This past Christmas was rather fucked up, as I've briefly alluded to, but ultimately not in a bad way. At the time it was bad. I was so homesick and uncomfortable with all the fucking carols about sleigh bells and shit when it was 40 degrees outside that I sat down in front of a box of chocolates and ate as many as I could. Which was only, interestingly, eight. A couple of years ago I could have murdered the whole box, no problem. I suspect my stomach is shrinking.
The chocolates helped, and then I basically threw myself into helping prepare for the big Christmas dinner - an absolutely inappropriate photo-replica of a northern European Christmas dinner, but oh well - and I realized, as I fussed over the angle of the napkins and the baby-ass smoothness of the tablecloth, that this might be why anal-retentive people are as they are. Distracting themselves from their misery by fussing over the sort of things that to my normal, non-miserable anal-expulsive self seem like absolute trivialities. Because it worked.
It's never an easy thing to be away from my family at Christmas, but this year was particularly difficult because summer-Christmas was no longer a novelty to me, and because the psychological distance between Australia and all my people besides the F-word overwhelms me sometimes, and because the F-word had some things out with some members of his family, members who are deeply unpleasant, and it got loud and ugly. That was obviously not a laugh riot at the time, and not conducive to me missing my own lovely family any less. But wow. It seems to have done him so much good. I guess he has a new sense of agency in his own life, by forcing a confrontation that could have never happened if he had just let things take their course. That's really interesting. And it's why, ultimately, Christmas wasn't fucked up in a bad way.
Aaaaaand my parents reacted to me feeling so homesick by telling me that they'll come meet me in Europe in June when I make a "business trip" back there after my business trip to Shanghai. Shanghai. Fuck, I don't know what the matter is with me sometimes. I'm struggling so much with Chinese but as we're planning on getting in the family way before long, I've also realized around the end of my awful, awful Chinese course is my last chance to comfortably go spend time there to consolidate the language a bit. So I've volunteered to spend a month at the Shanghai office training some new staff and being forced to speak that cunt of a language.
Sometimes my work ethic freaks me out. It's like my conscious self is lazy, laid-back Dread Pirate, who wants nothing more than a good book, a nice run, a beer on a hot day, good chats with friends, lots of fucking, and all those good things, and then my shadow is this middle-class British banker type who always wants things onwards and upwards, and grandiose exertions of her own agency no matter how fucking annoying that particular direction may be.
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lunedì, gennaio 09, 2012
giovedì, gennaio 05, 2012
What being stupid feels like
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lunedì, novembre 14, 2011
Frustration: geopolitical and self-imposed
I'm starting to learn the perils and annoyances of being in a small town
with a large circle of acquaintance. There are all sorts of
expectations of side-taking and an obligation to be pretty nice most
of the time, and it's really getting on my wick. I'm starting to suspect the city is the natural habitat of a misanthrope like me, the only place to find
something like solitude, and I recall now the last time I tried to live
in a small town, I ended up sneaking off to Paris in the middle of the
night.
In particular, but not in isolation, the situation with Squidsy and his wife has been getting me down. They've both done unforgivable things to each other. The thing is, Squidsy's wife isn't talking about it all the damn time. . . I'd rather not get into the specifics of other people's lives, but suffice it to say he's done things that have probably hurt her comparably to her fucking off to Canada with their child. Going by an objective analysis, they're both fuckups. And if we lived in a big city, I could take my distance from both of them. Not here though. I guess it's a signal and unignorable cautionary tale for the F-word and I - that we have to make sure we can always believe whatever each other says. If we can do that, I think we can weather a lot, or at least not transmogrify into total shitheads.
In other news, I have my Mandarin exam in less than a week, and two visitors in that time, and I don't feel fucking ready. At all. Fuck. Fuck. Why I am I learning such a fucking hard language? Why not Spanish? I practically already speak Spanish. Or fucking German? Something fucking Indo-European, for fuck's sake? Why am I such a fucking retard? Fuck.
In particular, but not in isolation, the situation with Squidsy and his wife has been getting me down. They've both done unforgivable things to each other. The thing is, Squidsy's wife isn't talking about it all the damn time. . . I'd rather not get into the specifics of other people's lives, but suffice it to say he's done things that have probably hurt her comparably to her fucking off to Canada with their child. Going by an objective analysis, they're both fuckups. And if we lived in a big city, I could take my distance from both of them. Not here though. I guess it's a signal and unignorable cautionary tale for the F-word and I - that we have to make sure we can always believe whatever each other says. If we can do that, I think we can weather a lot, or at least not transmogrify into total shitheads.
