Syntactic Sugar

Still getting complements on my hair *swishing hair sound*. BUY THE HAIRDRYER NOW LIEK SERIOUSLY.

We played Duck Duck Goose and Duck Duck Gray Duck (!??) in Sociolinguistics today to educate the international students. Epic lulz were had by all. Have you ever done that in your classes? I didn't think so.

I am becoming quite proficient (and I use this term loosely) in Python. What the hell kind of language does not output a string unless it's concat'd to something?? It was giving me a memory address instead and I was like "Geeze what the hell"... On Caturday I'm going to work on it a little more with Seth but I think we have this thing DOWN.

I got to chat with Megan today in the first time in forever...so awesome. I hope we'll get to chat more often!

Cafe Mac has started going crazy. Good thing that I only have a few more weeks left here, BWAHAHA. They have turned Tuesday into "Guilt Tuesday" where they hide the trays and make you feel bad about leaving any extra food on your plate that happened to taste shitty. Not only that but they don't serve bananas during lunch and dinner anymore because they are "high carbon" - which has nothing to do with an actual diet but has to do with the environment. Fuck that! Honestly, I guess it's good that they're making an effort but it's really stressing me out, and I don't think it's right of them to dictate their own weird moral/ethical choices into the food we eat. Today they even had some huge plea about how they spend 20 thousand dollars a year replacing broken cups - IS THAT THE WAY YOU WANT MAC SPENDING UR MONEYZ OMG??? Stop guilt tripping us! I'm paying you, stop complaining.

The Tallest Man on Earth just came out with a new album. It's cool, but I think "It Will Follow the Rain" is still their greatest piece.

Apparently people are already living up to the "Girls Gone Wild" spring break stereotype. I heard the bell ring (a sign that someone lost their virginity) quite early in the day and then several times after that. Sometimes that gets irritating.

I have been doing absolutely nothing all day except for going out to BreadSmith/Jamba Juice to get some food. I recently have gotten hooked on Jamba Juice's Chunky Strawberry smoothie, but the workers there are absolutely inept. I have to watch carefully to make sure they really DON'T put yogurt in it, and a worker helpfuly informed me that "it has peanut butter" when I made it really clear that I don't eat dairy. I thought he was just being, well, an idiot, but afterward I realized that they might actually put dairy in their damn peanut butter. I mean, they don't have the greatest track record.

I am looking forward to being able to make my own damn smoothies with no dairy within a 10 foot radius. I'm leaving in the morning, hopefully unmolested by some stupid race that is going through Snelling during the day sometime.

Oh yeah, I know why I'm posting. Well, I wanted to go upload some cat shelter photos but realized that I haven't been using Flickr since my Pro account ran out and it started eating some of my pictures. I asked Matt on the bus ride back from the cat shelter yesterday if he knew of any good Flickr alternatives, and he didn't (not sure why I asked him in the first place, actually). I found a lot of candidates, like SmugMug (pay service? No thanks), Zooomr (too many Os and a MySpace wannabe) and some other random crappy sites. It took a while for me to find Ipernity, which is sort of like a refuge site for Flickr users who have been censored. Apparently it doesn't cut off after 200 pictures on the free one and has a monthly upload limit of 200 mb...that and you can upload movies and sound files, which I certainly had some fun with. There are a lot of private files, so if you want to see them hit me up on my mufuggin' MySpace. Or just leave me a comment :) I did upload some sound files that I recorded in 7th grade during class...I'm kind of torn on whether I should make those public or not, because they're hilarious, but I don't want to condemn those involved.

Anyway, my account is here, so enjoy the stuff that's publicly available. I'll be deleting my Flickr account soon. I also put a music video on YouTube that I did with Megan and Geneva a zillion years ago. It's kind of hilarious.

So, surprisingly a lot has been happening to me. I have been accosted by a rabid Banker, handed out fudge at the gay pride parade, and am going to a lecture on Pāṇini tomorrow. The banker thing was a little traumatic but I'll blog it anyway.

I went to the bank to transfer some money to Heidi. The banker lady seemed pretty cheerful but couldn't match the banking number I wrote down on a scrap of paper. I asked her if I could log into my email to confirm the number. She said, "I'll check with my supervisor" and got up to check. I saw them talking in the next room, and the supervisor shook her head before the banker had even finished the sentence. She came back and said, no, sorry. So I asked, "So you are saying I have to drive all the way home, check my email, and then come back here?" Cheerfully, she replied, "We can do it over the phone and you can come back to sign it!" I decided to call my mom to get her to check it for me. I dialed the number while sitting in front of the banker, and said something *TOTALLY* innocuous, something like, "Hey mom, the bank is being stupid, could you log into my email for me and check something?" At this point the cheerful young lady decided to reveal her true form as Darth Banker and tried to Force Choke me.

