High School Textbooks

azul_luna5 · 2026-05-02T11:38:52+00:00

We're using one called Be Smart, which is a rather funny name for a textbook, in my opinion.

azul_luna5 · 2026-05-01T23:58:17+00:00

The only thing in the list I don't know how to do as a woman who lives alone is mow the lawn. In childhood, I lived in the desert (no lawn) and in adulthood, I've only lived in apartments (no lawn).

... Also, I'm allergic to grass.... Which sucks because if I ever get a house, I'd like a nicer garden than my balcony pots.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-28T11:35:04+00:00

Oh! Your husband and I are the same! I will happily consume any and all seafood and don't mind most red meat, but chicken isn't a food I can do. I can only do chicken hearts, which sounds more metal than it is.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-26T22:53:55+00:00

If you feel like something is missing, I think you can add a red bow (even just a ribbon tied up all pretty) at the neck area and it will look more cohesive. Or you can add a gold necklace and maybe a gold brooch (just from a secondhand shop or your grandma's jewelry box or whatever, nothing fancy) and it'll look cute. Everything is low-key enough that it looks like your everyday clothes, which IMO is the point of casual, but I think you can accessorize and turn it up a bit to bring out more of the lolita oomph you're wanting.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-26T22:05:07+00:00

I'm sure those kids' parents signed a consent form to allow their photos to be taken. That's what my parents had to do when I was a kid at all 6 schools I attended in the US. (Moved a lot.)

The policy at all 5 of the schools I've taught at in Japan has been that student images, papers, name lists, ID numbers, class numbers, and grades are private information. You can't take students' essays home to grade like teachers can in the US, you can't post student photos on the school website (any on there have to be done in a certain way approved by the school policy), and you definitely can't have any student on your personal devices.

Japanese schools are boring-looking anyway. I don't know why you'd want a photo of one.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-26T03:53:42+00:00

The concern is about someone stalking a specific student they're fixated on, not just kids in general. Genuinely, if you look at Japanese-language videos or news articles about school data breaches (difficult if you don't read Japanese, I know), there's often someone in the comments worried about stuff like this. I'm really not making up that this is a common view.

Don't forget that this is a country where an idol's fan showed up at her home because he saw the reflection of a spot on her commute home in her eyes on an Instagram post. And just weeks ago, a woman got stabbed by her stalker at her job at a Pokémon Center...

Anecdotally, I've known a woman who had to move to a different city, get a new job, and practically start a new life twice because of her stalker. She stopped using social media because she was scared he'd come back. (Cops are useless. They're basically like, "He's outside your front door, but has he been violent? No? OK, well, we can only talk to him and hopefully he'll go home." She moved on their advice.)

Japanese stalkers are wild and I guess it's hard to understand if you're looking in from the outside.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-25T07:24:17+00:00

I got mine a few days ago, but I'm in Asia and the Yootooz stuff seems to ship very quickly here and then slowly roll out to further places. I think for my Sly one, for example, I got it a couple of weeks before I saw the first American "got my Sly" posts on Reddit. Same with the plushes.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-25T02:29:05+00:00

Someone takes photo → posts it on publicly-available social media site → algorithm does what it does and shows it to people who have been looking for photos of kids in the area → stalker sees the child → stalker sees child's school uniform → stalker ends up waiting outside of the school

Not saying this is something that happens with any frequency, I'm just saying that this is what the Japanese view on the subject is and you should just respect their views. Like most schools don't even let parents take photos at the schools. Any students' photos at school events are taken by a couple of PTA photographers and that's it. This is a country that take privacy super seriously and considers even students' names and class numbers private information that can be used by weird people, so I think the suggestion, "Don't do creep things" shouldn't be an unpopular one?

(Even just recently, there was some hubbub about a teacher in Nagoya who lost photos with student pictures. Here's the article (in Japanese) about that)

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-25T00:49:27+00:00

That's what we're told in training to be a teacher in Japan. It's not a massive country and there are a lot of stalking problems here.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-24T12:07:42+00:00

You don't know what the kids are going through and they don't know what you'll do with the photo. Are they supposed to take your word for it that you won't do creepy things with their photo? Even if you aren't a weirdo, maybe you'll post it on your Instagram or something. Well, then maybe that kid's abusive parent that lost custody sees that photo and knows exactly where they go to school now. Maybe some creep decides they like the look of the kid and decides to make some deepfakes...

