I had a pretty good day today. The toddlers I was working with were enjoyable and not terribly behaved, I got giant toddler hugs from two of them actually. One of the Teachers I was working with was pregnant. I have only one episode of Haruhi to watch before I'm caught up and can join a Haruhi fangroup. I also got two Sakuya from friends of mine to add to my collection of virtual dolls, I now have 8/100. The wife made an awesome open faced turkey sandwich dinner, too.

Life seems so good sometimes.

I am collecting Touhou gashapon figurines.

Gashapon are figurines dispensed from machines and are rather popular in Japan. They are not unlike the toy machines you see at the grocery store. The word gashapon comes from the sound the machine makes when it dispenses your prize (gasha-gasha.) I have, in fact, seen more than one real japanese-style gashapon machine in Toronto but generally they don't have anything more niche than Dragonball or Hello Kitty figurines, neither of which are really my thing.

Touhou is a series of games originally propagated for the japanese PC-98 platform and which continues to be popular on NT based windows platforms. They are what are known as curtain-fire shooters which basically means the enemies generally shoot large complex spreads of bullets that beg you to dodge between and graze while trying to stay under the enemy so that you can accurately shoot it. The characters are highly collectible because they are all cute anime girls with different abilities and relationships to each other.

One thing differentiates my collection with other people's useless obsessions.

My collection doesn't exist in the analog world.

Yes.. I am collecting virtual dolls that don't even have images associated with them. This is facillitated by an IRC bot which acts as the gashapon machine and also keeps track of who has what. There are currently 25 people in the channel that has this bot, so it's not just me who is absurdly bent on collecting these.. names.

My collection thus far..
Chiyuri x2,
Cirno x3,
Elis x2,
Ellen x1,
Gengetu x1,
Hourai x1,
Kana x1,
Keine x1,
Komachi x3,
Letty x1,
Lily x1,
Mai x1,
Medicine x1,
Merlin x1,
Orange x1,
Point Item x2,
Reisen x2,
Rikako x1,
Rika x2,
Rinnosuke x1,
Sakuya x4,
Sara x1,
Shinki x2,
Suika x1,
Youmu x1,
Yuka x2,
Yukari x1,
Yuyuko x1

Quite extensive? No, not nearly as large as some of the collections belonging to people who remember to set timers at night and when they go to work. To remember to do that is the key to getting 100 of a single figure so that you can trade those in for a single RARE figure. I am collecting Sakuya, the girl with control over time which she uses to create an infinite amount of knives out of a single blade that she can then hurl at infidels.

I feel like such a loser.

I get the feeling that this Hideshi Hino's Theatre of Horror is a sucky TV hour in jp just as Friday the 13th is in N America. I saw Lizard Baby from the same line of movies and it was terrible. It wasn't suspenseful and reminded me of an ep of the Twilight Zone except it didn't have a twist at the end. Maybe I will try watching the Ringu series or Ju On next instead of subjecting myself to this series.

I have been watching a show called The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱) and it's really pretty interesting about a girl named Haruhi and her obsession with supernatural occurrences. Haruhi seems like some kind of catalyst for a larger plot involving alternate space, time travelling and the Earth coming into existence four years ago. At any rate it is still airing in jp and I have four more eps to watch before I am caught up to the current story line (the last ep aired was 13.) It's based on the Nagaru Tanigawa's Suzumiya Haruhi series of novels which I haven't read and, indeed, don't even know if it's been translated officially, unofficially or at all. Though if I actually do enjoy the TV series enough I will seek them out. I am actually learning a bit of jp. じょうずじゃありません。。。 But I'm not very good. If I get good enough I am thinking about doing some translation for a fansub group or two.

I just finished watching a movie called Dead Girl Walking which is a japanese horror movie about, well, a dead girl.. Walking. It was rather like a french art film (not that i've seen many of those) in which the main girl is put through travesty after travesty. It is done almost entirely in black and white and has a rather low production value, which I like. There are no real twists or anything, just a few very powerful images (it's not a gore fest or anything, so i don't mean dismembered girl bits strewn all over the place.) It's part of a series of movies produced or at least endorsed by one of my favourite mangaka, Hideshi Hino, called Hino's House of Horror or something equally obvious. I would recommend it, though I don't think it's actually very widely available. I got it in an obscure corner of a not so obscure imageboard and it was, luckily, subbed. I also got another movie called something something blah in the same line of movies that was absolutely terrible and boring. Low budget horror walks a very fine line, it seems.

Also, Mushishi is an anime I have been watching. About a race of creatures that exist somewhere between life and death and can be inexactly described as ghosts and the hunters who try to understand and kill them. It is rather well written and well drawn, more so than most anime, I find. It has only been subbed up to ep 21 though there are likely supposed to be 24-26 episodes in the series. I wish one of the numerous fansub groups doing a lesser anime would finish the hell up and resume work on this masterpiece of a show. Maybe i will just d/l the japanese language versions and hope that it is self explanatory enough to follow the story.

