Hi.

Updates, updates!

1. I'm going to be in my third semester in September. Woot.
2. Officially a senior, an associate team leader for IMOTION and MIST, an SLC in MSS, and a mentor for OPK.
3. Got failing scores in Maths, Stats, and Intermediate Microeconomics.
4. GPA's above 3.00, below 3.50. Could be better, could be worse.
5. Got into AKB48, less so with KPop.
6. Still not over E.
7. Read some books, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars being one of them. Not a fan. Too cheesy for my taste.

Going to stop at seven because seven's the magic number. (seven horcruxes, kami-seven, seven days a week, etcetera). Instead, I suppose I'm going to write about useless shit — when have I not, really — in the following paragraphs. Struggles of a pitifully ordinary, slightly dumb seventeen-year-old, you can say. With a hint of fangirling. And perhaps some clever/witty comments slipped in here and there.

I decided to do this in English because honestly, I suck at this now. I forgot words and phrases and I can't seem to pronounce shit right. Meanwhile, my Indonesian hasn't improved as well. It's like I'm downgrading, language-wise, and it sucks balls. English is supposedly one of my strengths, you know? And for someone with a very short list of things she's good at (hint: less than three, close to zero), to be losing one's skill is extremely frustrating. I suspect this is because I've been spending less time reading — and no, marketing articles do not count because those are technical stuff, not literature — and thus the need to spew out pretty words just seem to decline. Plus, the professors' English blows. Like, please-hit-yourself-with-a-brick kind of blows.

In the fashion of a true erratic teenager, I shall jump to my discovery of sparkling, smiling Asian idols, because this blog's mine and I can easily not care about sequence and coherency and shit like that. So, Asian idols it is. Where to start— hmm? KPop, you say? (shit, this ain't some interactive fairy tale book crap, wtf am I doing tbh) All right, it's not like I have other shit to do. Let's do KPop first.

KPop is like the high school version of The Jonas Brothers. You get into them because everyone else does and it's inevitable, like trading ugly binder papers in elementary school and hanging sanitary liquids with pouches on your bags. "What's so good about them?" you ask yourself, and your friends cried hysterically, "You absolutely must see this and this and this video!!" So you did. And they were catchy and good looking. And then came the varieties. And they were funny. And adorable. And before you know it, you're trapped in the world of hip thrusts and tight pants and defined abs, and it's absolutely normal and okay. Everybody else lust for these pretty boys too and you have friends to squeal with and it's great, it really is. You spend hours and hours watching videos of them being gorgeous and cute and hilarious. Your life revolves around them. NEW SELCA OMG!!? 8327 hours till MV's up!! DEAR JAYSUS THAT WINKEU?/!!! It's undeniably fun for a while.

Until you realized they're slowly but surely worming their way into your heart and you start to treat them as more than just good looking Korean men. You suddenly think you know them, from the shows you watch and the concerts you see. And there's something personal when you watch them, an emotional attachment of some sort. And that's not good, is it? They're no more than products, marketed to be likeable for the young adult population so we'll give them money. Yet everyone still glorifies them, and uses extremely intimate words, "I care about them," etc. I mean, they're almost not real — at least, not in your world. It's stupid when it goes beyond idolizing, when you actually yearn to be close to them personally and develop a kind of "crush". Idols are there to be looked up to; they belong to everyone, after all, and having just a hint of affection and attachment to someone who doesn't know you exist is dangerous and hurtful, because you grow to expect things from them. Things that is likely to not come true. They're waving at you because it's their job. They gave you a back hug to please you. Artificial happiness. Not real. You don't know them, not really, their personas on TV may not even be the true them.

So I slowed things down a bit, before I became an idiot love-struck teenager obsessed with attractive, strapping Korean men.

And when you take a step back and not indulge yourself in the emotional department of KPop, withdrawing your feelings from the members of a certain group, it admittedly became boring. It's a cycle of comeback teaser -> comeback MV -> comeback performances -> TV appearances, and coming back again for their next comeback. No dokidoki dugeundugeun feeling of looking at your bias because he's not your crush anymore, just another handsome performer.

