Mada, mada da ne.

I've been enjoying Prince of Tennis a lot, especially Echizen's "mada, mada da ne." It's so cute. He's so adorable - all quiet and brooding. ::snicker:: Talk about determined. I know this is a comparison out of left field, but I think if Ryouma had been pilot 01, the whole earth/colonies/OZ war would've ended a lot earlier than it had. That boy has determination in spades. I'm dying to make an LJ icon of him with "Mada, mada da ne" on it. >_<

But in other things… I've finally decided that I definitely will get an industrial piercing (a barbell through the outer rim - helix - of my right ear), although I'm going to begin with two CBRs (rings) in the right spots, and after they heal I'll put in the barbell.

Yay for me and my (nonexistent) decisiveness!

Alexander's terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day.

Have you ever read that book? I can't remember the author, but it's an elementary school book describing all the things that go wrong for 8-year old (or thereabouts) Alexander. Poor guy. Doesn't get what he wants and everything just goes wrong. I can sympathize.

Friday started out well. I opened the store at 8am, as usual. The day before had been a holiday, so Grand Central Station had been practically dead; the store had not done well, nor was it expected that it would do much better on Friday 'cause everyone was probably on a 4-day weekend and not likely to pass through GCS. So I expected Fay to come in late. She called around 11am to find out how business was (practically dead), if there were any people in the hall when I opened up (I counted three); so she ended up saying that she'd "hope to see me later." I interpreted that as her coming in around 2pm. Hopefully. I decided I'd take my lunch for an hour and get my hair trimmed around 3:30. So I made an appointment with the Fast Cuts near 1st avenue for that time.

Around 2:30, I started getting nervous. Fay still hadn't come in. By 3, I called and cancelled at the Fast Cuts because they said they accepted walk-ins and they closed at 7:30. So I decided that whenever Fay came in, I would ask her if I could leave early (especially considering how slow business was), like around 5 or 5:30, and then I'd go over and get my hair cut then.

The good part of it was that Fay came in at 4pm! I was so happy! She called around 3 to let me know that she had "completely forgotten about [me]." I was like, "Okay." Then she said, "No, but I really, completely forgot about you and your break." And I was like, "Okay." I didn't really care that she'd forgotten about me; in my mind it was a good trade-off. She gets to forget about me, I go hungry, but get to work 8 hours straight by myself without her more-than-annoying presence. I'd rather be hungry than have her there. In fact, at one point I was thumping on my stomach every few seconds to get it to rumble. ::snort:: Do you see how dead it was, not to mention how bored I was? ::sweatdrop::

Anyway, she came in just as I was calling Angelica to see if she wanted to meet me at 5 or 5:30 so that she could come with me to get my hair cut. It wasn't a huge cut, so I didn't exactly need her for moral support or anything like that (just a few inches off the bottom in order to make it straight and cut off the part that had been bleached and dyed last time). So it turned out that both Angelica and Liz met me between 5 and 5:30. We spent some time in the post office sending things (ebay auctions, mostly) and Angelica had stopped at our post office box on the way into the city, so I ended up with a lot of the things I'd been waiting for! Prince of Tennis episodes 13-16 and 17-20, Chobits episodes 1-4 and 5-8, Master of Mosquiton '99 TV episodes 12-14, Ayatsuri Sakon episodes 13-16, my BROM T-shirt, which has Soul Forge on it, and my white make-up for Kozi's outfit for Otakon (which is now only 18 days away)!

So there I was, lugging this heavy bag around with all this (good) crap in it, and we set off to find the Fast Cuts, which I'd never been to before, but my mom had. My mom told us it was located on 43rd between 1st and 2nd. So we went. No Fast Cuts. So, I called up and they said they were on 41st between 1st and 2nd. So we went. No Fast Cuts. If you go up 41st from 2nd Avenue, going toward 1st, you end up walking up a hill that ends at a dead-end cliff on Tudor City Place, not 1st Avenue. So I thought, maybe if we go back down and go around, down to 1st avenue, maybe it'll be underneath. But no, it's not. So we walked all the way around the block with no sign of the stupid place! It's now 6:30, we've been walking around a 2-block radius for 45 minutes. Gah! So Angelica calls the place back and they said they're at the end of 41st, turn right at the dead end (Tudor City Place). So we walk back up 41st, turn right at the dead end, and it's there, tucked all the way in the corner of another dead end on 40th Street and Tudor City Place!!!! That stupid receptionist doesn't know how to give directions at all! Even if it was closer to 41st (which it wasn't, it was closer to 40th), it still wouldn't be on 41st, it would be on Tudor City Place!

After Angelica started to get nasty at the receptionist, I sort of intervened with a suggestion of how to change her directions so that other people can understand them (thereby bringing Angelica back to her senses a bit) and getting the receptionist off the defensive. (I've had lots of practice doing this sort of fight-diffusing at home.) Of course, it's not as satisfying as just smacking the stupid bitch upside her idiotic-looking hair. But hey, sometimes you have to take what you can get. I sat down to have my hair cut by Carlos. I was silent in my annoyance over the stupid-bitch-receptionist and he didn't try to talk me out of it, although he did make a few nice comments about my hair - he asked if I had dyed it myself, that sort of thing, and he took great care in avoiding getting the comb caught in my earrings - which I thought was really very nice of him because some people are so oblivious to that sort of thing. ::cough:: Veronica, Angelica's hairdresser, ::cough cough:: who is kowai because she doesn't look at you, she stares over you as she talks through you. ::cough::

But Carlos did a very nice job (admittedly easy) and he was very nice about it, so I made sure to give him a nice tip, and paid the stupid-bitch-receptionist who should definitely not be working for a hair salon because her hair was just tacky, and I'm not saying that because she was a stupid bitch. Stupid bitches can have very nice hair - in fact, some people are stupid bitches because they have very nice hair. She was a stupid bitch because she was a stupid bitch and can't tell the difference between being on 41st and being on Tudor City Place, which is just amazing considering they're perpendicular to each other.

