12.May.23: Summer Break and First Year Reflection

As i write this i have officially made it through my first year of college. Yippee!

I passed all my classes with amazing grades (Three Bs and an A). I haven't done that well in anything since maybe elementary school or sixth grade. crazy to say outloud!

I honestly had a lot of fun... the first half of the year/first semester was pretty rough. Because of covid and quarantines, I hadnt been inside a proper school setting in a good while. I was also dealing with horrible mental health and plenty of more outside factors. I failed a class last semester and i thought i was doomed before i even began. Not to mention my already terrible social skills had gotten even worse, I felt alienated in all of my classes, all the time.

I sulked and prepared myself for the worst over winter break

My schedule this semester was much tighter than it was the prior. four classes doesnt sound bad, but Baking and Food Preperation were 4.5 hours long each. Service Managing was anywhere from 3 to 5 hours long depending on the events. and english, while it wasnt long at all(1.5 hours is a blessing), it was a late class and sometimes happened after baking, which lead to me fighting sleep in almost every week. It really sucked at times. I felt very overwhelmed and alone... but then i joined a club!

Well, its a bit more serious than a club, but it behaved like one. it was centric to my major. So i ended up seeing lots of classmates there. I pay close enough attention to know who people are, but the club gave me a chance to actually say hi. I began to chat with people more, and before i knew it i had opened up a lot, hanging out with friends after class almost every day i could. I even made some friends outside of my major!

Making friends was something i always struggled with. i think i already said that. You grow up being the "weird kid" to everyone, even your own family, it really kills any drive to talk to people, and any confidence in yourself. Also, i struggle with social ques, unspoken rules, and knowing when things are funy or not, so i have a habit of staying quiet and bottling things in so i dont embarrass myself. But despite all of this, i managed to make friends. Its wild to say! I made friends and well. Some of them i might not ever see again. It took me a while to comes to grips with it. But no matter how i feel i can say im glad i managed to have fun with these people, even if only for a few months in a kitchen. it's the realizations like these that make me wish i didn't dislike photos so much; so i'd have something physical to attach the memories to.

Well... reflections aside, i have a few things im really looking forward to now that school is done for the summer. the most immediate of those being coding! i can finally sit down and mess around with my site without worry! I've been squeezing in some projects but i really want to rehaul the entire arrothame theme and structure. Of course i'll be building it offline, so nothing will be broken just yet. but look forward to that!

To anyone who's reading this and is still going through finals/preparing for them, i wish you the best luck. Happy friday!

-Leo

14.May.23: Gourmet Race (Culinary Student Woes)

Culinary as a major is a lot like playing Gourmet Race for the first time. seems super straightforward and easy at first right? how hard can it be. But oh man when it starts...
...Maybe I'm just bad at the game? Not too sure anymore.

Seriously speaking, as much as i enjoy and love the fact I'm doing culinary as a major, it's very, very stressful when you first begin. especially if you're like me and have absolutely no prior experience in a commercial kitchen (whether that be through jobs or a trade school... I have neither of those under my belt T-T). I often find myself struggling and working at a slower, messier and less efficient pace then my classmates. I'm only a few weeks into my first true cooking classes, and I know it will get easier with time, but that doesnt change the fact it's very stressful! And it makes me question why i do it in the first place...

Most of my stress and self doubt stems from my food prep class. I am a good cook, but a time crunch and overall unfamiliarity makes what should be an easy recipe into the worst 4 hours of my life. What the hell is a salamander? How big are brunnoise cuts again? I only have an hour n a half to make a 2 hour stock??

To offset the horros of food prep, I also take a Baking Fundementals class. Baking has always been my strong suit, even if the things i bake at home are very barebones. But that confidence and basic knowledge has made the class so fun! I've made focaccia, baguettes, muffins, and soon I will make Cinnamon Rolls, cakes, and more!

Food Prep tears me down and Baking builds me back up again. A very taxing, time consuming cycle.

But hey, I got a cook chef coat and a knife set now. The coat is even embroidered with my name! And the knifes are very high quality. Hefty and hold an edge well. Thank goodness. They were over 230 bucks. Something they never tell you about culinary is how expensive it is...

This is a departure from my usual memoir entries, I know. But I feel like arrothame would benefit from having this. If things ever get too dusty around here and I forget to update for a while, this is why. I'm rushing around at campus nearly everyday, from 8-5, and the few days I do get off, I find myself spending most of it laid up in bed trying to replenish my forever-half-empty battery, or preparing for the next week. (luckily, i have this week off! yippee to spring break.)
Coding is still a massively present hobby for me amd the last thing i want to do is to lose touch with it like i did art.