Ahem. Sorry, been playing too much Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Anyway she started screaming at me while I was in the middle of the conversation with my mom and said things like, "How dare you call me stupid! Show a little respect! It's not *MY* fault, we have an INTRAnet, not an INTERnet, our firewall can't access external websites!" and a lot of other nasty things at the time. I was a bit shaken and sort of stumbled out of there, after first trying to clarify that I called the BANK stupid, as in, its policies - she had nothing to do with it. Funny thing is that I had nothing bad to say about the poor lady until she started going crazy at me. And also, sweetie, if you have an INTRAnet with *no* connection to the internet, I'm interested in how you're getting your data back to the main banking server. I mean, Google Gears just came out, and that's supposed to be pretty revolutionary. But you wouldn't know that, would you?

I've also been clocking in some time at Chuck's Nuts. I learned a little bit about making coffee - we're going to have some great things like Fudge lattes. I also supposedly made a good espresso, woo. We're acting like made scientists, figuring out how many scoops of fudge and so on to put in the latte. The fudge latte actually takes 4 oz. of fudge, which looks pretty redonk when it's in the latte cup. But it needs that much to be really good. We're also going to make a brownie one as well as a brownie hot chocolate, maybe. In any case it looks like my job there is going to be pretty much Barista/ringing up purchases. Some other guy works in the kitchen. I'm a little jealous of him but on the other hand I don't envy him much

Last weekend Chuck put me in charge at the Pride on the Plaza festival. It was a little scary, because I thought someone was going to be there, but he was in the parade, so I walked around for a while and then found out that our stall was the empty one with all the strawberry boxes (which were actually filled with fudge when I checked later). I placed all the fudge out and started merrily calling out to passers by about our free fudge. There were 5 flavors: Double Chocolate Espresso Bean, Black Forest (chocolate and cherries), Lavender Pecan, Maple Walnut, and Chile (no chocolate, just chile). The chile was kind of a love hate thing. I haven't tried it yet because supposedly it has a "kick" and I'm still just weaning myself off wimpy curry. We really have a lot of chile flavors at Chuck's Nuts that I just can't try. But oh well. My fave of all of them was the Maple nut, which didn't even have chocolate in them, but I really like Maple. It was good for kids too, since it was really mild. Anyway it was pretty silly, you would not imagine how many boring adults will walk by you when you say, "Free fudge!", as they snort something about "I don't eat *sugar*" contemptuously. Believe it or not, I had to work to get these people to take a couple of free sticks of fudge. People these days! By the end of the day, we had managed to run out of pretty much everything but Chile and Black Forest (since we had a TON of black forest). Also, I had managed to pick up a creepy 40 year old male admirer. I'm sorry man, but when you are hitting on girls at a gay pride festival, you are pretty desperate, or you like getting turned down.

I also got to bunny-sit some sweet holland lops that a fairy-woman was letting children hold as well as selling them. I thought that bunnies didn't make good pets but these were so sweet. I wonder if Mac still allows pets, or I might just pick one up for myself. But my cats would hate me, then. :(

I'm really meeting all sorts of people through this job. Today I walk in and Chuck is talking to some guy, who turned out to be an Italian guy who makes biscotti that we're going to serve. I'm like blah blah I studied in London after he asked where I got my hair done, and I said I did Sanskrit/Linguistics, which is my default answer. Then this guy says, "Yeah, I studied Japanese linguistics." and then I said I studied Japanese and we started talking Japanese right there in the middle of the store - I haven't spoken to many gaijin who are pretty much fluent in Japanese, and it was kind of weird actually going back to English once I'd gotten used to his Japanese style of speaking. I blanked on a lot of words but understood him pretty well and he said he was impressed, so cool :) He also said that reading classical Japanese wasn't so hard but I'm still a little suspish, I mean, I did see this huge-ass "classical Japanese" book at SOAS...if there was really "nothing" to it, would there be a book out like that? Looking back it was kind of funny - speaking Japanese with an Italian biscotti maker in a candy store. I dunno, just seems a little random, hehe. Before he left, he gave me his number and told me to show up at some store and ask for a girl named Emily who speaks Japanese better than him. We'll see if I end up doing this, because I don't want to seem like a stalker.