In other news, I have my Mandarin exam in less than a week, and two visitors in that time, and I don't feel fucking ready. At all. Fuck. Fuck. Why I am I learning such a fucking hard language? Why not Spanish? I practically already speak Spanish. Or fucking German? Something fucking Indo-European, for fuck's sake? Why am I such a fucking retard? Fuck.
mercoledì, ottobre 26, 2011
Free university
I'm back to enjoying Chinese instead of thinking that learning it is a horrible untenable burden I'm a fool to subject myself to, free university courses or not. In a complete lack of coincidence, it seems I enjoy it more when I have more time to focus on it and actually prepare for class instead of completely ballsing up every time the professor asks me something (which is a lot because there's only two people actually showing up these days) and, oh yeah, when I actually show up for class myself (which I haven't done in weeks due to travel, illness, time zone mix-ups, etc.).
A week ago I'd been toying with the idea of dropping out after this course but now I think I'll persist. I'm finding being back in L--- trying but one thing about this place is there's fuck all to do, which gives me time to run and work out and get back a tummy I haven't had since I was smoking a pack a day in the skinny part of Europe, and it also gives me time to learn Chinese, and once I breed I probably won't have time for either of those things no matter how culturally, erm, calm, I'm finding this place, so carpe diem, right?
Also, I guess I'm having a moment of appreciation for getting free university again. My parents paid for my undergrad. I just worked during the summers to pay off accommodation and stuff like that, but the key issue was that I didn't leave it with any debt and I didn't have to hold down a job and study at the same time, at least not extendedly - I switched majors and did a couple of courses in Toronto during my first summer while I was working, but I was 19 then and could do anything, except talk to boys. And then I did my masters in France, where the tuition was just a couple hundred dollars, and since it was a thesis masters there wasn't a shitload of classes and I managed to work at the same time with only a minor mental crisis or two. Working and writing the thesis at the same time - well, that really sucked.
But it gave me a bit of understanding of how unreasonable or evil the demands on Anglo-land students are now (and would have been in Canada back in the 90's too, including for me if I hadn't had supportive middle-class parents, even though tuition was thousands of dollars cheaper then). Them leaving university with so much fucking debt, with years or decades of debt slavery ahead of them without even a paid-for house to show for it at the end of it, and being told by wankers "well, just hold down a job while you study", as if that was such a fucking simple proposition, and as if your average undergrad student could get a job that would pay even a fraction of its tuition after covering books and the other necessities of life that we all have to pay for once we don't live with our parents anymore. I mean, if they could make that much money, half of them probably wouldn't be going to university in the first place.
And the other fucking germ of genius I've heard spreading around is to study where you grew up - assumedly continuing to live with your parents - which is a bit of a kick in the arse for your parents, I suppose, and also suggests a misunderstanding of what university is about. I studied modern languages, general humanities, and international relations. Those are three things I couldn't have studied at my local university. Medical schools? Legal departments? Engineering? Teacher's college? I suppose all those people should just stay home in their shitty little podunk towns and study American Lit or forestry instead? Fucking hell, man.Why not just bring back feudalism while you're at it so we all know where we stand?
There's no misunderstanding of anything, though, of course. The transformation of aspirational students into fit young wage slaves is almost certainly a matter of policy. I've been spending a fair amount of time mulling over wage slavery, having signed up for six or seven years of wage slavery myself by buying this house, and putting myself into the situation where it'll be a minor disaster if I lose my job in the next three and a half years. Wage slavery seems to be a necessary condition for economic life as it's understood in Anglo-land, including Australia (noting, though, that this is a place where conditions for citizens going to university are actually pretty great; they haven't quite rolled back all of Gough Whitlam's good work here yet); it keeps salaries down for long hours without having to go to the political trouble of letting too many immigrants in.
It makes me quite bitter, you know. Now that there are all these great ways to grow food and make stuff, in the developed world - hell, in the whole world - we've never been so well equipped to be idle and to be able to pass most our time doing nice things, like learning things or making things or spending time with our families. And instead we live in a society where people work 40 hour weeks as a matter of course, and don't even know what they'd do with themselves if they were idle, and spend their free time watching reality television and fretting about angry young people having peaceful demonstrations about corporate greed and how their student loans are fucking up their lives forever, and other people live with famine and malnutrition.
Sigh.