Well, I do home those reading this have had it easier then I do. And if not, i hope it gets better soon! The next memoir entry will probably be about my pokemon cards like i promised ages ago. Or, about old animanga I grew up consuming. either way, I'll be seeing ya!

-Leo

1.Feb.23: プロレス, 日本語, and Lost Friendship

I have been attempting to teach myself Japanese (日本語) for, at the time of typing this, 3 weeks.

At first, I only relied on Duolingo for work and study, as i didn't think i would go too in-depth with it. But over time, with shifting interests, and memories coming to light, i began to rely on several better sources.

If you were to ask me what my motivation for learning japanese was, I'd probably tell you professional wrestling (and Hiromu Takahashi's youtube channel). Pro-Wrestling is amazing in the way that it tells stories through action, so you don't really have to know what theyre saying to know what they're saying, you get me? The same is true for Puroresu (プロレス), though after a while you can't help but want, NEED to know what they are saying after hard fought battles and title changes. And in the case of DDT shows, you miss out on a lot of humor!
There are also articles and stories I'd love to read that are written in Japanese, and to shove it through a machine translator would break and butcher it beyond sensibility (I mean, look at what it did to this tweet by El Desperado; he meant to say forehead...

But as much as I'd admit to your face that this was the only reason, it isn't. I have somebody else to thank, though as much as i wish i could, i can't.

A long time ago, way back on vine and kik(yeah, remember those?), i'd talk and become friends with a lot, LOT of people. Sure, some mistakes were definitely made seeing as i was only 13-14 talking to strangers online, but it also brought forth some great memories. It was the launching platform for one of my longest-standing friendships.
It also gave way to my most elusive, but often reflected-upon friendships.

My "formula" for getting friends on kik was to meet through vine, and transfer to kik if they were cool enough. I talked to lot's of people with the same interests and what not on there. Most of the time they spoke english, but sometimes I met people who spoke spanish or russian. I suppose you can see where this is going.

I never knew their real name; they didn't know mine either. We spoke through google translate almost all the time; though they knew some english already. I do think looking back they were older than me by a bit, but I didn't care. We had fun; I would already wake up very early for school (due to familial situations, I'd be getting up at around 4 am every day), but due to time differences this would be rather late in the day for them; I'd try my best to cram in as much talking time as possible before I had to go to school, and they had to go to sleep. Of course this came with consequences, I would be half-dead through my classes (and i can pinpoint spanish baring the brunt of it) but we both loved to talk to each other, so it was worth it.

But after a while, we talked less and less. Not so much a growing dislike, the conversations we had still were fun and engaging, but as individuals do, we just began to drift. the timezone differences didn't help either.

One day we said bye for the last time, and that was it.

Perhaps I'm just too sentimental. I think heavily about everyone i have ever talked to; even the people who shouldn't have been talking to me... even the people who i only really talked to once or twice but made me so so excited to have made a new friend. So my nameless, long ago friend never really left my mind; they sort of gave way for my deep respect and admiration for Japan and its' culture. Different in the way people grow to love it through media; I think about Japan fondly because somebody I once thought about fondly lived there.

It's a little strange to type it out; i try to keep it close and private because, as the internet loves to do, you mention things that are a little too interesting people jump on the "things that didnt happen" boat. frustrating doesn't begin to explain it.

This emotional connection ties together with puroresu and give way for a passion and drive I never thought i could have towards learning a language; I can barely make it through a sentence in my one and only language without stumbling and forgetting what I want to say, and here i am! Love is power, i guess, no matter if the love is for a lost friend or pro-wrestlers.

No elegant ending to this. I will come back and update on my learning journey, some point in the future.

またね。

-Leo

15.Jan.23: Mandatory Birthday Entry

So...! Today is my birthday. strange! I turn twenty. Ultra strange!!!

I feel like, if there was any better spot to talk about age and myself it would be here on my own website. So beware, there will be emotions shared.

I was never a big fan of my birthday. There's no big sad reasoning behind it; i just never cared much. It was right after christmas, so i didn't get many gifts, and I really, really hated the streams of birthday texts and calls I'd have to tough through.

And this hasnt changed! I get a lot of questions from family, as to why I don't go out and why i refuse to have a party. I tell them how it is, that I'm just not that kind of person. and they always seem super disappointed.
Am I celebrating my birthday wrong??? I dunno. Half the time I don''t even feel like the age I'm becoming. Even now... I'm stuck in this state of feeling seventeen. Exactly seventeen.

I just always feel like i'm not enough for my age, and that i won't be enough for others. Or that i won't have time to accomplish the things I want in time. But then i think it over a little more and...well... what else do i have but time?

