Wednesday, November 29, 2006

I have a journal paper due tomorrow. So, as often happens when I should be working on something, I do something else instead. I started reading this book I borrowed from the library called The Unfolding of Language. It's basically about how languages evolve. Pretty interesting. Anyway, it brought to mind a couple of thoughts I've had in the past about language/culture differences between English and Chinese. These weren't in the book, but reading the book reminded me of them.

The first thing is something I noticed 13 years ago, when my family first got a car with a CD changer. In Chinese, the word for "next" is "shia", which also means "down". It's interesting that "next" and "down" are equivalent in Chinese, because in English we would probably associate "next" with an upward direction (for example, to go to the next channel on your TV, you press up on the remote). So the CD changer in our car was like this: to go to the next (higher-numbered) CD, you press up on the "CD" button. This made perfect sense to me (and apparently to the engineers at Bose). But my dad complained, saying it was silly -- why doesn't pressing DOWN ("shia") go to the NEXT ("shia") CD? I thought it was interesting.

The second thing I think I may have learned from the one Chinese class I took as an undergraduate. In English, you face towards the future and away from the past. What I mean is, in English, when you say something is "ahead", you mean it hasn't happened yet, while if it's "behind" you, it is in the past. But in Chinese it's reversed. The word for "ahead" is "chien", which means the same thing as previous, or past. And "behind" is "hou" which means future or afterwards. Weird, huh?

Thursday, November 16, 2006

I had some random things to blog about, but I've been holding off, because I feel like they aren't enough to make up a whole post. But now my sister is coming to town tomorrow and Jenny is coming to town on Sunday, so if I don't post now I probably won't for a while.

I got Guitar Hero II last week. It's fun! I've been playing it a lot, probably more than is healthy. I've beat every song on medium with 5 stars, and I've beat every song except the last one on hard (though not with 5 stars). The 5-minute solo in Free Bird is killing me. Also, I'm getting better at playing using the standard PS2 controller -- you need it to play multiplayer if you only have one guitar.

I saw Guster in concert last week. That was pretty cool.

I donated blood yesterday. It was the first time I donated through the American Red Cross, even though I worked for them back in high school for almost a year.

Saturday, November 4, 2006

Well, I said I'd post pictures one of these days when I'm up early due to jet lag. And here they are.

I thought I was over the jet lag, because I came back on Tuesday afternoon, went to sleep at a normal time Tuesday night, and got up at a normal time Wednesday morning. But then on Thursday I managed to sleep all day and not get up until 8 pm. I slept 16 straight hours! I missed all the daylight that day. You know when sometimes you take a nap, and you wake up 2 hours later but for a split second (when you're still groggy and can't distinguish am/pm on your clock) you're afraid it's 14 hours later and you missed the entire day? Well, it actually happened.

So now it's 6 am a few days later and I'm here posting my pictures. Actually now it's 7 because I went to Kroger to buy stuff to make an omelette. I think it's been years since I made an omelette.