Zannen!

I finally finished this week of last-minute presentation preparation and riding around on my bike running errands. Today, I had a group presentation to give, and somehow my group pulled it off in decent fashion. It was for my advanced listening class, and we had to give a presentation on a TV show, and my group gave it on the variety show "Minna no Mondai", which is a show with quiz questions having to do with daily life. My group was the largest - seven people - and consisted of me, a guy from malaysia, a guy from taiwan, and four girls from korea. The four girls from Korea drove the guys crazy - they were always too busy to meet, were incredibly bossy, and they didn't really listen to anything we said. Well, really just one control freak in particular. The other three just didn't seem to give a shit. So today we finally met up as a group and rushed to throw the things we'd all done separately together into a presentation. I had the idea of taking up the show's basic set-up - with a host and a team of guys and a team of girls - for our presentation, making us a tv show talking about a tv show. Oh, how very clever I am. Unfortunately, since we never rehearsed even one time, that didn't actually go too smoothly. We all had geinoujin (celebrity) characters to play, including Yon-sama, Kimura Takuya, BoA, Yada Akiko, Yuuka, and Hata Youku, a recent comedy celebrity who is famous for his act "guitar samurai" where he rails on all sorts of people while singing this one song. Since I know how to play his song on guitar, it was only natural that I would be him. While working on the presentation, I was frustrated with my group and had written all sorts of lyrics about them that were unpresentable in a classroom setting. But after we limped through our presentation (actually, my group really surprised me and came through pretty well considering we had no practice), the inevitable request to perform a song came. I kind of anticipated it, so I made up a bit during the presentation about how crappy our campus is and sang it. It was pretty weird and embarrassing doing a Japanese musical comedy bit during lecture, but everyone seemed to like it, and it happily did not insult the people on my team to their face in front of my entire class.