Well, anyway, with all of... THAT out of the way, I'd like to compile a little list of nice things that happened whilst I was nineteen:

• I got to see my first bunch of in-person wrestling events! One being a WWE broadcast (smackdown), and the others being at a local convention i regularly attend. Three matches in one day, they were all dressed as different characters, (Spiderman, Master Roshi, etc) it was very fun!
• Every friday during summer break, I managed to hang out with one of my closest friends. It was the most we had seen of each other since highschool ended, so it was very nice to have them regularly in my life (in person) again!
• I finally got my hands on Sonic action figures, after wishing for them for what feels like my entire life (this is very literal; I've wanted a sonic action figure since i was AT LEAST 7 years old). The same can be said about Bakugan.
• Hacking my 3DS and using it for emulation! Emulating wasn't new to me, but i had been very afraid to 'break into' my 3ds... I finally did and it's allowed me to replay some of my favorite games that I no longer have physical carts to (Bowser's inside story, Sonic Rush, PKMN BW...). No regrets!
• And finally...
  Making this Website!!
  Learning to code is by far the greatest accomplishment of mine this year, and I am so so proud of how far I've gotten. I've only had this website for, what, 3 months now? 2? And look at it! Culdivating a place all for myself, all BY myself, is the best thing I have ever done.

To close this off, I'd like to say thank you to anybody who frequents my webpage. Like i said, this project is the highlight of my entire year, and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. Goodbye teens, hello rawr'ing twenties! I had to squeeze that in here somehow.

-Leo

Unkown Date: Cool Card Collection

I collect a lot of things; rocks, gunpla, miscellaneous wrestling merch... but the biggest group of items i own are trading cards.

The bulk of my card collection belong to pokemon, but I seek out other cards too: right now i have WWE cards, Magic The Gathering cards, power rangers: the movie cards, and Dragon Ball cards (my favorite of the subgroup). I even have two NeoPets trading cards! (they aren't in the best condition though; they were given to me by somebody who doesn't collect)

Neopets cards! They've seen better days. (Shoyru doesnt look bad on camera, but they have a crease going through the middle of the card)

I noted i have DB cards. Cool part about them is, I have two different types! I have some that i got from a convention (DBZ gamecards), and then I have a set that I got from Barnes and Noble(Super gamecards).
My favorite of the Super set is tied between a double-sided "Pan"/"Pan, Ready To Fight Returns" card, or the "Son Gohan, the Awakened" Card. The Pan card is super cool, because on the Ready to Fight side, the energy affects have varied textures sprinkled across. it feels really nice!
As for the DBZ Cards, they are nowhere near as detailed as these new ones, mostly because they use screens from the anime instead of editing together art for the cards. But that's not a bad thing- it gives them a nice classic touch in my eyes. My favorite cards from the bunch are the Yamcha ones. I really like yamcha, he's one of my favorite characters, so it's nice to say I have some cards of him.

Images can't do the Super cards justice! the holo surface really doesn't want to cooperate with me haha.

Despite Pro-Wrestling being one of my biggest interests, I don't really have many Cards! My coolest card is a gold plated WWF The Rock from 2003! It was given to me by a family member. Second coolest card goes to my Topps Finest Refractor Adam Cole card. Other than them, I have two boosters worth of 2015/16 NXT trading cards, but they're.... okay. There were a lot of repeats sadly, so i didn't get many unique cards. I have a few favorites, like my Finn Balor card, Asuka card, and Shinsuke Nakamura card. Someday, I want to get my hands on a signed card from Bayley or Daniel Bryan, or one of the cards that have embedded pieces of the ringmat, gear, chairs/ladders... The possibilites are endless with pro wrestling!

you can barely see the details of the gold card but. I can't just mention it and NOT show a picture.

I don't have much to say in regards to my MTG cards; i keep them in a case and they are, shamefully, not organized at all. I used to play, but as life went on i fell out of it, and my cards fell to time. They are mostly In good shape, but i bought them at a time where I didn't really appreciate cards for their collectable value so... you know.
I do keep three cards out on display near my mirror: "Shivan Dragon", "Gatsaf Ravagers/Gastaf Arsonists", and "Nissa, Genesis Mage". They are favorites of mine, purely for visual reasons. Dragons, werewolves, and mages are cool!

I got all of my mtg cards at the same time; in a set that included over 200 cards!

As much as I'd like to show off my Pokemon cards here, i have... a lot. too much. I actually maintain a spreadsheet dedicated to which cards I have. I'll have to dedicate an entry solely to those cards, as this one is gettin a little too long. Let the photos of my precious cards live on through the internet forever!

-Leo