Experimenting with wordle.net
wordle.net. as much fun - and more, because it’s my own stuff - as that 3D dictionary that went commercial before I’d had a chance to play with it properly.
This is an example from my pseudonym piece “First Date”.
lovely.
Cold
So I am forever complaining about how cold it is in the mornings and evenings, and frequently I make it into the grad room with three layers + a fat puffy michelin-man-type jacket, + a hot water bottle for emphasis. To be fair, I’m probably a little vain and wanting to be perfectly comfortable, and probably not in any real danger of hypothermia.
So I have an exam at Tamaki today. Along less pleasant lines, as far as exams go, but after it’s done and dusted, that’s all I want to know - I run out in the freezing wind to catch my bus. Out I toddle to the bus stop, and there I wait. In the cold. Brrr.
So the sky darkens. No bus. I look around nervously, as any self-respecting ex-Dio girl does when she’s alone in a low-decile area at night. I decide I’m being overly anxious, and pray under my breath in case there’s someone sitting behind the bus stop waiting to mug me and murder me when I let my guard down (what guard?). Please God, let it be quick. I huddle against one side of the bus stop. The bus, I mean.
Behold a bus! It’s the wrong one, but terribly encouraging nevertheless. Night never seems terrifying until you’re in it. But now it starts raining. Soon the rain turns to hail, thousands of balls of ice that hammer down in sheets across everything - across the road, showing up all the bends and crevices, on cars, and down my hood and in my shoes. The bus shelter is not much protection as it’s horizontal; how alarming, I think with great tiredness.
I’m a wimp. I quickly call my boyfriend and scream to him that the sky is hailing on me, even though it’s not technically as bad as all that. I’m excited and scared and thrilled and perplexed. When was the last time it hailed in Auckland? But then the right bus pulls up, opening its doors against the hail and letting me into the relative warmth. Oh, a bus, my kingdom for a bus.
By the time the bus reaches my area, I am the only passenger left, but it’s not scary - the bus driver is kind and stops at my road so I don’t have to walk the whole 15 minutes. But even now the hail and rain have stopped, and even the wind has died down. I half-run home, thinking of the warm kitchen ahead, where my mom has already advised me via text message that dinner awaits. I’m smiling. Nothing tastes as warm as blessed feels.
Unabashed Nightwish fan
William has kindly printed on my calendar that it is Anette’s birthday on Saturday 21st (tomorrow). Happy birthday Anette (: Her new haircut is gorgeous and Nightwish is still my favourite secular band in the whole wide world.
Morning thoughts
Sitting in a darkened room, gazing out at a still-silent university and listening to stylistically dramatic Nightwish songs like “This moment is eternity” seems to make everything somehow quite surreal, as if other planes were somehow blending into this one, superimposed upon its otherwise quite ordinary red-and-beige concrete features.
Suddenly the world does not seem completely real; as if its tired terracotta stairs and long steel handrails had momentarily become the centre of a wide courtyard of some marvellous white marble temple, the welcoming threshold of some ancient god, as devotees quietly approached. Or perhaps some small village, their pale ochre and verdant lanes full of twists and turns, stairs without steps; here an armourer, there an inn, with villagers in quaint fantasy style, perhaps pushing wheelbarrows or balancing pails of water, chatting, playing, without another care in the world.
As I type, the reality of the recession, the hefty burden of exams, and the mental cogs that otherwise do not seem to be able to keep from worrying about this person and that person, these seem to fade away as if somehow they are not really particularly important. How pleasant to be lost in a vision in some place so mundane as school.
Eeepc disclosure
For those who are somewhat less geographically removed from myself, you may know that I have recently spoiled myself by investing in an Eeepc (701). Thus have I thrown myself headlong into what has quickly emerged as an eee community (centred around but not restricted to eeeuser.com). Through these networks, not only have I learnt HEAPS more about command line than I ever thought I’d grasp, but I’ve also found unexpected and delightful things like the above “laser tazer” piece. (How tickling to discover another Eee fan on wordpress. This one is armed with a camera and a great eye.)
Some general info about the lovely Eee here. This is in fact what I use to post on here, hence the general trend of “fixed width” themes on my pages - the Eee has a 7″ screen. :)
Fables of the Indian subcontinent
In front of her are pages upon pages of endless Hindi grammar, explaining this little semantic shift, the slightly different function of that allomorphic postposition.
