I Am Completely Serious

Four are ours, one belongs to the people down the road, and one is a stray who followed me home from the park.

WE CANNOT KEEP THE TWO EXTRA DOGS, DAD.

(Dad has hoarding tendencies.)

It’s REALLY WEIRD how quiet it is here.

No major disasters; my first flight was delayed by two hours, and my layover was two hours, but I somehow made my connection anyway.

I sat next to a model on the plane, and she showed me pictures of herself on an elephant in Thailand wearing a $3000 dress. (She was wearing the dress. The elephant was unclothed.) The decision to have her get up on an elephant was made on the fly, when the photographer spotted an elephant out the car window. Upon negotiating the use of the elephant itself, the photographer decided to do the shoot atop a nearby hill. There was no obvious way to get the elephant’s block (or whatever you call the thing you use when you’re mounting an elephant) up the hill, so they had her get on the elephant at the bottom and ride it up. She was riding bareback, which made the journey uncomfortable.

Continue reading “How Saturdays go.”

Listening to Frog’s theme from Chrono Trigger makes my walk home feel like an epic journey.

Yup. So if there are any hilarious fanfic/conspiracy/bad medical advice Geocities pages you feel need to be preserved for the ages, better do it now!

(Leo is the Russian kid.)

Peter Pan, Jack’o'Lantern, and an as-yet non-nicknamed cohort came over to my desk and prevented me from working for a while again today, so I decided to make them practice some non-lying-related English. One of my questions was, “How old are you?” They didn’t understand the question. I did the example sentence for them, “How old are you? I’m twenty-three.” This works on grade-schoolers most of the time, but did not work on this set of high-schoolers.

Manager, who was standing nearby showing Leo something, said to them, “Why don’t you have Leo help you? He’s fluent in English, you know!”

Leo gets extremely annoyed when Manager tells people he speaks English, which I don’t think Manager has noticed - I’m sure he and Lucca get really sick of people assuming they do - but in this case, he actually did know. He told Peter Pan haughtily in Japanese, “She’s asking how old you are. She’s twenty-two - I mean, no, twenty-three!”

“Oh!” said Peter Pan. “You’re good!”

“Okay, so how old are you?” I asked Peter Pan.

“Anooo… juu-san-sai.”

“English! English! You’re thirteen.”

“Sah-teen.”

“No! That’s bedsheets! Thir-teen! Thir-teen!”

The word “bedsheets” was apparently too much for Peter Pan, for I had lost her again. Leo said, “Thirteen. It means juu-san-sai.” Kagura-sensei had come over to look for something, and he pointed to her and said to me in English, “She’s four hundred.”

Manager and I both made threatening gestures at him. (Kagura-sensei, who was doing actual work, did not bother.) “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I don’t think you’re actually sorry,” I told him. I don’t know if he understood this, but he nodded solemnly in agreement.

“Wow!” said Peter Pan and Jack’o'Lantern. “You really are good at English!”

“Oh, I’m not that great,” he said, spinning around impressively on his roller-skate shoes.

“Those are good shoes,” said the third girl, eyeing them covetously. And Leo, though his ego is quite healthy, is nonetheless still twelve - slightly too fragile to handle all this at once, he was forced to skate away for a second. Aww.

Today was Archangel. This book creeps me out a little bit more every time I re-read it.

The first time, I remember being very impressed by Josiah. He’s clearly a very cynical person, if not an actually evil one - the power behind the throne, he manipulates Gabriel and Rachel and Raphael, relatively simple-minded people, into doing what he wants. When he says that God has no emotional attachment to human beings, he’s talking about himself. And while it’s obvious to the reader that he condescends to and lies to everyone he meets, none of the characters ever realizes it.

Rachel never quite catches on that Josiah dismisses her faith as a cargo cult (though he says it pretty clearly), and Gabriel never realizes that Josiah, reassuring him of God’s existence, is just telling him what he wants to hear. Our heroes all sort of absent-mindedly think of him as the story’s non-threatening mentor figure who exists only to set up their own stories. And then they all live happily ever after within Josiah’s plot, without ever noticing there was a plot to begin with.

But this time through, I’m developing the sneaking suspicion that Shinn doesn’t realize it, either. I liked the book so much better when I thought she was in on it. My meta-book is so much more awesome than the real one.

Also, the book suffers from What These People Need Is A Honky syndrome. Why couldn’t Rachel herself have been ethnically one of the pseudo-Romani, exactly? Why did she have to be adopted? Was her blondness in some manner integral to her function within the narrative?

