[Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger]

Mh, I really like this album! With uninspired crap like The Killers, The Bravery or the Kaiser Chiefs being hyped to death, it’s kind of hard to tell which band is worth a listen. Maximo Park are refreshingly different, I love how you can’t tell where most of their songs are going. Or first you think you know exactly where a song is heading and then it just runs off in a completely different direction. Amazingly good stuff!
I was a bit surprised by the lyrics. All of the songs are love songs which I didn’t expect at all, but thankfully, it doesn’t get too sappy or depressing. There’s some great imagery in them and some lines are rather poetic.
The Limited Edition CD also comes with a live EP recorded in Tokyo. The sound quality is quite good (that is to say, MP sound like a fab live band!) and Paul speaking Japanese is just too cute for words ^^;

My grandmother will be released from the hospital tomorrow. That’s so much earlier than we expected! But everything healed up quite nicely so she can come home already. They didn’t find any other cancerous lumps in her body which means the cancer hasn’t spread yet and the doctor said the chances of a complete recovery are 100% if she goes through the therapies which will be quite strenuous but necessary. (Chemotherapy starts in three weeks.)

My last full week of work at the record shop starts tomorrow ;_; I’m a bit sad to leave but I have one hell of a busy summer before me, I just won’t have time to work there.

My Episode 3 midnight premiere experience didn’t happen. I was supposed to meet a few friends of mine to watch Revenge of the Sith but I went to visit other friends in the evening and then an hour before midnight, I decided I’d rather stay with them than go to the theatre and have my eyes poked out by lightsabers and get run over by stormtroopers. Star Wars premieres can vary between ridiculous and evil, I know that from repeated first-hand experience, and even though I’ve been looking forward to seeing Episode 3, I just wasn’t in the mood for being in a theatre with sci-fi weirdos ^^; (<— See, I’m exaggerating so I don’t regret not having been at the premiere -_-;;)
Almost all weekend screenings are sold out, I hope I’ll get to see it next week…

I came home from our little get-together quite late/early, at about 2:30 am, and didn’t feel tired at all. But today I have the worst hangover ever which is kind of strange because I was the only person not drunk/high/dog-tired when I left. Maa.
So I spent most of today reading. …It’s really hard to keep up with all the books, manga tankoubon and manga magazines that always find their way into my room. Who’s buying/ordering all those volumes over volumes of printed matter all the time??? *blinks innocently*

[Music: Maximo Park - A Certain Trigger]

Today I went to the hospital with my parents to visit my grandma. I believe nobody is very fond of going to hospitals in general, neither as a patient nor as a visitor so it comes as no surprise when I say that I was glad to be able to leave the building again after just 2 hours.

The worst thing must be the smell of the disinfectants that seem to want to conceal the smells of illness and, ultimately, death but I associate that smell with those very same things; so to me, when I enter a hospital, it reeks of suffering and death.

My granny was relatively okay. She was operated on four days ago but she was already able to walk around. She looked so small, though I’m sure that was due to the high ceilings of the Wilhelminian-style hospital building (it was built around 1900) and everyone in there looked rather diminished in all senses of the word.

The doctors told her she was relatively lucky because the tumour was detected quite early, the operation went quite well and she’ll probably be allowed to go home in a week or two. She’ll have to go a number of therapies during the next few months though, which I suppose will be harder for her than this stay in the hospital.

All of us are optimistic, or at least we’re trying to. The way we spent the afternoon together, chatting and laughing (and worrying and then being optimistic again), seemed like a normal visit at my grandparents’ minus the usual environment. I’m sure once she’s back home, things will be back to normal again. Well, not exactly as normal as before because there’ll be the chemotherapy etc., but she’ll probably be more relaxed if she doesn’t have to breathe that hospital air anymore.