Anyways, it's making me appreciate someone else (work) paying for my Chinese courses, which aren't expensive, this being Australia and students not being fucked up the ass here yet, but are still more expensive than I'd like to pay for myself. That was my point, several paragraphs ago.
A week ago I'd been toying with the idea of dropping out after this course but now I think I'll persist. I'm finding being back in L--- trying but one thing about this place is there's fuck all to do, which gives me time to run and work out and get back a tummy I haven't had since I was smoking a pack a day in the skinny part of Europe, and it also gives me time to learn Chinese, and once I breed I probably won't have time for either of those things no matter how culturally, erm, calm, I'm finding this place, so carpe diem, right?
Also, I guess I'm having a moment of appreciation for getting free university again. My parents paid for my undergrad. I just worked during the summers to pay off accommodation and stuff like that, but the key issue was that I didn't leave it with any debt and I didn't have to hold down a job and study at the same time, at least not extendedly - I switched majors and did a couple of courses in Toronto during my first summer while I was working, but I was 19 then and could do anything, except talk to boys. And then I did my masters in France, where the tuition was just a couple hundred dollars, and since it was a thesis masters there wasn't a shitload of classes and I managed to work at the same time with only a minor mental crisis or two. Working and writing the thesis at the same time - well, that really sucked.
But it gave me a bit of understanding of how unreasonable or evil the demands on Anglo-land students are now (and would have been in Canada back in the 90's too, including for me if I hadn't had supportive middle-class parents, even though tuition was thousands of dollars cheaper then). Them leaving university with so much fucking debt, with years or decades of debt slavery ahead of them without even a paid-for house to show for it at the end of it, and being told by wankers "well, just hold down a job while you study", as if that was such a fucking simple proposition, and as if your average undergrad student could get a job that would pay even a fraction of its tuition after covering books and the other necessities of life that we all have to pay for once we don't live with our parents anymore. I mean, if they could make that much money, half of them probably wouldn't be going to university in the first place.
And the other fucking germ of genius I've heard spreading around is to study where you grew up - assumedly continuing to live with your parents - which is a bit of a kick in the arse for your parents, I suppose, and also suggests a misunderstanding of what university is about. I studied modern languages, general humanities, and international relations. Those are three things I couldn't have studied at my local university. Medical schools? Legal departments? Engineering? Teacher's college? I suppose all those people should just stay home in their shitty little podunk towns and study American Lit or forestry instead? Fucking hell, man.Why not just bring back feudalism while you're at it so we all know where we stand?
There's no misunderstanding of anything, though, of course. The transformation of aspirational students into fit young wage slaves is almost certainly a matter of policy. I've been spending a fair amount of time mulling over wage slavery, having signed up for six or seven years of wage slavery myself by buying this house, and putting myself into the situation where it'll be a minor disaster if I lose my job in the next three and a half years. Wage slavery seems to be a necessary condition for economic life as it's understood in Anglo-land, including Australia (noting, though, that this is a place where conditions for citizens going to university are actually pretty great; they haven't quite rolled back all of Gough Whitlam's good work here yet); it keeps salaries down for long hours without having to go to the political trouble of letting too many immigrants in.
It makes me quite bitter, you know. Now that there are all these great ways to grow food and make stuff, in the developed world - hell, in the whole world - we've never been so well equipped to be idle and to be able to pass most our time doing nice things, like learning things or making things or spending time with our families. And instead we live in a society where people work 40 hour weeks as a matter of course, and don't even know what they'd do with themselves if they were idle, and spend their free time watching reality television and fretting about angry young people having peaceful demonstrations about corporate greed and how their student loans are fucking up their lives forever, and other people live with famine and malnutrition.
Sigh.
Anyways, it's making me appreciate someone else (work) paying for my Chinese courses, which aren't expensive, this being Australia and students not being fucked up the ass here yet, but are still more expensive than I'd like to pay for myself. That was my point, several paragraphs ago.
giovedì, ottobre 13, 2011
Not the good kind of chesty
New Jane Eyre? Ugh. It was nice to look at. I was with it all the way up until the end, actually; I mean, it was beautifully shot and sort of spooky enough that I could just ignore my fangirl reactionaryism any time they changed or skipped a line (to be fair it was one of the better "altered" scripts I've heard); it was a good and consistent vision of the book. Rochester being stripped of all his silliness wasn't the way I would have done it, but it did allow for things to be paced reasonably well, since his silliness takes up an awful lot of time.