——
A year ago I would have been fascinated but horrified at the thought of reading Hindi grammars; three years ago I might possibly even have been dismissive, as of impossibility. But eleven years ago, in a damp, dreary Latin classroom, I thought I would be clever and ask where Latin came from. To my surprise my teacher strolled over to the wall map and began to explain. That is where I first learned how Latin had been brought to Italy by the proto-Latinate and eventually pre-Roman tribes, from India of all places, via Sanskrit and other names that at the time seemed to me magical.
Rome, supposedly the seat of Western civilisation, having its roots in the colourful, exotic, East? My question was answered and soon forgotten, but the curiosity had been planted and would never leave. Humans are endlessly wondering where they have come from, as if it will lead them any closer looking backwards, than forwards.
I don’t know what caused me to choose Latin above French and Japanese. It was one of those moments where you thought you’d decided everything pat, and then when it came to the final choice, it felt like you were tipping over the edge of a precipice. So you freaked out, and then reversed everything and ran with it, and somehow, kept running.
It still seems odd, Latin for an asian girl. To this day I have met only two other asians who continued Latin on to university. Even girls have been relatively few.
And yet somehow, through the years, Latin has, grammatically, become my first love. Even my ability to describe English grammar is relatively primitive in comparison - a second language, one that is hesitant and followed strictly by rules, not instincts (even though obviously my spoken English is far better than my spoken Latin). Case relationships fall more easily into place in a Latin grammar than an English one, somehow. And now, confronted with a massive Hindi assignment, I am at first daunted, and then struck, by the resemblance to my own L1.
——
She is touched to the cockles of her heart, because Hindi, like Latin, has abstract nouns in the feminine. Ablatives, genitives, locatives, and phonemes and diminutive suffixes. They surround her in waves of nostalgia and realisation, as if she has found an impossibly distant relative, and discovered they still shared the same eyes.
Feel the gravity falling
The Light Princess is a superb read, every time I read it. It may just supercede this wonderful, wonderful story as my favourite fairytale of all time, perhaps dependent on how old I feel.
Oh can you feel the gravity falling, calling us home?
Oh, did you see the stars colliding, shining just to show we belong…
- Brooke Fraser
A noble profession
They speak of medicine as a noble profession, and I can see why - saving lives, performing edgework procedures and devoting their lives to making others healthy. And of course, the cynic adds, a noble profession for the modern “nobility”…
After five months of working in the health field (dentistry), I’ve decided it’s shockingly more fulfilling than working in retail. Perhaps because one’s health is much more closely tied to one’s true self than stuff you own, so you end up talking to real people, hearing their real fears. You can pretend you like a horrid dress the shop assistant recommends, but you can’t pretend you don’t care when the doctor tells you your body is slowly killing itself. I intend no indiscretion, but I compare Borders once again. Emotional breakdowns because the shipping for a little girl’s Christmas present was delayed? A sense of personal triumph when you succeed in getting someone to buy an expensive book? Granted, it’s the reality of retail, and Borders fits a greatly demanded niche, but when you go home and reflect on your day, you can’t help but feel a bit artificial.
To some degree it’s still there in dentistry. People come in with deep decay, needing expensive root canals to save their teeth and insisting that they can’t afford them, and then in the same breath demanding re-whitening of their already-white teeth… I suppose it happens everywhere.
But there is something different in the health field. I am seeing it now in SLT. Mothers come so truly concerned for their children’s futures that money is a relatively less important aspect, and if it really needs to be spent, it will be. One child only has 13 phonemes. Another can barely understand/be understood. It strikes me suddenly and poignantly how important SLT is, to them, for their fragile connection to the rest of the world. A mother hopes and dreams and despairs and weeps for her child even before it is born; how much more when it is 6 years old and cannot communicate?
It is not only with children, either. In our first week we met a few aphasic/apraxic people - in the 30/40ish+ age bracket, and SLT is incredibly important to them as well. How easily our lives, that we have carefully built up and take such pride in, can be destroyed by things we cannot control! Who would have thought that silence could be so crippling in otherwise reasonably healthy adults? Who ever wept, before, for the mere absence of words?
Let me, then, draw gradually out of the realm of the pure and admiring and noble, out into the grey dreary, rainy world of the here and now. Our little group of 18, from everywhere (but mostly Auckland), one group of maybe three or four in New Zealand who will enter the field in a few years’ time. What are we getting ourselves into? When we qualify, if we qualify, will we be fit to take fragile lives into our own hands? Will we do the right thing? Are we noble enough?