Only one bad thing at work has happened so far...Chuck didn't like what I was wearing today and called it "Earth Mother". Ouch. A lot of people seem to think that I dress like a hippie. That kind of bugs me, because a lot of times I wear colorful things which people just automatically label as "hippie" because OMG COLOR IS BAD or whatever. Strangely enough I wasn't even wearing the most "hippie" thing in my arsenal. I do understand that he wants to keep it professional looking, but honestly my outfit was not that bad, the only kind of silly thing I was wearing was my spongebob socks. I guess you could make an argument that my shirt bore a resemblance to a Peasant blouse...and speaking of which, the guy who works in the kitchen gets to wear crap (I guess if he just works in the kitchen it's fine, but maybe it's cause he's a guy?) and I could have been wearing something slutty. I'd take hippie over slutty any day, even though I don't like to be called that. I am now going to be super paranoid about what I wear to work and only wear my most boring and crappy things. Well, all the better I guess, so my good stuff won't get stained. I just hope I have enough normal things to wear.

I think that's all I want to report on, except that I'm going to that Pāṇini lecture tomorrow. I hope I find some Sanskrit buddies here. In any case, Pāṇini is the shit, so learning more about him in any case is cool. I also was going to go to some philosophical discussion in Borders, but last time I went to something at Borders, everyone brought their hearing aids, walkers, canes, dentures, and Eris knows what else. Just not really my crowd. Santa Fe is just populated by a bunch of old horny grandpas. Don't take my word for it, though. There were funnier posts on it, but now they've expired. So it's not just me.

Anyway, now that I think of it, the Pāṇini thing might be similar, especially since it's intellecual. That tends to draw in the grandpas like a magnet. Well, fingers crossed. People like Whitney had to start *somewhere*, don't they?

I keep trying to write random blog posts, but instantly erase them since they seem stupid. I'm really not doing all that much lately. Term 2 is over - now I have a month off, in which I'll write two essays and have my mom visit me.

Since I should be writing, I'll try to make this quick...but it's time for another Library Rant! (singsong)

Never have I felt more like a terrorist than when I entered the British Library. I went in, and my bag was searched. Okay, no problem. I went up to the counter and tried to give them my NHS card as proof of my address. The grumpy guy there told me that he didn't accept it and I went home and asked the Dinwiddy people what I could do. They said that the NHS card should have been enough and that I could use my tenancy agreement. I got their number just in case they tried to pull any shit at the library. Had my bag checked AGAIN. When I brought up the agreement to the guy, he said he didn't accept it, and I freaked out a little, telling him to call the people at Dinwiddy. Finally he checked with his supervisor and said it was okay since I was a student. Whew. I got my card, and then went downstairs and put everything but my wallet, a few sheets of paper, and a pencil in a clear plastic bag.

Note that all the following has been done to gain the "privilege" of going into one of their reading rooms, where you can't even check stuff out. (You may argue, but I wasn't checking out ancient Sutras for Eris's sake). At the reading room, the guy checks your bag, and looks at your card. By this time, I learened that it was too late for me to get any of the books I requested. Well, fine, some of them are offsite.

The real story is when I came back on Saturday to get the books that were there for me. I went through the whole humiliating process again, cold without my coat and my trusty bag.  Now, since they don't let you take books out of the room, the only option is to copy them. Which they offer graciously at 20p per page - equaling about 40 cents. Now, this would be expensive even if it were 20 cents! To make things worse, they scrutinize your book and tell you you're not to copy more than 5% (how you're supposed to tell when you reach that mark, I don't know) AND that you can't copy more than one page at a time for ridiculous "copyright reasons". This wastes money and paper. The book that I really needed was supposedly at SOAS (but with complications, I'll explain that later) but one good one was not, so I made about 10 pounds worth of copies. No student discounts or anything. Students don't have this kind of money! When I left that day, I swore I'd never enter that accursed place again. So much for my dad's romanticized image of me going over ancient Sanskrit scrolls and such. Not that they'd let me within 50 feet of them.

Okay, stop two is SOAS. The book I need is a reference book, so this should be fine. I go there, and it's not there. Well, maybe someone is looking at it. I go about my business and come back maybe an hour later. Still not there. At this point I bothered someone to help me find it, and we checked all the reshelving places...Not there. My helpful advice was "Come back tomorrow" which means waste a large chunk of the day and 2 pounds in bus fares. Well, today I came back...And guess what, it wasn't there. I alerted someone again who unhelpfully just sent me upstairs to this overly harsh woman who helped me check out books before. When I told her the book, she walked over and PULLED IT OUT OF HER OWN SHELF. It had been there all along. I was really pissed - I have no idea how long she'd been hoarding that, or how she gets special status to keep it in her private collection without even leaving a note in the catalog or a slip of paper on the shelf. Think I should complain?