But sheeeit. I know Michael Fassbender is really nice to look at himself, but giving him unseeing eyes and a beard is really not the same as chopping off one of his hands and cutting up that pretty face of his. What a bloody cop-out. Oh well. The film wasn't a waste of time and that's more than I can say for most such films. I'm going to try to sit through the BBC miniseries now, since I have a nasty flu and am not capable of much more than passive observation, which is making me feel really great about the Chinese test I'm gonna flunk tomorrow.
I usually deal with L--- pretty well but right now I'm bored enough to remember what it was like to be depressive. Since I'm running a temperature and have a nasty, chesty cough, there's a lot of things I just can't do - concentrate and run are two of them - and without them, there's fuck all to do in this shithole, since the F-word has taken the car to go working at some local markets, which cuts out the possibiities of driving somewhere, or having a nice mid-afternoon fuck.
It's times like this that I badly miss living in cities or other places you can actually enjoy having a little walk outside. And I don't think it's until today I've grasped the irony of that statement. But in small-town Australia, everything is far apart, and even if it wasn't, who gives a shit? It's all small-town shit, and ugly to boot. Usually I can keep busy with Chinese or exhaust myself with a run but at the moment neither's possible. I really have to give some serious consideration to how I'm gonna deal with being a heavily pregnant woman and a mother since the hormones, extra weight and exhaustion are probably gonna leave me feeling like this a lot. I think what'll do me is stopping the language courses and switching to history courses at Griffiths. History courses I could always manage, sick or well, high or sober.
But sheeeit. I know Michael Fassbender is really nice to look at himself, but giving him unseeing eyes and a beard is really not the same as chopping off one of his hands and cutting up that pretty face of his. What a bloody cop-out. Oh well. The film wasn't a waste of time and that's more than I can say for most such films. I'm going to try to sit through the BBC miniseries now, since I have a nasty flu and am not capable of much more than passive observation, which is making me feel really great about the Chinese test I'm gonna flunk tomorrow.
I usually deal with L--- pretty well but right now I'm bored enough to remember what it was like to be depressive. Since I'm running a temperature and have a nasty, chesty cough, there's a lot of things I just can't do - concentrate and run are two of them - and without them, there's fuck all to do in this shithole, since the F-word has taken the car to go working at some local markets, which cuts out the possibiities of driving somewhere, or having a nice mid-afternoon fuck.
It's times like this that I badly miss living in cities or other places you can actually enjoy having a little walk outside. And I don't think it's until today I've grasped the irony of that statement. But in small-town Australia, everything is far apart, and even if it wasn't, who gives a shit? It's all small-town shit, and ugly to boot. Usually I can keep busy with Chinese or exhaust myself with a run but at the moment neither's possible. I really have to give some serious consideration to how I'm gonna deal with being a heavily pregnant woman and a mother since the hormones, extra weight and exhaustion are probably gonna leave me feeling like this a lot. I think what'll do me is stopping the language courses and switching to history courses at Griffiths. History courses I could always manage, sick or well, high or sober.
martedì, agosto 30, 2011
Running out bush
What a good little while it's been, starting on Friday with (I think - marks aren't out yet) killing at my Mandarin exam. Trying desperately to cram all the shit I'd forgot in Vancouver and the shit I hadn't learnt yet produced a series of declics and in the end went beyond cramming into breakthrough territory. One must be calm; language learning is an unlimited series of breakthroughs after frustrating plateaus, each making the proceeding stage look like absolute retardation. But a couple more months like this, and I'll start putting " Elementary knowledge of Standard Chinese" on my resume, and I don't have the balls to lie on my resume.
Then the Windsong festival on Saturday, which was very nice. It's hard to believe the format isn't more popular since it seemed pretty good for the musicians and the organizer involved, in financial terms. However, it wouldn't have been spectacular for the organizer in financial terms - no selling places to vendors - and I think I have the answer to why the format isn't popular right there. I think the organizer turned a profit, but probably not one enough for someone whose heart wasn't deeply into what he was doing to feel compensated for the man hours. People bandy around terms like "commitment" and "doing what you love" a lot, but do they? Do they fuck. Anyways, even someone like me who isn't nuts about folk music could really love on a festival like that.
Since then we've been out bush, while Mum is at bandcamp and I work and prepare for second year Mandarin, which starts tomorrow morning at 5 fucking am. Melbine and her family joined us for too short a time, and gosh it was nice to see her. God, she's such a good mum. And those kids are terrific. Clever and adorable or, to be all standard Chinese about it, 很可爱， 也很聪明。It was so nice to get a chance to get to know them and (since if I didn't write something about running, this wouldn't be the Dread Pirate Jessica's blog as it is these days) so nice to spend time with Melbine after so long, including a nice little run around the park while her patient husband was patient.