After Carlos cut my hair and dried it, we took the train over to the East Village so I could get some hair dye for myself. I ended up getting fake lashes for Kozi's outfit, two pairs of gloves, and bleach and dye for Liz, in addition to the hair dye (Special Effects' Hot Lava) for myself. $40 down the drain in three seconds. ::sigh::

I know I'm forgetting a few things, like how they had to "reset the signals" in the subway so we couldn't move for half-an-hour on the way to the village, and how before we went to find the hair salon, we stopped at the post office and Angelica tried to get cash back using her debit card, but she couldn't remember her PIN number until five minutes after she had given up and told them to charge it as a credit card.

And I just remembered I haven't gotten Kozi's baseball cap yet. ::cries:: Not to mention just writing out a check for $100 for 3-day registration for Anime Expo East.

But, getting back on track: After the village, we went over to Angelica's house so that I could type up something for Joe (her stepfather). We got there around 11:30pm and left around 1:15am. Joe drove all of us over to my house (the last bus is at 12:15am) and Angelica slept over. But we didn't go right to sleep when we got to my house (1:30am). Of course not. We bleached and dyed my hair… two strands in the front (from either side of my middle part), and a section from the underside of my hair. So that, from the back it looks like normal, but when I flip my hair over, it's all bright red. It's kawaii, I'm very happy with it. I'd been vaguely dissatisfied with it all weekend, but when I got to work today and looked in the bathroom mirror with better lighting, it looked much nicer. ^_~

So we finally finished my hair at 4:30am and went to sleep. Only to get up at 5:30 (I did, anyway) to put the towels from the washing machine into the dryer (the benefits of living in the basement: laundry is so much easier to do). Then I went back to sleep until 7:40, when the clock rang and Angelica had to get up to take a shower and get ready to get to work by 10am. We had to leave the house by 8:35 to get to the bus stop to make the 8:49 bus so that she'd have enough time, but my father was up and he offered to drive her to the subway, so we left at 8:45 and dropped her off at the subway at 9. Normally, she'd have plenty of time to get to GCS to open the store at 10, but there just happened to be a fire on the tracks - a fire truck was just pulling up as my father and I left to go back home. Later, around 9:30, Angelica called me and told me what had happened, and asked how else to get into Manhattan, I told her which bus to take, but my father then offered to drive her to GCS (he's so nice to my friends, I wonder why he can't be that nice to me…) so she'd be at work on time 'cause if she took the bus that I told her to, it'd be another hour or more before she'd get there - and it was already 10 to 10. So we ended up driving her. We also happened to be in the middle of a fight, but that was besides the point.

Later, we had a few more fights, came home and did our separate things… the usual. I ended up falling asleep in the living room with Liz. I had wanted to watch the new Prince of Tennis tapes I got, but she was one volume behind me. So I said, let's watch that tape together and then we can start on the new ones. But I fell asleep in the middle of the last episode, and I could not get up for the life of me. So Sunday morning, I woke up around 10, took a shower, got dressed and went online until 1 when I woke Liz up (she was still asleep on the couch) and we proceeded to watch the rest of the new Prince of Tennis tapes. Then we watched the Chobits tapes that I had received.

I wasn't sure whether I'd like Chobits -- CLAMP and I have a funny relationship. I like their more mature/angsty stuff (X), but some of their shoujo stuff scares me (Mahou Kishi Rayearth). But then again, I really enjoyed Angelic Layer, and that was definitely shoujo (but I really liked it for the cool silent Angel fights, not really for Misakichi - sometimes she was so sweet I had to gag). So, I wasn't sure about Chobits, especially because I knew next to nothing about it. But I have to say - I LOVED it! It's so cute and great and entertaining and funny and ecchi and sweet! And I'm really impressed that despite the fact that it's a shoujo anime, the main character is a guy! That's really rare! And I'm completely gaga over Chii - who is kinda baka in that way I don't like, but the fact that she is a Persocon and not a real person - makes it more palatable. Oh, and I died over Sumomo when I first saw her - she is sooooo adorable! The whole time I was watching, I kept thinking of ways to cosplay her, or make a plushie of Sumomo and be Chii and put the plushie on her shoulder and go around saying "pantsu, pantsu, pantsu." And Hideki - the main chara - is so cute; he's so hentai, but in that shy-guy sort of way that's just so sweet you almost can't resist jumping his bones! And as I got further and further into the 8 episodes that I have, I realized that this is not a kiddy anime. I mean, not that I'd prevent a kid from watching it, but it's not a Saturday morning cartoon or anything - some kids wouldn't even begin to get the hentai jokes. But I think it's great. I love hentai/ecchiness!

Kyaaaaaaaaaaaa!

Yes, I was completely genki/giddy while watching. o.O* How could I not be?

I want moooooooore. More Chobits. More Prince of Tennis. More Hikaru no Go. Waaaaaa!