I met someone yesterday and spoke to him like a normal person. His name is Steven and it happened while getting a tea at Timothy's coffee shop around lunch time. He was sitting in one of the couched areas reading a paper when I asked if i could sit in the seat dagonal him. He agreed and wondered aloud at the book I had just put on the table between us, which is about globalization. I turns out that he had been a teacher for 20 years until he left the profession in 2001, possibly because of the inherent problems with institutionalized learning institutions such as daycare, elementary and high schools in which attendance is considered legally mandatory. He started telling me about how large corperations like the WHO and the US government turn out research related to what they are selling and try to pass those studies off as unbiased. This kind of thing is not a surprise to me as I've studied vaccines and how they relate to my family. So I had a conversation about something with someone who agrees with me! This is not a normal occurance and it felt pretty good. We also spoke about the future of the global workforce and how it is becoming less and less employment oriented and more about finding what you do well and simply presenting that to a market that wants to buy into it. We exchanged numbers when we stood up to leave and he told me he would give me a call on the weekend. I'm glad to have met him, he's full of a sort of sly wit that I never pick up on straight away but appreciate later. He called my plan for starting up a home daycare a charity! Probably out of what he percieved to be noble intention on my part, nobility my ass.

Something else we spoke about and that I read about yesterday was the plan to make downtown Toronto a huge WiFi howspot. Interesting concept, certainly, but there are concerns over the safety of having electromagnetic radiation blasting out bodies with disruptive noise. The companies involved are, of course, touting that the WiFi signals are just as safe as TV and radio waves, which is true though I suspect the WiFi field will be a lot stronger than those on which TV and radio signals travel on. Health issues aside, I think a large network like the one proposed could potentially be a good thing. This is a technology that will allow for more free flow of information for those willing to embrace it. I wonder just how secure the network will eventually be...

Canada's immigration laws incorperate a "points" system that seems to make it harder for foriegn religious workers, such as middle eastern and Indian clergy, to stay in the country even if they've been here for 6 or 7 years and have established themselves as pillars of their local communities. To me it sounds like a policy that feeds into our xenophobic culture (in Glorious, Socialist Canada? No way!)

I worked the Eaton Center site in the kindergarten for the first time today. They serve their kids snack and lunch there as opposed to having the children serve themselves and I had forgotten to ask why. Having the children (especially kindergartners) serve themselves at food times is empowering and teaches about the correlation between the gluttony/restraint dynamic and the waste produced at the end of the meal (the kids can scrape their own plates into a communal organics bucket to emphasize this) and I don't understand why someone would knowingly take that away from the children other than, "oh, it's easier." Sigh. One of the teachers there actually taught one of my classes at Mothercraft. I also worked an afternoon shift at Hester How. One girl was playing in the reading section (doing what, I don't know; happily or not, i don't know) when her grandma showed up to take her "for a little while." I was incredulous and was vindicated when Dawn began crying hysterically about losing "her spot" (all areas are limited in number of children who are allowed to play in them.) It seems to me that if someone is picking up a child from daycare, the idea that they might come back is one that can create problems. "Spots" are viciously guarded things, mainly because they are lost so easily. The girl must have thought that, since even standing up can give an ambitious child the opportunity to slide in and claim it for their own, this temporary absence from the classroom would spell doom for her spot. I saw the most beautiful dolls today. Two Eurasian toddlers who were about twenty five years old and were made in Toronto. They had wonderful, black, curly human hair and well made traditional chinese dresses... And they were selling at $1250.00 each! I was telling the shop owner how nice his store was and especially those dolls when he asked me, "are you coming back for them?" I nearly laughed in his face. Me, with my torn shoes and uncut hair, "coming back" for twenty five hundred dollars worth of doll! I demurely declined.

esterday was the first time I felt completely comfortable in the infant room. It happened when I was reading the group a few stories towareds the end of the day. One of the stories was a book about how animals move their body parts and so the head touching, arms waving, hips wiggling game began. It occurred to me at that point that, while oral comminication is important for infants' speech development, they get so much more out of kinesthetic comminication. In other words, play is a better medium for speaking to infants than speech is! This is something I couldn't grasp in my kindergarten classes and frankly ignored in the toddler rooms I've been in. I can see now that this kind of play based communication can certainly be applied to anyone with less language skills or people who are less willing to use language.

Lunch shifts at the (three story) coop are crazy. I'm basically responsible for getting the food up to the classes (from the basement!) and spending some time in the "big kid's" room (kindergarten) serving and sitting with one of the groups. Then I have to clean up the trays and bowls and things, take it down to the chef and clean up the "mid kid's" room (which is always a disaster after lunch.) The shift is only an hour and a half long but is so busy that I usually do more on that shift than I do during the rest of my day.

I also have my interview with the man with autism today. His name is Matt and I know next to nothing about him or autism. Wish me luck!