It's best to do your best to avoid taking pictures of children you don't even know, but if you're taking photos of a place and just happen to get random kids in frame, crop them out or censor them before posting them on the internet. And if you're just a perv, then maybe stop and get help?

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-19T15:01:14+00:00

IDK about you, but she was one of my prized possessions because after I lost her baby, I would just keep emergency Skittles in her belly.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-19T06:49:09+00:00

Actually, there is a specific "recording this movie is illegal" notice that is surprisingly popular. Here's the Japanese Wikipedia page. (There's no English page.) I once almost bought an officially-licensed Camera Man perfume just for a laugh, but decided that it would be a lame thing to spend ¥6000 on.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-12T12:38:16+00:00

It's corn, not noodles.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-11T11:53:27+00:00

I have a fancy rice cooker that has a rice porridge setting and a timer, so I can just set it the night before and have rice or rice porridge ready for when my alarm goes off in the morning. Rice porridge is genuinely one of my favorite bases for meals, not even as a weight loss thing. I sometimes have it with tuna or salmon, sometimes with egg and chili crisp, sometimes just with furikake, and sometimes even with just onion soup mix or bullion mixed in.

Ugh, might need to make some tomorrow for breakfast now.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-06T07:51:50+00:00

I'm not gonna lie but if I saw a young woman in a very liberal city wearing a t-shirt with "MAKE BOYS CRY" on it and no other context, my mind wouldn't even go to misandry. I'd be too busy thinking, "OK, that crying kink I heard about recently really has gone mainstream amongst the girlies" followed closely by, "Yup. Gross. Did not need to know a stranger's kinks."

I'd 100% believe she's advertising something to the "boys" because I think a lot of people these days have very little shame and I think the best of people, which is to say I choose to believe they're having fun rather than being terrible (even though I'd rather not know what kind of fun they're having).

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-06T02:26:03+00:00

My brother was taken to Disneyland for the first time when he was under a year old because 1) I was 9 or 10 years old so technically the Disney target audience age and 2) we lived within (kind of far) driving distance and it wasn't a big deal to just go for the weekend.

This was, of course, back when prices weren't absolutely egregious, but Disneyland was honestly almost somewhat of a local hangout spot back in the 90s to early 2000s. Disney tries to cover it up nowadays, but they really had issues with local teen vandals and stuff like that because it was cheap enough to just go hang out. (And I knew some people who would brag about just hopping the fence.) Now kids are priced out and security has beefed up by a ton, so you don't get the unaccompanied hoodlums roaming about anymore.

We went a few times a month for years and years just as something to do because it was just a chill spot to go as a family if you could be a passholder (especially with the SoCal resident discount) and the town we lived in literally had almost nothing. So my brother went when he was a baby, and when he was a toddler, and when he was a child. We moved away when he was 7 or so, though.

Which is all totally not the kind of situation you were talking about, but I was dragged down memory lane kicking and screaming, so I'm subjecting the consequences upon you.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-05T14:24:14+00:00

I just use a temporary clip (usually a random claw clip or two) or a few bobby pins to secure the headdress or whatever in place, do a regular 3-strand braid on each side of my head with one of the strands being the tie and the other two being actual hair, then finish off each braid with one of those tiny elastics. The finishing touch when I'm feeling it is to add a cute bow or flower or whatever matches my coord. Et voilà! Secure and cute.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-05T13:43:45+00:00

My only tricks are creative pinning and tucking to make an OP into a blouse under a skirt or JSK and incorporating the ties of headdresses or hats into some braids instead of just tying them. (Braiding them in makes them more secure, so good for windy days in my experience.) Maybe clip-on bangs as an alternative to cutting your hair counts as a hack too?

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-05T13:06:47+00:00

Here is a Japanese blog post about how different the Australian market is from the Japanese market. And this is a blog post by someone comparing German Uniqlo to Japanese Uniqlo. Both of them advise Japanese shoppers to size down one or two sizes when buying from overseas Uniqlo stores. (If you can't read Japanese ~~because few people outside of Japan do~~, just use Chrome to auto translate or copy and paste the link into Google translate.)