It's different for Jay Park, I guess, because I respect him and I'm fond of him as an idol (as it should be). I admire his courage to rise up from the gutter and do what he likes, with what little he has after the shit's he's been through. He doesn't whine about it, doesn't do excessive guigui, but is not quitting either. A "my pace" kind of guy. It's like, he doesn't try hard to impress and he doesn't give a fuck but cares about shit anyway. It's hard to explain, but I guess the best way to put it is that he's genuinely genuine — not a corporate product that's been designed a certain way, but just a guy trying to make a living by making music. Still an idol with somewhat mediocre talent, I know, but his genuity should count for something, right?

On to AKB48, because I fucking can.

AKB48 is my thing, okay. It's mine, because it's a niche product and I can literally count with one hand the number of people that knows their other songs other than Heavy Rotation. It's the kind of thing that you want to be popular because it's great and you want to have fangirling/boying friends, yet at the same time you want it to be exclusively, privately yours. Not like it has a danger of becoming popular in Indonesia (save from JKT48 wotas, and I don't count them zombies), as it's obvious the country's infected with KPop and AKB (and JPop in general) just have different concepts and sounds from their Korean counterpart.

I'll start with why AKB48 is mine, as in, why it's my thing and stuff:

• The costumes are mostly cute dresses/colorful uniforms, and I'm a sucker for those. This is a seventeen-year-old girl that still has really soft spots for Disney princesses and their wardrobe, mind you.
• Speaking of which, the whole thing reeks of musicals. They way they bounce on stage and sometimes have dialogues and how they need to act a certain way for a certain song (in love for Heart Gata Virus, lonely and solemnly wanting a hug for Dakishimeraretara, etc) is like a musical, and I absolutely love those kind of shit as well.
• The girls are not drop dead gorgeous!! I never liked perfectly pretty people (S-curve, slight frame, thin nose, etc), so the diversity of girls is a breath of fresh air for me.
• Their marketing tactics are brilliant. I feel like this is important because I'm studying economics in the direction of marketing and I can learn a thing or two from them?? 

I'll stop the list now because it's turning into a list of why I like AKB48, which would be somewhat off topic to the whole "mine" thing. Anyway.

I like AKB48. Judge me lol. I'm a teenage, (probably) straight girl that likes a bunch of girls in cat ears and tails and lingeries singing "I wantchu~ I needchu~ I lapyuu~" It's okay. I would probably judge me silently too, if someone I know likes the girl group that does something like Heavy Rotation.

The thing is, AKB48 goes beyond that 70mill+ viewed music video. *insert common man gasp here* 

"You mean they're not just wannabe porno stars servicing to their 40+ year old something fans??"

Nope, they're more than that, can you believe? And where'd you get that statistics of the 40+ year old men, anyway. You probably think their graduates end up being JAV stars, don't you?

"They're not JAV actresses??"

*sighs*

A brief background to AKB48: they're a theater-based group. That means these girls perform every fucking day in their theater in Akihabara for approximately two hours, in addition to promoting their singles, doing concerts, attending various events, being on TVs, etc. Thus the great number of girls, you see? They can't do all these shit without dying of exhaustion if there are only, oh, say, twenty of them. And the events I mentioned earlier involved, among others, a rock-paper-scissor tournament (Janken Tai), general election where fans vote for their favorite member (Senbatsu Sousenkyo), and handshake events, where fans get to meet and actually converse with the girls. These are done regularly. There are also Request Hour 100, where the girls perform the fans' top 100 songs (they have 500+ songs, btw), and Unit Matsuri, where they perform songs sung by seven or less people. 

I like AKB48 because it never gets boring (yet?); there's always something to look forward to. They release about five singles each year, and there are promotions of members and scandals and Janken and Sousenkyo and Request Hour and graduations and animes and mangas and that's not even counting the sister groups' activities. There are always surprises, too. And, unlike KPop, I don't have to worry about being emotionally invested to them. I mean, sure, I cried when I saw their documentary and shit, but I see them as idols, nothing more. I don't develop a crush on them or anything. I get to focus on their performances and TV shows, which is sweet. 

Right, that's about it, I guess. I'm tired of typing so bye. See you next year or sth. Probably with a different obsession by then. Lol.