My PayPal chargeback against Yahoo went through - I got my $35 back.

I think I may have discovered Japanese fandom’s equivalent term for “little black dress” - I think it’s “kokontouzai” (古今東西), which means basically “whenever wherever.” I have come to this conclusion entirely because someone called Oroshi’s blog calls Frog that.

Look, I even translated the relevant part of the entry! Very badly. Please correct me if you see mistakes because this is SERIOUS ACADEMIC WORK GOING ON RIGHT HERE.

Continue reading “Important Japanese language research”

Poll #5857827
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All
Did he hit me with it?

Yes
Yes
Less than twenty seconds after I entered the room.

Today some of the juku kids practiced their English on me. Not much actual communication took place. I still can’t figure out why they kept saying “a lot of sheep.” I asked Kagura-sensei, “Why are they talking about sheep!? Are they studying animals? Are they studying irregular plural forms?” She either could not or was unwilling to explain the significance of the sheep. I drew one sheep on the whiteboard, then a lot of sheep, and they said, “Ohhh!” indicating that they had not previously known what a lot of sheep looked like. (Maybe they were studying “a lot,” “a few,” and “some”?)

Mostly what they did was claim to be people and things which they were not. “I’m Madonna! I’m Michael Jackson! I’m a jack’o'lantern! I’m a lot of sheep!” I said, “Nice to meet you, a lot of sheep.”

At one point one girl said, “I’m Peter Pan! This is my sister, uhh… she’s…”

On the theme of “male characters generally played by women,” and because I’d been thinking about Saiyuki, I said, “Are you Sanzo Houshi?”

“Yes! I’m Sanzo Houshi!”

“Oh! Nice to meet you, Sanzo Houshi!”

Later another girl said of another, “This is my sister, monkey” (I do not think any of these girls were actually sisters), and I said, “Oh, are you Son Goku?”

“No, no! I’m Madonna!” And then in Japanese, “You really like the Saiyuki, huh…”

“I like Minekura Kazuya’s Saiyuki.”

“Me, too!”

Surely Japan’s future is in good hands.

Relatedly, when I draw a monkey, none of the kids recognize it as such unless I put the Monkey King’s curly diadem on it. My monkey totally looks like a monkey! It’s not a skinny bear! Shut up, Zuzu!

I always forget to make sure Ayla’s in my party for the Blackbird. I always forget to save before going to talk to the Elder, too, so I can never go back and fix it. You’d think I’d learn eventually.

Spoilers up to Death Peak: Continue reading “No one will understand this post.”

And I discover new reasons to love it every time I replay it! For instance, thanks to the internet, I now know why the cavewoman’s name is “Ayla.” I didn’t last time! It enhances the experience!

Also, either the SNES translation lied to me, or I’ve had my gender-default goggles and and missed evidence to the contrary - the DS translation assures me that the ruler of the dinosaur people, Azala, is a woman! I thought she was a guy before. This is actually pretty consistent with the game’s ideas about power, because with the exception of Magus, all the other active political leaders in the game are female. We see Ayla, Queen Leene, and Queen Zeal moving around and doing things and interacting with people, but the male leaders - the two kings, the various village elders, the other cavepeople leader - are mostly shown sitting or standing still. Sometimes they get hurt, or somebody betrays them. This is an uncommon reversal! It makes me happy!

Lucca panicking and issuing denials regarding her sexuality when Ayla says she likes strong women is hilarious. I can’t believe I missed that. Was it different in the SNES translation?

I totally failed to mention this yesterday - Lucca brought her dog in! Or, she had her step-dad bring the dog with him when he came to pick her up - she didn’t keep it with her during class. The dog is tiny and white and fluffy, and thus inevitably is named “Yuki” (snow). As advertised, it had a red bow on its head. Lucca was clearly very proud of this dog, which was very well-behaved. Aww, Lucca.

Zip and Zoh feel strange things are worthy of discussion. Today we were doing clothes vocab, and I’d made some big sort-of-paper-doll-ish clothes. I drew my face on the whiteboard, had them draw theirs, and used magnets to put the clothes on the pictures. I had on the skirt, Zip had the dress, and Zoh had the pants.

Zoh demanded, “Why am I the only one in pants?”

Zip explained kindly, “Because they suit you so well!”

“I’m not a boy!”

“Oh, no - of course I’m not saying that -” That being exactly untrue, they started wrestling. I suspect they would wrestle for the entire class if I let them - I have to stop them three or four times each class.