Anyway, now I should have everything I need, and with any hope shouldn't need to step foot in a library again (except when I turn the books back in).

King D is alright! I missed the simile, he fell to the ground LIKE a dead tree. According to Whitney, King D falls to the ground like this a lot for the rest of the Ramayana. That's like his only role in the rest of the story. Poor guy!

Speaking of the Ramayana, when I was in Hammersmith tub station on the way to my Irish lesson, I saw an ad for the Ramayana play! It sounds really cool, and it's very cheap, but I'm a bit torn on whether I want to see it or not, since part of the fun of translating the stuff in my textbook is that I don't know what comes next in the story.

I'm feeling a lot better today, but yesterday was rough. Fridays I have basically a 9-5 day. I almost left my Language Acquisition class early since I had a tummy ache, but I decided to stay anyway after eating some cake.

I finally called the Santa Fe Institute to get some information about the internship. When I get back this summer, I kind of just want to stay in Santa Fe. Unfortunately, there's nothing to do there...So anyway, I called the Institute. When I talked to them I got a bunch of Red Flags. Program organizers may love to use the words "fostering a community" but that's the last thing I want to hear. When I said I already had housing in Santa Fe, they said I was "strongly recommended" to take the housing there, apparently to help "foster community". I remember a long time ago when I was apply to Mac I freaked out a little bit because they said something about shoveling snow as helping the community or something. Thankfully I've never run into something like that, and living in the generic dorms you can keep to yourself. So anyway, yeah, I don't think I'd like that program. I'll probably just try to get a job at Best Buy or a coffee shop or something, which is probably better anyway, since I'll be burned out academically.

Sometimes native speakers are so stupid. In my Language acquisition class, there is a gaggle of Japanese students who don't speak English all that well. Bearing aside the obvious problems - there's a more glaring one. Two languages that are spoken about in Linguistics classes are Japanese and German (quite my luck that I chose those two to study without knowing!). This means that teachers are always giving examples in Japanese. The teacher in this class doesn't speak Japanese, so he asks the students. The most simple questions go over their heads - I don't know if it's because they don't understand English, or what, but I think that it's pretty much inexcusable to be a Linguistics student and not know shit about your own language. For example - he was talking about diminutive suffixes and mentioned Japanese ko. I'm going to give you the dictionary entry for this right off the bat:

子    【こ】        (n,n-suf) child, (P)
(Note the n-suf...Noun suffix. Meaning child. Put two and two together)

The Japanese students stared into space for about 3 minutes until one of them said, "Oh! Ko-inu?" which means "little dog" = puppy...Not exactly a suffix, but it can be used in that way I guess. There are much more glaring examples: if you've heard any Japanese women's names, have you noticed a lot of them end in...You guessed it, ko. Kimiko, Himeko, Ichiko....The list goes on and breaks my Japanese word processor. The usage of this suffix is like the -ie in English - Kimmie, Suzie...etc. Why the hell can't these native speakers get something this obvious? The second time, they chatted in the back of the class about a *simple* grammar question for 5 minutes while the teacher was still talking. Seriously, STFU. The hard thing is that I want to say something, but it's embarrassing as hell - who would listen to the gaijin when you have a lot of (presumably) much more knowledgeable native speakers?

Otherwise, that class is good, so I should stop complaining about the students. Hopefully we stop doing Japanese examples.

On a much brighter note, after considering getting my hair cut in a funky emo style, I decided to go to the fabled hair-salon Pepi's. Pepi's is pretty much the only place in the world that can weave plastic tubings into peoples hair. A full head costs about 320 pounds, so most people get a mohawk done, but that looks very cool too. I splurged and bought 4 different kinds of Point 5 wool. In the end I decided to go with a deep forest green mix along with a funky purple pink. Since I already had the yarn, they only charged me 4 pounds per extension. I don't think that's too bad of a price, and in the end I gained super knowledge on how to put the wool in properly. Basically you do a kind of 4 strand braid (almost like lanyard weaving style) using two strands of hair and two strands of wool.  You fold the two pieces over and over until the hair runs out, and then you start with a new piece of yarn. It looks pretty cool and I don't think it will fall out and/or rip out of pieces of my hair like the old method.

I'm still involved in Lusternia. Oh crap. Eris have mercy on my soul.

I'm going to nap now, but I just wanted to rant about native speakers and talk about the hair thing. Pictures later, I suppose!