That sense of seeming normality was the strongest when a really handsome young doctor (aged approximately 28-32) had just left the room after he’d spoken to another patient and my grandmother said – audible for everyone in the room – that he’d been eyeing me the whole time o_O;; Embarrassing me in front of the rest of my family is what my grandma’s best at!
I told her to stop it but she went on how it was only natural because I was a pretty girl and so on and so forth. So embarrassing! And I’m not even sure if she was just imagining things because I didn’t look at the doc because even though I noticed he was quite hot when he’d entered the room, I didn’t want to be really obviously staring at him, especially with my parents and grandparents around and everything ^^;

And then just before we wanted to leave, the other one of the two women my grandma shares a room with came in and asked me all about the Japanese language and how I managed to remember all those weird signs (kanji). Apparently, my granny must have told her ‘roommates’ my whole life story… -_-;;

[Music: Bloc Party - Silent Alarm]

I can’t decide what to think of the new Hot Hot Heat album. It’s definitely good, maybe not as crazy as the debut album but still unique and fun. There isn’t really one weak song on it I’d have to skip but a little more variety would have been cool, too. Or less repetitions of the choruses.

But with Idlewild and Bloc Party both having released such brilliant, amazing, intelligent, different, urgent and profoundly important albums this year, everything else pales in comparison.

Silent Alarm, Warnings/Promises, 100 broken windows, Air’s Talkie Walkie plus a bit of Simon&Garfunkel and Dylan here and there is all I’ve been listening to recently. It’s been cold and rainy for two weeks now. My yt.net mail server is down. My grandma was hospitalised because she’s got cancer but they’ve already operated on her to remove the tumour. I just called her and she seems quite optimistic at the moment. It’s just when she called us two weeks ago and told us they found a malign tumour in her breast, it felt just like in a movie because I’ve been silently fearing something like this to happen to my grandparents and when it does, it’s so surreal you just want someone to make it stop.

Time passes way too quickly for me at the moment; the first week of May is already over! Which means it’s high time I started writing something about the new anime series that started in April. So here’s my impression of Hachimitsu to Clover, the new anime series I’ve been looking forward to the most this season.

The original manga series by Umino Chica is one of my favourite manga at the moment. I’m so in love with it! It’s been running in Shueisha’s Young You for slightly more than 3 and a half years now and it received the Kodansha manga award in 2003. The manga succeeds in combining light-hearted and often downright hilarious comedy depicting the everyday life of a group of art school students and some of their teachers with philosophical moments of bittersweet melancholy and romance that can move the reader to tears. Primarily, it is a manga for young women but it speaks a universal language that transcends boundaries of age and gender and thus appeals to both female and male readers from young teenagers to adults.

So last night, I watched the first two episodes of the Hachikuro anime TV series that is currently shown on Fuji TV. I was half-expecting something stylish but I was by no means prepared for something this perfect *_* Mind you, the first chapters of the manga were published in Cutie (before Young You picked it up), a fashion magazine for young women (and one of my favourite mags, too ♥), which means the series always had a artsy, fashion, lifestyle and music-related sort of background. So it’s no wonder that the anime adaptation is supported by fashion labels such as adidas, we and Levi’s. And the opening sequence is directed by Noda Nagi, an art&video director responsible for ad campaigns for a variety of fashion labels and music videos; it’s the weirdest anime OP I’ve ever seen. In a good sense :)
I don’t like the opening song too much because I’ve never been a fan of (ex-Judy and Mary no) YUKI’s voice, in fact I find it quite annoying ^^; But it fits the quirky, indie pop inspired atmosphere of the anime just perfectly.

The show itself is beautifully animated, the character designs are splendid and the voice acting is superb (though I don’t like the voice of Takemoto at all -_-). I’m really fond of the colours, they work very well together with the general atmosphere of the anime :)
The story follows the manga quite closely, though there are a few extra scenes and variations here and there.
They’ve preserved the hilarious slapstick scenes (oh my God, I LOVE Morita!!!) and even Hagu’s annoying-ness is just as bearable as in the manga. They could’ve made me hate her by giving her an overly cutesy voice actress but the voice she now has is quite alright. I’m also glad they introduced Yamada Ayumi right in the first episode and gave her a few extra scenes because she’s my favourite character (go Ayu!) and I think she’s the one most fans of the manga can identify with most easily.

And then, right in the first episode… a melancholic moment… a song starts playing – and it’s Hachimitsu by Spitz. ;__; (‹– Yuuya’s face during that scene)

That was the moment I decided this is my anime.