Zip is pretty quick at getting new words and grammar down, but Zoh is a little slow. It’s hard to get her talking, because she feels Zip is so much better than she is. The difference isn’t actually all that big, but in Zoh’s head it’s apparently huge. I kind of wish Zip would have a sick day (she’s one of two or three students who’s never had one yet) so I could try and work with Zoh alone for a while - I think she’d feel more confident if she wasn’t comparing herself to Zip all the time.

There are some little windows in the classroom so the parents can watch classes from the waiting area. Obviously, when there are other kids out there, they come over to the windows and wave and pop up and down like prairie dogs and so forth.

So the other day Mr. Yodeler was in the classroom, and Mr. Weepy was outside waiting for the teacher for his other class to show up. Mr. Weepy came over and knocked on the window. Mr. Yodeler walked over to it, looking very solemn. They both pressed their noses up to it and kissed through the glass. Then they giggled, and loudly proclaimed one another to be “baragumi.”

I know that “bara,” which means “rose,” is used as a term for gay guys - I mean, that part of the whole interaction seems pretty clear - but I’m not sure about the “gumi” part. According to my dictionary it just means “group,” but I think I’ve only ever heard it used referring to military and police units. When I google for this in romaji I get stuff about the anime Sakura Taisen, which does, in fact, use the term to describe a (deeply offensive-sounding) all-gay military unit. But I don’t think a couple of four-year-olds are likely to have seen this show, since 1) the art makes it look kind of porny, and 2) Sleep-san liked it, which probably means it’s both kind of porny and too complicated for little kids. I could be wrong? Anyway, I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to ask the manager to clarify this one for me. His sense of humor can be somewhat lacking.

(The first google result in Japanese is somebody’s Second Life store, and I am deeply unimpressed by those dresses.)

And Frog doesn’t talk all forsooth-y anymore!

Whaaat.

I knew that he talked normally in the original Japanese, but it’s still kind of startling. The Frog in my heart will always use “thou” incorrectly. And I will be so sad if Magus isn’t a little emo kid dripping ellipses all over everything.

Reading through random bits of Dreamwidth documentation, I just found the page where the devs are talking about comment import ethics policy. I sighed dreamily and put my hand over my heart. (I literally did that.)

The other day the manager was sitting at his desk very carefully whiting out the dates on an old class schedule, and putting this week’s dates on there. I’m not sure why, maybe this is part of a bizarre paper conservation effort.

The week of the schedule he was altering, one of my students hadn’t shown up, so I’d crossed his name out, as is the custom. The manager, having finished modifying the dates, was interrupted by a phone call. He came back, clipped the refurbished schedule into a clipboard, and considering the effect, was shocked to see that a line was through a student’s name already. “Sarah! Did you put this here? Mr. Smokestoomuch is coming this week! He won’t be absent!”

This says it all about the level of organization at this school. Unlike the owner, the guy is never actively malicious, as far as I can tell, but it took him less than five minutes to forget that he’d used white-out on that schedule.

Kitty and Yuzu aren’t aggressively sulky like Goody Proctor and the Devil - they do talk without being prompted - but they often say obnoxious things. Kitty enjoys mimicking me. Fortunately, Yuzu doesn’t, and Kitty bows quickly to peer pressure, so I can just switch to talking to Yuzu, and Kitty will behave herself on her next turn. They both cheat at Go Fish. They make no attempt to hide that they’re doing it, they just sit there and trade cards and smirk at me. I confiscate the cards, but this doesn’t seem to affect their willingness to do it again the next class.

Kitty enjoys giving silly answers to questions, which is fine when the answers still have to do with the subject matter. Like yesterday, there was:

“Kitty, where are you from?”

“The United States.”

“”I’m from…?”"

“I’m from the United States - China - the Philippines - Canada. I’m from Canada!”

Yuzu laughed at this point. Apparently, Canada is absolutely hilarious.

“Really? Are you from Ottawa? Are you from Toronto?”

“…very cold.”

“Woman, you live in Shibata.”

See, that’s good! (Except for the “very cold” part, which was just gratuitous, in my opinion.) She was answering my questions and using good grammar and everything! But then she was also doing stuff like this,

Continue reading “School”

Yup. I remain snarp.

I’m kinda still pondering what to do when cross-posting goes live - I doubt the buggy WordPress lj-crosspost plugin I’m using will be able to post to Dreamwidth. Anyway, I’ll be reading both my list there and my list here for the foreseeable future.

Edit: loqia posted in the comments saving my world with her WordPress crosspost plugin JournalPress. It will hopefully work with Dreamwidth soon, and in any case presently works much better than LJXP, the plugin I was using before.