The Mandarin and the Fury

ARRRRRGH. I have a cold. Not my first Australian cold; when I first arrived here I was down with a vicious cold for about a week, and this feels a lot less worse than that. But the bitch of this cold is that it's accompanied by dizziness - not bad enough that I'm actively falling down, but bad enough that I know it'd be really, really stupid to go out for a run, and that is pissing me off no end. Today will be the third without a run. It is making me sick with fury. Like, not-being-able-to-have-a-cigarette-when-you-want-one fury. My brain is rationalizing the fury by saying things like "this is undoing all the great progress you've made" or "you've noticed how fucking hot your body's getting and if you stop running it will go soft again!" but actually this is a dull roar of physical fury from every bit of me that it doesn't get to go for a fucking run.

Friends who run have spent the last month or so welcoming me to the addiction - I'd thought they were being facetious.

Oh well. There's actually one part of my physical being that isn't anxious to go for a run, a patch of skin on my ankle that's been chafed by both my running shoes and my sandals over the last month or so, which is now busily healing. So I guess it's not all bad. I just better get better fast.

Probably what's making it a little more frustrating is that I'm not all that sick. Last night, for example, I had no troubles dragging myself to my Mandarin class, where we learned numbers and how to use them. Holy fuck, is that shit hard. I really need to go spend, like, two years in China to properly contextualize all of this information before I have a damn idea what anybody's saying about anything, I think. It's interesting though. Last night I caught myself staring at the whiteboard with the sort of slack-jawed fascination I usually reserve for spectating male full frontal nudity. Our teachers are just raw kids, university students here, who have never taught before, but since I'm starting from zero and since they're patient it's working for me well enough.

But for a clue of what I'm looking at, which really shits on all the European languages I've had any involvement with in terms of how fucking different the sounds are, check out this pinyin table - try to tell me how the fuck you make the final sound on the second table - who know 'er' could be that difficult?