Well yesterday was interesting, but not in any exciting way. first we had our midterm and it was easy and i think i did fine. then at the library my hard drive suddenly finished dying. fortunately, joel had a copy of winXP with him, so i copied it and installed the new hard drive and installed winXP, and so i'm back online. of course now i have to install all my software again, so i'm going about downloading everything.
two nights ago we all went to see a Noh play (pics). actually, four. all the reports about the boringness of noh were greatly underrated. we sat there from 330 until 930 watching people say approximately 5 words per minute, and move even slower. noh was apparently originally developed for the nobles to have their art form that the peasantry just didn't understand, so that the nobles could feel cool and exclusive when they went to watch it. but i sort of think the peasantry had it better off - they could laugh at the nobles for enduring this boring hours-long ordeal, simply so they could feel good about being in the upper class.
but i find it hard to believe that the entire art form exists purely for exclusivity (and now for tradition). i mean, EVERYONE i talked to said it was boring as hell (even the lady who makes Noh masks we went to see said "You're seeing four plays? Gambatte!" ...'gambatte' meaning "put forth your best effort"). but why would anyone decide they want to study to be a Noh actor, etc? Surely there must be SOME people who love the art form and actually get into it. I haven't found any evidence of that, but I can't believe that EVERYBODY thinks of it as boring and something you'd only do once in your life just so you can say you've done it. Shrug.
yesterday my host mom went up north with a friend, so i was on my own for dinner. i stayed at the school downloading software till around 7, then went down to kawaramachi to get some mcdonalds. saw some cool sights i dont often see (since im not often there at night), so i took some pics. didn't have my tripod with me of course but i think i managed some decent stuff just using walls and trees etc to hold the camera steady. pics are here: night photography
Originally posted on LiveJournal. Original post