Taking the Midnight Train

About Me

My name is Tara; more commonly known on the web as Da-manta-ray.

I just graduated from high school, and I am currently attending the University of Waterloo, situated in Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I am in the only Mathematics Faculty in North America (apparently) and am currently a computer science major and in the co-op system of study, meaning that I alternate periods of study with working.

As for hobbies, I enjoy playing my oboe, water polo, mathematics and logic problems, swimming, reading manga, watching anime, occasionally playing chess and working in scanlation groups. Of course, now that I am in university, I don’t have a lot of time for some of these things, and I will be trying other things, which I haven’t decided what it was going to be.

For those of you who followed the ochibichan link here, I am a proofreader for them, as well as Manga-Heaven. My obsession with manga even lead me to create a separate blog just for manga and other Japanese-related stuff.

I’m a huge music freak and I was involved in my high school’s senior jazz band, wind ensemble and symphonic band, as well as some out of school things such as piano (taking my ARCT), orchestra, cadet marching band and solo thingies and festivals and such. If people need an oboe player, I’ve done some volunteer stuff such as playing in a chamber orchestra backing up singers. If you ignored the first two paragraphs, I guess you would probably be surprised about me being a Computer Science major, and not a Music major, since I’ve done a lot more there than in computer science. But we’ll ignore that for now. Currently, I’m in the UWaterloo orchestra.

I really like math contests too. I did tons of them in high school, and did pretty well in some of them, but I doubt I’ll be doing any more, seeing as I’m not a Pure Math major or anything like that. But maybe I might. Doubt I’d do too good in those though.

I’m also a big fan of planes. I’m actually a qualified Glider pilot and Power pilot, which only happened because I was in air cadets, not because I’m some rich person who can actually afford flying lessons. I retired from air cadets after graduating high school so I could focus on my studies instead of polishing boots and ironing a uniform. I left with the rank of Flight Sergeant and position of Drum Major, which I didn’t do very well in, since I was counting on the other guy who was the drum major for the half of the year to stay, which he didn’t. Which was very unfortunate. Other things I did in cadets was band camp (I have my level 5 on both the oboe and saxophone), ground school and instructing in my last year to a bunch of little monsters who were forced to go to cadets by their parents. Not to say that there wasn’t any good cadets.

I used to beta-read fanfiction, but now they made a whole system about beta-readers (it’s an official user group now) and now I don’t do anything with fanfiction anymore.