Now that I think about it, she's actually only the second person I've run with, after the F-word. I'd been planning to run with my double cousin and her new man the other day, but when they were late coming by the cabin I went on my own, in some relief because her new man (who is in his 50s but chiselled like a fucking Greek statue - my doublecousin may be the closest thing I've got to a sister but oh yes, I've looked, and come on, I haven't got laid in almost a month now, so I won't accept judgement for the way I'm turning into a human-sized wet spot) was some sort of Olympic runner and would have gone too fast. Melbine is not an Olympic runner, though pushing out three kids is probably more of a workout than that, but she still had to slow down for me. Anyways, it was terrific to have the catch-up, both in and out of breath.
Then the Windsong festival on Saturday, which was very nice. It's hard to believe the format isn't more popular since it seemed pretty good for the musicians and the organizer involved, in financial terms. However, it wouldn't have been spectacular for the organizer in financial terms - no selling places to vendors - and I think I have the answer to why the format isn't popular right there. I think the organizer turned a profit, but probably not one enough for someone whose heart wasn't deeply into what he was doing to feel compensated for the man hours. People bandy around terms like "commitment" and "doing what you love" a lot, but do they? Do they fuck. Anyways, even someone like me who isn't nuts about folk music could really love on a festival like that.
Since then we've been out bush, while Mum is at bandcamp and I work and prepare for second year Mandarin, which starts tomorrow morning at 5 fucking am. Melbine and her family joined us for too short a time, and gosh it was nice to see her. God, she's such a good mum. And those kids are terrific. Clever and adorable or, to be all standard Chinese about it, 很可爱， 也很聪明。It was so nice to get a chance to get to know them and (since if I didn't write something about running, this wouldn't be the Dread Pirate Jessica's blog as it is these days) so nice to spend time with Melbine after so long, including a nice little run around the park while her patient husband was patient.
Now that I think about it, she's actually only the second person I've run with, after the F-word. I'd been planning to run with my double cousin and her new man the other day, but when they were late coming by the cabin I went on my own, in some relief because her new man (who is in his 50s but chiselled like a fucking Greek statue - my doublecousin may be the closest thing I've got to a sister but oh yes, I've looked, and come on, I haven't got laid in almost a month now, so I won't accept judgement for the way I'm turning into a human-sized wet spot) was some sort of Olympic runner and would have gone too fast. Melbine is not an Olympic runner, though pushing out three kids is probably more of a workout than that, but she still had to slow down for me. Anyways, it was terrific to have the catch-up, both in and out of breath.
domenica, agosto 21, 2011
Modern Standard Fuck Me That's Tough
The thing I'm finding about Mandarin or Standard Chinese or whatever the fuck you want to call it (a good warning sign that a language is going to be a massive pain in the ass for an Anglo to learn is that Anglos haven't even settled on what to call the fucker yet) is that getting it into my head is reasonably okay - no less okay than, say, cramming Italian or French into my head was once upon a time. The problem is getting the cunt to stay there. In Vancouver I stopped studying for my nice downtime week of R&R and everything just fell out of my head. And my bastard of an exam is on Friday.
With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.
Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.
With Italian and French there were hooks keeping it there - still are - the hooks of phrases learnt from the paternal side as a child, the hooks of bilingual writing on a cereal box, and most importantly, I realize now, the hooks of English vocabulary being chock full of Romance vocabulary. English may not seem like a Romance language but when your brain is spasming around trying to process Mandarin and all the little connections in your head are firing as wildly as the popo after the levies break, desperately seeking any, even the most obscure or strangest connection that can be found, between the words you're learning and the words you already know, and it comes up with sweet fuck all - you realize, Anglos learning a fucking Romance language should not be any sort of fucking stretch.
