okanagwa. He was pretty cool... the Japanese guy just drank beer and didn't talk. On the way back I sat between two old couples that had both just been on a cruise that ended in Osaka. That was interesting... one of the guys didn't have an arm. He quite literally had a claw and reminded me of Captain Hook, but he was really nice. The plane ride was boring, other than turbulence. I'm not sure if it was the whole flying over the Pacific thing, but it was the most turbulence I had ever experienced, both coming and going. Going to Japan I watched Fantastic 4, The Wedding Date, About a Boy, Babe and something else I think. Coming back I watched Bewitched and Batman Begins and parts of Moulin Rouge and Mr. and Mrs. Smith. But enough about that... that paragraph sounds almost as boring as my plane flight.

When we got to Japan it was hot and TERRIBLY humid. Thankfully, the humidity broke the next afternoon when it rained, but for awhile it was miserable. We ate dinner at the airport that night... they have a very artistic looking airport and it is actually really cool. I had something called Udon, which is a kind of soup/noodle dish with fried tofu on top. It was good... but so began my adventure in looking at a picture and deciding that I wanted that, although I didn't know what it was. In Japan, they have this really cool custom of actually making fake "sample" dishes and displaying them in the windows of restaurants so that you can see what they offer. This is all well and good until you go in to order and you get a menu with no pictures. Then you have to go back outside and quickly memorize the kanji so that you can find it on the menu! When we got to our hotel, we each got our own room, which was awesome. It wasn't much bigger than the bed and the bathroom, but it wasn't squished. I have pictures of this stuff on bebo if you guys want to look.

Random things about Japan: Like I said, it was terribly humid in Japan for the first day, and this was miserable. Over the rest of the week, it was less humid, but it was hot and we had to wear our band uniforms for three full days and also MARCH in them. Talk about disgusting. I took a bottle of Febreeze with me and by the time I came home it was about 3/4 gone. I honestly have never sweated that much before in my entire life! Osaka is by far the biggest city I have ever seen in my entire life. It took us an hour to drive from the airport to out hotel, and that was without traffic. It is also a very pretty city. Things in Japan are by far a lot brighter and more engaging. Signs are everywhere and they are bright and flashy with not much empty space. I wonder if that is a factor of the small size of the island nation... if clutter is sort of built into their culture. But to drive through downtown at night is serious sensory overload. Even to go into something as basic as a drug store is an intense experience. The lights are very bright and the signs are very cheerful and colorful. Oh yah, and those little anime-style characters? Everywhere! I thought that it was just an American thing to depict the Japanese as having anime everywhere because that is one thing they are known for... but no, it is all over Japan. For instance, something serious that we would use a pretty lady to advertise, they use a little anime cat. It is hilarious, but also cute. And it is embraced in their culture... I saw ties for grown men with Hello Kitty faces on them and little elephants and little airplanes/trains/dogs/boats/giraffes. You name it, I saw it. I specifically remember one businessman I saw in an elevator who had on a nice suit and tie, but there where little elephants and palm trees all over the tie. It was hilarious! And there are so many people! Everywhere! And the streets are narrow and the buildings are TALL. For instance, my street would be a wide street compared the street our hotel was on. Oh yes, and they had Tully's, Starbucks and Seattle's Best Coffee. It was very strange to go into places like these because you are familiar with the store, but other than the name, it is not familiar at all.

Since I can't take the time to tell you everything, I will list some highlights from my trip:

Hanging out with the Golden Bears Band and Cheerleaders. They were these cute little highschoolers and they LOVED us. Everything we did they copied, so we taught them our cadences =).

Going to Karaoke in Japan and riding the subway to get there. Karaoke was in Namba, which is the part of Osaka that is a little seedier, which equals more bright lights and even narrower streets. They had like little malls where the streets were so narrow that they just sort of put a roof over it and turned the street into a walkway. It was very fun and gave you sensory overload! I have pictures of karaoke and of the place. Plus, it was amazing to see the subway at 11 pm on a Sunday night... it was absolutely packed.

Buying things from all the vending machines and convenience stores. I am in love with some types of Japanese candy now... and their waffle ice cream, oh my goodness!! It is true when they say there are vending machines everywhere. They are just stuck in little nooks and crannies along the street. They are only about four types though: Cigarettes (a LOT of men smoke), Beer, Drinks and Ice Cream.

Going to the public bath in Himi with my host family. Nothing like getting to know your host family like getting naked with them and taking a shower. The only way this could have been more public would have been if it was in the street and the guys and girls were together! You go to this place that looks a lot like the YMCA and buy a little ticket then go into guys/girls locker rooms. And then you take off all your clothes. You don't leave anything on. I didn't know if this was like camp where you could wear some stuff until you get into the shower and then take that off, but no... you take a shower in a giant place with all the other women. You don't even take your towel with you. So you get this little bucket and you sit on it in front of a little vanity thing that has a mirror and a shelf and a shower head and you take your shower. All of these little "stations" are in a shower room type setting which equals no privacy. When you are finished, then you go to a hottub sort of thing that they call the bath. You can soak there and it is rather enjoyable, other than being naked with a bunch of naked Asian women that look at you because you are the white girl =) But still, it was one of my favorite things.