The ending theme song by Suneo Hair is much better than the OP, and the ‘insert song’ of the second episode by Suga Shikao came at just the right moment, just like the Spitz song.
The background music reminds me a lot of the Chobits BGM, with easy listening tunes that aren’t anything special but match the tone of the story really well.

The only weakness of the anime is the typical problem of books turned into movies. Things that are explained in the manga by a universal narrator who, unfortunately, isn’t present in the anime. Each episode of the manga ends with a philosophical little note that often foreshadows things to come. There is no such thing in the anime. So for example, when Takemoto’s stomach suddenly aches when he thinks of Hagu while carrying Morita on his back, it is left to the viewer to realise that this pain isn’t caused by hunger but by love, something which the narrator tells us in the manga (in a very sweet way).
But so far, this is the only negative thing I can note about the anime…

[One additional negative note which has nothing to do with the anime itself: The contrast of the subs released by ANBU&Solar is way too bright; sometimes you can't even make out the outlines of bright objects moving in front of a bright background >_< It's really annoying.]

I’m so glad they’ve preserved the atmosphere of the manga and even enhanced it with elements such as beautiful colour schemes and (not so) indie guitar pop songs. If no American or European company licenses it, I’ll definitely buy the Japanese DVDs. This might sound like financial suicide but it’s well worth it :)

I just saw a 40-minute live set by Idlewild on TV *_* I’m still all ecstatic and overwhelmed because it was absolutely fantastic, even if it was just on TV.
The show was recorded just a while ago in Cologne and the sound quality was amazingly clear. The older songs from Hope is important and 100 broken windows sound brilliant now that Roddy’s singing voice has evolved so much. And they played El Capitan! Thank God they didn’t play an acoustic version of it because the song loses all its dynamics if it’s not played fully electric. (And Colin wore his yellow comic print T-shirt which always reminds me of Speed Racer, the very old anime.)

So yes, that was the best thing I’ve seen on TV in quite some time; Athlete is on now but I don’t like them that much so I’m off to bed.

I was home alone today. Or so I thought when I got up at noon. It was already quite hot outside and my parents had left open the windows of the kitchen and the living room. When I sleepily walked into the bathroom, I immediately noticed a large grey spot on the sink that shouldn’t have been there. There was a small possibility that this might be some sort of insect or spider but I was wearing neither my contacts (I was going to put them in in the bathroom) nor did I have my glasses anywhere near me, so I had to move quite close to the spot to make out its true identity. And yes, lucky me, passionate lover of all creatures with more than 4 legs (/irony), it was a bug. And it was moving, which meant I had to step into action at once. So I grabbed a towel and reduced the world’s insect population x to x-1. You can go and call Peta now.

I closed all the windows in the house for fear of more bugs coming in, made myself some coffee and got ready for work which would take place in front of my computer today because I had a few things to write. After 20 minutes or so, I heard a sequence of strange rustling noises near the ceiling but I thought I was just imagining things or something. Nevertheless, I got up and checked but didn’t find anything suspicious.
Three minutes after I’d gotten back to work, there suddenly was this really loud buzzing sound from one corner of my room and I noticed something flying towards me which must have been hiding somewhere on/behind my shelves all the time o_O First I thought it was a bee, but it was much bigger, so I thought it might be a wasp or a larger type of bumblebee but within a fracture of second I realized it was a GIANT HORNET, so I jumped up and left my room, quickly closing the door behind me! The thing was gigantic and I heard it flying through my room. Its buzzing was much much louder than that of your average bee or wasp.
So here I was, not daring to go back into my room to open the window and get rid of the intruder because hornets are supposed to be much more aggresive than wasps and just by the sound of it, I knew this fellow wasn’t just going to ignore me and fly out of the window peacefully. Which left me no choice. I had leave my work unfinished, go into the living room and watch TV all afternoon and evening because I had nothing else to do as all of my things were in my room with the hornet ;_;

When my parents came home tonight, I asked my mother for assistance in getting the damn thing out of my room. No animals or humans were hurt during that mission. It just took the insect some time to actually find its way out of the open window… And from up close, I noticed how massive it was, it must have been 2-3 inches big o_O

So this was my bug infested day. I won’t open my windows again all summer.