Anyways, I'm pottymouthing, but I'm enjoying it. Also enjoyed going for a canoe this morning with my doublecousin, and also enjoyed seeing her happier than I've ever seen her before. And enjoying being here, enjoying being with Lexie, enjoying all the rest of it. Just not enjoying realizing I'm just two and a bit weeks in here and already getting overwhelmed with lusty nostalgia for the F-word. Emotionally this trip is whizzing by to the point where my heart wants to stop time, but from the point of view of my pantsjungle it's crawling to the point where my poon is ready to hijack a plane and fly into the arms of my old man. I wish my conscious being didn't have to be so fucking schizo about everything.
martedì, luglio 26, 2011
Awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh
Some Australians do this thing, and I'm gonna call it a cute thing, because I can't be indifferent to it and I'm already whining enough about other things Australians do . . . it's happened in my earshot a lot since I got here but this morning I'm writing about it while it's on my mind. There's a centre a bit downhill from here which I'm pretty sure is rehabby - lots of recovering-junkie looking people. I run past it most of the days I go for a run, which is most days, and it always gives me a little lift, because whether or not they stay clean for a long time, I really love to see people trying to get clean, at least - choosing a painful fight back against a disease.
I've heard some objections raised by people who have lost loved ones to cancer about using fighting metaphors - "lost/won her battle with cancer, fighting cancer," etc, and I can understand that's objectionable - like some sort of value judgement is made of a person who dies of the disease, when the outcomes of cancer treatment are determined so much more by national health care systems that detect it early and treat it agressively, rather than the sufferer "fighting". But drug addiction, due to its psychological dimension, is that bit different. Obviously your outcomes are going to be better if you provide better access to rehab programmes and better programmes and all the rest of it - but it's that choice, not just at the beginning but for the rest of their lives, the choice that recovering addicts made that is really inspirational, and the letting-go of the choice of the ones who can't take themselves out of that life which is so deadly sad.
Anyhoo. None of that is to the point. A guy standing by the door of the centre smoking said hello as I jogged slowly past. I said hello, and he asked how I was, and I told him I was fine, and then asked how he was. The answer, in a very nasal voice with a high and rising intonation, was "awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh." I felt like telling him it wasn't a yes or no question, but even at the slow, slow pace I jog, I was already a good 30 meters away. So I just enjoyed it. They say it all the time, but for some reason today it stuck on my mind.
I've been an absent blogger. It's not just the running, which continues with the standard hour a day except when I set out to get an hour of some other aerobic excercise like kayaking or bushwalking - all that fitness has pretty much replaced my blogging time (and made my ass so much firmer! It's a fucking miracle). It's also the fucking Chinese. Fuck, is it hard. Except it's not that it's hard exactly - the grammar and all that sort of thing are way easier than in European languages. It's just weird. Mandarin words tend to be monosyllabic (or else compounds of monosyllabic words), and there are a very small number of syllables you can make. I don't know how many, but you can recite them all in about four hours, and that includes the four tones you can use with them, which means you can orally recite every "word" in Mandarin in just four hours.
So that means the language is absolutely rotten with homophones to the degree that the context doesn't always make it clear what you mean when you speak. So it's necessary to know the characters too, since those are far more unique than the sounds. And of course, that's hard. It has its advantages and disadvantages for a language learner; the main disadvantage is the big mental block that needs getting over of how a language could be this fucking weird. My guess is other major Asian languages aren't quite this weird, since Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese can make use of phonetic writing, and since Cantonese has nine tones instead of four, so there's probably about a kabillion more syllables you can say than in Mandarin. But probably all that means is that they're a whole different kind of weird.
One thing I'll tell ya . . . when I'm done with the Mandarin courses that are available to me here, and after I spend a bit of time somewhere in China or Taiwan to try to consolidate things a bit, I'm learning fucking German or Dutch or Spanish or something I already half understand. I'm still having fun with the Chinese, but damn. Damn. DAMN. It's hard.
I've heard some objections raised by people who have lost loved ones to cancer about using fighting metaphors - "lost/won her battle with cancer, fighting cancer," etc, and I can understand that's objectionable - like some sort of value judgement is made of a person who dies of the disease, when the outcomes of cancer treatment are determined so much more by national health care systems that detect it early and treat it agressively, rather than the sufferer "fighting". But drug addiction, due to its psychological dimension, is that bit different. Obviously your outcomes are going to be better if you provide better access to rehab programmes and better programmes and all the rest of it - but it's that choice, not just at the beginning but for the rest of their lives, the choice that recovering addicts made that is really inspirational, and the letting-go of the choice of the ones who can't take themselves out of that life which is so deadly sad.
Anyhoo. None of that is to the point. A guy standing by the door of the centre smoking said hello as I jogged slowly past. I said hello, and he asked how I was, and I told him I was fine, and then asked how he was. The answer, in a very nasal voice with a high and rising intonation, was "awwwww, yeaaahhhhhh." I felt like telling him it wasn't a yes or no question, but even at the slow, slow pace I jog, I was already a good 30 meters away. So I just enjoyed it. They say it all the time, but for some reason today it stuck on my mind.