Riding on the Italian EuroStar bus and then the French EuroStar bus because the tire fell off the italian one. The guys took it to get to their temple homestay in Himi and the tire fell off as they were driving and rolled across a ditch, jumped a fence and went into a field. Apparently the lugnuts weren't tight. Yah, apparently. Oh yah, and the buses had these horribly cheesy looking fake chandeliers. It was interesting, to say the least.

Being treated like a rock star at the concert in Himi. THe line to see us wrapped around the building and people got there at 4 for a 7:30 concert. Crazy. I waved at one little old lady and she started jumping up and down and waving back enthusiastically. It was amazing.

Getting to meet all sorts of new kids and people who also share a love of music.

Trying to figure out what I am doing when I can't speak the language or even read it! It was very frustrating at times because if I was in Europe, most likely I could attempt a pronunciation, but I couldn't even do that here. Yet the language amazes me and I found it to be quite fascinating, although I never got the characters down. I know like 10 Japanese words now, thats about it =)

Anyway, as you see, I could go on and on about my trip. But I need to go to bed and you are probably tired of reading about it. You can ask questions if you want, and I sure have a lot more stories than what I wrote about here. I seriously could talk for days about my trip! I had an amazingly wonderful time, and I would actually like to go back at some point in time. It was weird, by the end of the trip when we came back to Osaka from Himi, Osaka felt familiar, like I was coming home to something. It was awesome!

Japan... finally!

Okay, so it is officially time for my update on my Japan trip. But unfortunately, I deemed packing much more important than posting to my blog and I have put it off until 9:45pm. You will see why this could be a problem in a second.

So tomorrow I leave for Japan with the Husky Marching Band. There are about 100 people going altogether, out of a band that marches 240 on the field. Why are we going to Japan you may ask? Because the music programs at UW have a connection to schools over there. They have been here some and the UW wind ensemble has gone over to Japan before, but never the marching band, so this is a new and cool thing. We are marching in two parades, doing a field show, doing a homestay in a little Japanese fishing village, touring around to schools and hosting a combined concert.

Now this is why I should be in bed: we leave UW tomorrow at 4:30am, which means I am setting my alarm clock for 3:15am. Oi! But I love you guys enough to post when I said that I would. I then catch a 6:25am flight to San Fran, and then take a noon flight to Japan. The flight is going to be 11 hours and 30 minutes long. I looked today =). I don't mind flying, but I have never been on a plane that long, so I am not too sure about this. I don't even like CAR rides that are that long, and you can at least look out the window. Oh well... I will watch their little movies, or *sigh* do catch up on the homework I am missing. We will arrive in Osaka at 4:15pm on Friday. We will have a little bit of a chance to recuperate, and then we jump right into our schedule. We are there a week and come home on Thursday, October 13. And then I turn right around to leave for the UW vs. UO game in Eugene.

Apparently the people in Japan are really, really excited about us coming. I can't seem to think that we are anything that special, but they are very excited. I think part of it may be the culture, but just a guess. They have billboards up all over Osaka with a picture of the logo W and our Husky dog, Spirit. And last night Brad told us that the people in the town where we are doing our homestays had a meeting about us coming that went all night. He told us that we are going to be treated like rockstars. I will let you know if that happens or not =). So while everyone is excited about us coming, we do have a responsibility to behave and not make them hate Americans. Some funny things that I have noticed so far, they have interesting terms when it comes to translation. For instance, they call our uniforms our "performance costumes" and they call the field show a "marching exhibition." Apparently this "marching exhibition" is going to be broadcast all over Japan. Scary stuff. Oh yah, 39 of our guys are going to be staying in a Buddhist temple for their homestay. Now that is scary =).

Anyway, on to something that doesn't have a thing to do with Japan. When I bought my car about a month ago, I went and bought a new stereo and an iPod interface. I love my stereo, but unfortunately, it took me until yesterday to finally use my iPod interface. I could have kicked myself!! I should have used it much sooner. It is really nifty, all you have to do is hook up your iPod to the cable and then you can access all of the albums/songs/artists on your iPod. It spells out on the stereo screen who it is you are listening to and what song and all that jazz. I like it because now I don't have to make sure that I have the CD that I want to listen to handy as long as I have my iPod. I can also change albums way easier than if I were to have to change the actual CD. And it charges my iPod. How cool is that?!? Goodnight!

I schlept in my bed last night...

I am in a Johnny Q. sort of mood again. If you aren't sure what that is, then you should read my blog more often, or look though my old posts =). I looked tonight to see if there was a way to post the song, but unless I can link it through a web page and then put up that link, I'm not sure if you will ever hear it from my blog. Sorry, disappointing, I know.

