The Ikebukuro West Gate Park / ???????????? is an older drama (year 2000) starred by Tokio’s Nagase Tomoya / ???? and the current super popular idol Yamashita Tomohisa / ????. By the way Tomohisa (aka YamaP among his fans) looks SO young in this drama, I think he was like 15 years old or something around that time. When I was first watching the drama I was thinking like “oh that guy looks so familiar isn’t he YamaP?!” and later on when the credits scrolled around I figured out it was him…lol. I watched a couple of his recent dramas like Kurosagi and Nobuta wo Produce, he looked way more mature (he’s around 22 now I think), not a bad actor at all.

Enough talks. Now about the drama. It’s GOOD! The first couple episode is a little..boring ? Since they’re still trying to introduce the characters and setup the storyline. It gets really exciting and suspending starting around episode 4 when they starting to see hints and evidence of the strange murder that’s been happening around Ikebukuro. The story is about a group of youngsters (lead by Tomoya) whose job is to “protect” the Ikebukuro area from the harms. The head of a group of young gangsters named themselves “G-BOYS” likes Tomoya a lot since they have the same interests in protecting the area. In other people’s eyes, these youngsters are just a bunch of of jerks that screws around the area and cause problems. The story mainly portraits the lives of these young people, how they carry out tasks for their leaders, how they “protect” the area by fighting with some groups of other gangs…etc. It also depicts the lives of the young schoolgirl prostitutes that does Enjo Kousei (????) meaning “dating with compensation” in Japan.

Right from the beginning of the story, strange murders keep on happening, and the targets are always on these young prostitutes. Tomoya and his friends decides to start an investigation on this matter after his girlfriend got killed in the incident. There are lots of suspenses going on during the development of the story, and it’s also funny to see how the G-BOYS carry out their tasks and how loyal they are to their leader that they would basically do anything that they were told to. The leader of the G-BOYS (forgot his name) was really cool looking too and has a weird attitude and he speaks in a weird way, really hilarious! …and he has a really bitchy girlfriend which just adds more fun to his role.. anyway all in all it’s a wonderful 11-episode drama that really shows you the innocence and ignorance of young people in Japan in their raw forms, highly recommended!

Was wandering around Sears this afternoon, and came cross this $9.99 “mini digital camera”. I bought it without hesitation since my Blackberry phone (got it free from work) doesn’t have a built-in camera (yea I know even the crappiest phone has built-in camera these days ) and I usually don’t carry my Canon G9 camera around me. Turned out to be a not-too-bad camera consider its low price tag, and it’s really “mini”…lol. Comes with USB cable, an AAA battery, CDs, and instructions. It has 16MB of memory which holds 20 pics in the highest resolution mode, and 2xx pictures in the lowest res settings. I think it’s a 0.3 megapixel…lol…but I don’t care as long as it takes *some* sort of picture XD

As some of you might already know that I worked all day on the Valentine’s, till 3am, while many of you were having fancy dinner and enjoying a great night with your partner. Then of course, worked all day on the 15th. I’m now dead tired, and deeply depressed on everything. Stress from work, from personal, relationship with friends… everything is causing me headache… There are a couple friends that have been constantly supporting / talking to me which I’m really thankful to. These couple weeks have been very hard and painstaking. I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to keep myself awake and stay normal….

So, what do I do now to keep myself awake? Well, I’ve been playing piano, on some really cool song that I discovered lately. Also have been playing some video games like Myst - End of Ages, which brings me temporarily out of this world into this imaginative piece of land… Thanks Ubisoft for making such an awesome game…

Went to Henderson Place at Coquitlam today to watch Locus’s band show… and I missed the show! Got there half an hour late since my common sense told me that bandshow *always* starts an hour (or more) late.. turned out that they started right on time and when I got there they JUST finished their performance! *cries* Feeling really bad that I missed the show, it’s all my fault I guess Anyway I watched Aura’s show that followed. It wasn’t too bad, and I also found that their bassist Dorian’s actually my friend in high school~~! What a surprise…

Anyway it was a fun trip driving to Coquitlam as I haven’t been there for quite a while…..didn’t really go there since graduating from Simon Fraser (the U that I went to that is pretty close to Coquitlam) Drove passed New Westminster’s upper part along the way, looking at all those old old old buildings at the oldest part of Vancouver… not a bad drive at all.

Kelvin (one of my old high school friends) was here sleeping over at my place last night. He was coming from Hong Kong, stopping by Vancouver, then head to Calgary for some businesses deals. I got off work earlier so I could meet him up and show him around. I brought him to Aberdeen Centre, and a couple other Asian malls. I was going to eat at a bubble tea place with him but it was so packed with teenagers so we didn’t bother and ended up driving all the way to downtown. It was quite cold at night but since we had to search for food we walked alone Robson street from head to toe. We ended up settle down at Earls, due to the farily attractive menu and relatively low price…lol.. The place was nice, waitresses are…hot…lol. I think we ordered a pizza, a pasta, and some “dried cripy ribs”. The food was awesome, very tasty actually.

Played some darts at home with my dart board that was otherwise covered in dirt. It was quite fun, as Kelvin apparently knows it better than I do. We had some chats, played some fighting games on the PS2 and went to bed…seperately. I guess having some guest over kinda lightenS up the otherwise dead atmosphere in my house. Not that I hate living alone but it’s indeed kind of cool to be able to interact with someone during the course of the day. @_@