I've been an absent blogger. It's not just the running, which continues with the standard hour a day except when I set out to get an hour of some other aerobic excercise like kayaking or bushwalking - all that fitness has pretty much replaced my blogging time (and made my ass so much firmer! It's a fucking miracle). It's also the fucking Chinese. Fuck, is it hard. Except it's not that it's hard exactly - the grammar and all that sort of thing are way easier than in European languages. It's just weird. Mandarin words tend to be monosyllabic (or else compounds of monosyllabic words), and there are a very small number of syllables you can make. I don't know how many, but you can recite them all in about four hours, and that includes the four tones you can use with them, which means you can orally recite every "word" in Mandarin in just four hours.
So that means the language is absolutely rotten with homophones to the degree that the context doesn't always make it clear what you mean when you speak. So it's necessary to know the characters too, since those are far more unique than the sounds. And of course, that's hard. It has its advantages and disadvantages for a language learner; the main disadvantage is the big mental block that needs getting over of how a language could be this fucking weird. My guess is other major Asian languages aren't quite this weird, since Korean and to a lesser extent Japanese can make use of phonetic writing, and since Cantonese has nine tones instead of four, so there's probably about a kabillion more syllables you can say than in Mandarin. But probably all that means is that they're a whole different kind of weird.
One thing I'll tell ya . . . when I'm done with the Mandarin courses that are available to me here, and after I spend a bit of time somewhere in China or Taiwan to try to consolidate things a bit, I'm learning fucking German or Dutch or Spanish or something I already half understand. I'm still having fun with the Chinese, but damn. Damn. DAMN. It's hard.
sabato, luglio 09, 2011
没有狗屎，福尔摩斯
Oh my fucking fuck, Chinese is SO HARD. Fuck ME. I have really caught myself wishing I hadn't smoked so much reefer in my life, that's how hard it is (and then I watched an episode of Sister Wendy's History of Painting, and decided to get some reefer so that I can enjoy it to the maximum). But at the same time - call me an optimistic retard - I am starting to suspect it's a door that'll open with a lot of hard work.
So that's what I'm gonna do. I figure that even if I get pregnant five minutes after getting back from Canada in October, I can still complete all of the Chinese language courses on offer through Griffth's University before a baby comes out and all of my accomplishments grind to an enervated, sleepless, hormonal and worried halt until the child and his or her potential siblings move out in 20 or so years. And I'm pretty sure that if I don't get fired, at some point in the next few years I can argue my way into half a year or a year in Shanghai, hence subjecting both myself and my offspring to the language in an immersive fashion.
The characters, for example - I believed, and still do, to a great extent, that a language based on such characters is one that's meant to keep as many people as possible illiterate, because it's so damn hard, relative to a language that's based on a phonetic sort of alphabet system. But there is also something about the characters that are really lovely.
I think it is how they are so old, and have been used in some form or other for so long, that it as though they were designed to be written, in a way I've never quite appreciated with my own alphabet (probably because my cursive script varies between medical-grade illegibility and My-Little-Pony-esque careful girlish curlicues). And there is something so mysterious and story-telling about the radicals. Especially the woman radical - 女- the way she's always popping up in funny places. What is she doing there? She's probably been there for thousands of years; who put her there, and why?
Anyways. I've got fucking homework to stop procrastinating from.
So that's what I'm gonna do. I figure that even if I get pregnant five minutes after getting back from Canada in October, I can still complete all of the Chinese language courses on offer through Griffth's University before a baby comes out and all of my accomplishments grind to an enervated, sleepless, hormonal and worried halt until the child and his or her potential siblings move out in 20 or so years. And I'm pretty sure that if I don't get fired, at some point in the next few years I can argue my way into half a year or a year in Shanghai, hence subjecting both myself and my offspring to the language in an immersive fashion.
The characters, for example - I believed, and still do, to a great extent, that a language based on such characters is one that's meant to keep as many people as possible illiterate, because it's so damn hard, relative to a language that's based on a phonetic sort of alphabet system. But there is also something about the characters that are really lovely.
I think it is how they are so old, and have been used in some form or other for so long, that it as though they were designed to be written, in a way I've never quite appreciated with my own alphabet (probably because my cursive script varies between medical-grade illegibility and My-Little-Pony-esque careful girlish curlicues). And there is something so mysterious and story-telling about the radicals. Especially the woman radical - 女- the way she's always popping up in funny places. What is she doing there? She's probably been there for thousands of years; who put her there, and why?
