check it out! we were walking downtown hoping there was a festival of some sort and came across this. the lyrics of the second song are entirely about Sendai (like, Sendai foods and things) so i might try to translate them later - i'll wait a few days to see if youtube does automatic captioning first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-gnHzoWNHc

also after waiting literally months to buy harada's "Color Recipe" because they stopped selling it in like december since she was editing it and going to release an updated version, i finally got to buy the updated version today! haven't opened it yet but i'm excited to see what was "improved". the cover was actually made worse. i've read the first volume a billion times but haven't read anything from the second, which goes on sale on the first of next month. seems like the lady who draws "twittering birds never fly" just released some new manga volume too, i dunno if i still like her works or not so i didn't buy it and i'll just wait for it to appear secondhand somewhere...

my wife's TOEIC (english test for foreigners) test is tomorrow so we did some reading aloud practice together. she has swedish consonants, sometimes wrong intonation in individual vocabulary words (like "i addressed the audience" versus "write your address", which at times I'm not actually sure if she's wrong, if it's my dialect or if I've forgotten how that word is actually said. And when she remembers to correctly say z instead of s tends to draw out the z sound too long. Overall though her accent just makes her sound like she constantly has a cold, and this test is just trying to prove that you have English competence enough for daily life / daily work life, nothing near the actual native-level fluency she does have.

i finished completely rewriting that BA thesis proposal from scratch (didn't even look at the old version while writing it) in 2-3 days and turned it in this morning, so whether it passes or not i'm pretty much free from that class now. my classmate also failed it, and my other classmate dropped out of the course, so that means at least 3/6 of the students in the class failed the final assignment. great, huh. anyway i finally managed to order my transcripts, will start writing up a japanese CV/resume (and will do it in English too since I'll be applying for jobs that use English) and make a CV on my website as well that I can just link to. my wife said that since with just a bit of practice i can sound like a very "commercial English voice", as in she thinks I could be a voice actor for small-time commercials and stuff in English, I can put up reading samples on my online CV too. I'll also put up stuff like scans of the articles I've written for the Esperanto newsletter, PPTs of presentations I've done for school, and samples of the thank-you letters I got from a few of the japanese elementary schools. my japanese level is, while nowhere near perfect, DEFINITELY good enough to be very impressive right now — i've noticed that shopkeepers, library staff, strangers etc automatically assume i'm fluent in japanese now and even speak with 100% normal super-formal shop language and all that as if they were speaking to a japanese person. in general right now i feel like i'll get a full-time job super fast after i apply to some, it feels like my chances are reaaaally high.

i've also decided to quit eating cheese (yeah... i was eating it for a while...) because while it doesn't make me physically sick, i still have a better mood when i'm not eating it. also found out my estonian classmate who's been going to a ton of job interviews with no success, actually she hasn't been going to INTERVIEWS - she's been going to stuff like "group info sessions" and "ice-breaking sessions" and "job fairs". no, you've gotta apply to a job directly, search on job hunting websites directly, email companies directly.