So in other news, the drumline now knows my nickname. There is a cadence we do that lends itself perfectly to the sex pocket dance. At UCLA the piccs where doing the cadence and saying "Sex Pocket!" (I'm famous, I know!) Well, the drumline was in front of them and heard it and was like "What in the world does that mean?" So my nice friends in the piccolo section told them. Apparently the drumline was discussing my name on the way home. I shudder to think what about... probably similar to what Matthew thought when he read my blog =).

I know I am jumping from topic to topic tonight, but my brain is seriously going at about 500 miles a minute because I have SOOOO much to remember for Japan. Bear with me please? Sitting in class today, I heard the bells from Denny Hall ringing on the hour... it was wonderful. Last year Denny was getting a new roof put on so we didn't have bells the entire year. I really like UW's campus. It is so pretty and some of the architecture is amazing. A lot of the buildings are from earlier in the history of the school, so they are really neat. Nothing like being in an ultra-studious looking environment to make you want to study! Although, as you move down campus toward the hospital, the buildings house more sciences and are therefore a lot newer... due in great part to our good friends Bill Gates and Paul Allen. But they are still pretty, in a new sort of way. My favorite place to study is the atrium in the electrical engineering building. And now all of the leaves are changing colors and it is absolutely beautiful on campus. Maybe I will take some pictures soon. The crisp, fresh, fall air. I love this time of year!

Jumping again, today in my anthropology class we watched a funny movie about dialects and accents. They kept highlighting different accents, but it seemed to me as if they only had about four, and they didn't interview ANYbody from the west coast. You'd think that they would just because we are said to have the least noticeable "accent." Anyway, in this movie they were going around asking people from different regions what a region specific word meant. So they went to these hillbillies and they were like, "What does the word 'schlep' mean?" And they were like, "Well, I don't know. Is it sort of like, 'I schlept in the bed last night'?" It was hilarious! (Do you guys know what schlep means? I already did, its like carrying around a bunch of stuff. "I had to schlep my backpack all over campus.") That movie made my day.

I am going to be going off to bed now, must conserve sleep when I can. I have to be at UW at 4am on Thursday (details are still forthcoming, I promise!) Funny story really quick though, when I walked out to my car after band practice tonight, there was a pair of socks sitting by my car. I didn't know where they had come from, so I picked them up and they were mine. Apparently what happened was my coat was sitting on a stack of folded laundry, so when I grabbed it and went to practice, they got stuck in my coat and then fell out in the parking lot. What is even weirder is that I got to school at 4:15, so when I walked back out to my car a 9:15, my socks had been sitting in the parking lot for 5 hours. Strange... goodnight!

T-minus 4 days

So many things are happening in my life right now, and I have 4, count 'em FOUR, days until I leave for Japan. I promise that I will post more about that trip before I leave, but for now I have lots of other things to say.

School started on Wednesday. I am only taking 12 credits because of the whole missing a week of school to go to Japan problem, so 12 credits equals two classes and marching band. The first class I am taking is Abnormal Psychology. This week we had to read a case study about a guy with something called Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I didn't even know there was such a thing. He had SERIOUS road rage and when someone cut him off, he forced the guy off the road and then started slamming the guy into his car hard enough to dent the door. Reading this made me wonder though, how many of these mental illnesses could be cured by better parenting? Hmmm? The guy grew up in a kind of violent home, so if this was all he knew, how do we know that he is really sick, or that he is just acting on the example that he saw at home growing up. The other class I am taking is Linguistic Anthropology and I am really enjoying the class so far. It looks at how we use language to actually convey what we mean and how the same words can mean different things in different cultures. Like I said, I am finding it very interesting because it is answering some of the questions that I had whenever I took foreign language classes. And then there is marching band. Of course! So that is my schedule for this quarter.

And then we almost got a new cat on Wednesday. There was a kitty wandering around the church parking lot when we got there for Bible study. It was the CUTEST cat ever. It had long fur and it was silky and fluffy with Siamese type markings. It had brown ears with a brown face, a blue eye, a cream colored body and white feet so it looked like it was wearing boots. It only had one eye, but it wasn't like it was icky, the eyelid was just closed like she was winking =). We couldn't figure out where she belonged so we took her home and she ended up sleeping with me in my bedroom. She woke me up about 3 times, walking on my head and meowing because she wanted me to pet her. By this time everybody in my family except my mom wanted to keep her if we couldn't figure out where she belonged. Even my dad. He kept coming in and checking on her, picking her up and cuddling her. It was so funny. And then we found her family. Apparently she got out when they were moving. So we don't have a new cat. And I am sad... I want a kitten now =)

Almost done, I promise. I watched the USC/ASU game today: USC won. I am very angry. ASU was ahead when I started watching. This was the 26th game in a row that USC has won. I think they need to lose a little bit so that it doesn't go to their heads. Oh wait, it already has =)