Anyways. I've got fucking homework to stop procrastinating from.
mercoledì, marzo 30, 2011
Never can say goodbye to school
I'm going to study Mandarin at university. I'm a little shocked by that because a) I didn't expect to start messing around with university studies again until I quit, got fired, or had been resident in Australia-land for three years and b) I hadn't really been into the idea of Mandarin, of all things.
But the introductory course work paid for that I'm concluding next Monday totally whetted my appetite, and there are no other courses available in L--- - my only option is a correspondence degree with Griffiths University. And I won't have to pay foriegner fees. So - there you are. I start at the end of May. I'm totally excited about it too - I'm the sort of dry, joyless learner who does really well with university-type education - it's how I learnt Italian - so I feel quite optimistic that maybe in a year or so I can have a degree of functionality in Mandarin, especially if I can somehow persuade work to let me go work in one of the Chinese offices for a month or so.
What a strange language it is, coming from my Romantic Anglo Saxon perspective. Grammar so simple you could blink and miss it, which is just lovely, but then the fucking tones. I feel certain that the tonal languages must have been a different language-event from the non-tonal languages; I just don't understand how a tonal language, whose construction seems to me to owe so much more to singing than a clod-hopping language like English or French, could have sprung from the same source. As I practice the Pinyin table exhaustively I realize I am basically saying every word you can say in Mandarin without actually knowing a damn one (though the word for 'bullshit' does stick in my mind quite reliably, it's a really good one) and that is fucking weird.
I have to think about it as singing - I have to, because as a language learner I've never had any interest in speaking with anything like a correct accent. When I speak French or Italian, people have had a hard time placing me as an Anglophone, because unlike most of us Anglos I do actually make all the correct sounds - rolling rs, weird gs, no problem - but nobody has ever mistaken me for a local and I've never wanted them to. Francophones and Italians always thought I was Spanish for some reason. Fine with me. Spain's cool. Also Francophones guess I'm Italian because once I figured out how to roll my r's in Italian and realized that French people could still understand me if I rolled my French r's I just never gave up on it. That's fine with me too. Everybody knows that the Italians who aren't in Italy anymore are the cool ones. Man, that fucking country.
Anyhoo. It's clear now with Mandarin I don't have the option of riding roughshod over accents anymore so I'm going to think about it as singing correctly when I speak.
But the introductory course work paid for that I'm concluding next Monday totally whetted my appetite, and there are no other courses available in L--- - my only option is a correspondence degree with Griffiths University. And I won't have to pay foriegner fees. So - there you are. I start at the end of May. I'm totally excited about it too - I'm the sort of dry, joyless learner who does really well with university-type education - it's how I learnt Italian - so I feel quite optimistic that maybe in a year or so I can have a degree of functionality in Mandarin, especially if I can somehow persuade work to let me go work in one of the Chinese offices for a month or so.
What a strange language it is, coming from my Romantic Anglo Saxon perspective. Grammar so simple you could blink and miss it, which is just lovely, but then the fucking tones. I feel certain that the tonal languages must have been a different language-event from the non-tonal languages; I just don't understand how a tonal language, whose construction seems to me to owe so much more to singing than a clod-hopping language like English or French, could have sprung from the same source. As I practice the Pinyin table exhaustively I realize I am basically saying every word you can say in Mandarin without actually knowing a damn one (though the word for 'bullshit' does stick in my mind quite reliably, it's a really good one) and that is fucking weird.
I have to think about it as singing - I have to, because as a language learner I've never had any interest in speaking with anything like a correct accent. When I speak French or Italian, people have had a hard time placing me as an Anglophone, because unlike most of us Anglos I do actually make all the correct sounds - rolling rs, weird gs, no problem - but nobody has ever mistaken me for a local and I've never wanted them to. Francophones and Italians always thought I was Spanish for some reason. Fine with me. Spain's cool. Also Francophones guess I'm Italian because once I figured out how to roll my r's in Italian and realized that French people could still understand me if I rolled my French r's I just never gave up on it. That's fine with me too. Everybody knows that the Italians who aren't in Italy anymore are the cool ones. Man, that fucking country.
Anyhoo. It's clear now with Mandarin I don't have the option of riding roughshod over accents anymore so I'm going to think about it as singing correctly when I speak.
lunedì, marzo 07, 2011
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?
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?
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