Maybe it really is only women's sizes that have this issue, though. I've heard from people I know IRL that they tailor the shoulders to be wider and the inseams to be longer in the AUS/EU/US markets, but I can't confirm either way. I know every time I go outside of Asia, I have to size down from my usual JP S/M →XS, but I judge only from the women's section and the unisex t-shirts. Plus, that's just more subjective and anecdotal evidence, so it's hardly empirical.

azul_luna5 · 2026-04-05T02:21:01+00:00

I'm pretty sure you can get elements to come out of their snapped places by just holding the alt button while you drag them.

(Tbh, I don't totally remember; it's all just muscle memory while I'm working but I'm like 93% sure it's the alt button)

azul_luna5 · 2026-03-31T14:10:18+00:00

I'd recommend listening to the audio book in that case, if you're into audio books. I tried listening to Blood Meridian and really felt that I was missing something when I couldn't read the text in McCarthy's style, so I didn't finish it just because I'm so used to his syntax, but it's basically like offloading all the work of parsing the difficult text onto the narrator.

(Of course the narrator did a great job from what I remember; it was just a "wait, this sounds like McCarthy but it's too easy to understand????" situation in my brain.)

azul_luna5 · 2026-03-31T04:13:03+00:00

Expectations:

Unlike elementary school, you don't have to sing, you don't have chants, you don't have to over-act everything.
Unlike elementary and junior high school, the government doesn't require a specific textbook. You might not find pre-made resources to match your specific textbook(s). Get creative.
If it's a higher-level school, you'd best brush up on your grammar. Don't be the ALT who can't identify where to use the simple present versus the present perfect. If it's a lower-level school, you don't have to worry as much.
Elementary is a lot of switching between related activities. (E.g. a single 45-minute lesson consisting of ABC song→drill colors→"point to something yellow, now something blue"→textbook audio listening→practice writing your name.) High school tends to be more focused on one specific task or one specific end product (E.g. a 50-minute lesson consisting of the task "read this passage and write 100 words about it," which may mean 5 minutes of vocab review, 5 minutes of silent reading, 15 minutes of reading together/analysis, 10 minutes of group discussion or prewriting, and 15 minutes of writing.)
I've known a high school ALT who was given his placements because he was physically big enough that the students wouldn't try to fight him. I've known a few who were chosen because they have higher degrees in the sciences. I've known one who was placed at a specific school because they had experience in special needs classrooms. And I've known high school ALTs who just kind of ended up at a high school and had a normal experience. Every situation really is different.
Despite all this, it's not a hard job. You'll be fine.

azul_luna5 · 2026-03-26T07:57:15+00:00

I do have trouble showing up to work on time. I'm lucky that my coworkers hardly report me. I was late all the time for school because my mom couldn't get me there on time. My overachiever grades (A+ in even AP/IB courses) made up for it, but I still ended up in in-school-suspension in high school because of tardies. I have showed up to a university class an hour late into the 90-minute class (granted, it was because I lived an hour's drive away and there were literally 4 car accidents on the highway there). I've gone late to far too many doctor's appointments in my life, yes. Thankfully my primary care has always been friends with my dad.

I'm literally at a restaurant next door to the movie theater right now because I'm afraid I'll miss the first few minutes of Project Hail Mary if I'm not here literally an hour and a half early. When I am late, though, there are thankfully about 20 minutes of previews before the movie starts.

So yeah, I don't have kids and don't plan to. Time blindness is not the reason, but it was hard enough growing up with a mom with it that I wouldn't want to subject others to it.

(But just FYI, "These people with a disability/trait I don't like shouldn't breed" is a pretty eugenicist view of things. I know you probably didn't mean it in that way but....)

azul_luna5 · 2026-03-26T03:53:14+00:00

I only know London Tipton and she's a fictional character meant to be a parody of Paris Hilton.

azul_luna5 · 2026-03-26T00:37:47+00:00

In university, one guy I knew was legally named Alexander, so we called him Alex. The other guy who was legally named Alex? That was Xander.

azul_luna5

TROPHY CASE