Day in the Life of an Idiot

In further adventures in language learning, Memrise just taught me this amazing phrase that I wish you could hear a native speaker say: "エコじゃないんじゃないかなぁ" It sounds something like "ECHO ja nai n ja nai ka na-a." I know this is hard to parse, but it's a very fun, repetitive sound. It almost sounds like someone pretending they speak Japanese, you know? 

 
Image: A baby quilt made of flannel squares of periwinkle (blue) and red and a while pattern (with kitties, but you can't see that very well in this picture.)

Over the dead week between Christmas and New Years, I unearthed a quilt I'd started right after my nephew Jonathan's baby was born. Initially I was not fond of it. I thought that the blue, in particular, was a bit dull. I even started piecing something else together, but Shawn encouraged me to take another look at this one. When I pulled it out and laid it out, not only did I realize that I had it nearly finished, but also that I didn't hate the combination as much as I thought I did. So, went back to it and am now nearly done with it. This quilt is entirely flannel, so it is really warm and soft.

As I was telling spiderplanet in the comments yesterday, we try to limit our fabric purchases...or, at least, reuse/buy cheap. So, the only fabric that I bought new for this quilt is the white kitty squares. To be fair, we have A LOT of fabric already around the house thanks to the fact that Shawn makes rag rugs. Any time someone on our neighborhood "Buy Nothing" group offers up old sheets, we're first in line to try to snag them. We also have gone to our local GoodWill outlet and bought fabric at pennies on the pound (literally. I believe they sell at 15-20 cents a pound? It's something insanely cheap like that.)  The stuff from GoodWill starts life as shirts or sheets, but we as much of the fabric as we can. We have also made friends with other sewers who will give us their scraps after mask making or re-upholstery work. We try to be end users of fabric. The bottom feeders of the fabric food chain, as it were. The sewers of the sewers. :-)

In other news, I got to a section of Duolingo where they are finally teaching me the important stuff, like, "My friends and I are otaku," and "My gamer brother is a complete noob." Very important. It's only taken me, what? Three years to get this far?? (I've been studying Japanese far longer, but I think I've only been on Duo for three years. I have yet to make more than a 60 day streak, however. I'm not good at daily practice.)

 This is what my wife said to me this morning: "I'm sorry for falling asleep when you wanted to talk about grammar." Which...??? I laughed very hard and told my wife she is a SAINT for feeling bad? Because honest to god, I can be so nerdy. 

Last night, I mostly wanted to complain because articles and particles suck in Japanese. When do you use the object marking particle 'wa' as opposed to 'ga'? When do you use the articles e, ni, or de? It's very complicated for a non-native speaker and my instructor is great, but he also, I think, assumes that his students actually understand English grammar in a way that I'm not sure most of us do? Like, deciding what the subject of a sentence is can be hard once you move beyond: "the boy kicked the ball."

Did any of you out there have to diagram sentences in school?

I remember actually loving it, but, for me, it was more that anything that was more like art was automatically more fun for me?

Anyway, class went okay. My TMI went over just fine? Everyone else talked about their pets. I should have probably done the same, ah well.

 So, I've started up my Intermediate Japanese class through Community Education. It's a bit chaotic, but also wonderful? I'd forgotten how much I personally like the teacher, Tetsuya. He's great. I think he's legit planning on having the class organize a Zoom karaoke.  Our first homework is to write a short thing in which we talk about three things we like and three things we dislike.

I have half of the assignment in this paragraph (in romanji):


Now, I just need to come up with two more things that I like and I can start practicing saying this out loud. I feel like this is important information that I may need to convey in many future situations, so it behooves me to memorize it. :-)

I have to admit that I kind of want to continue to just talk about manga and anime the whole time? And then end it with the Japanese version of "Thank you for coming to my TED talk"

How much do you suppose Tetsuya is ALREADY regretting allowing me to take this class again??

I will probably actually be able to check in more than once a week. This week, in particular, is going to be busy with stuff I'm sure I'm going to want to journal about. I'll get to all that in a second. Most important announcement! Our family has welcomed a new member: Willow.



Picture: Shawn holding a tiny black, short-haired cat, who basically all ears and bright yellow eyes at this point in her life, whom we have named Willow.

The story of how Willow came to us is a nice one. It was one of those cases where we said, "We're ready, but not in a hurry for a new cat. Maybe the universe will provide." And it did.

We had started looking around, even put in an application for a pair of siblings we saw on a website called "Kitty Revolution." But, someone else had gotten there first, so we thought, "Ah, well, those weren't the cats for us, then." Then, my barista (Molly) said to me, "So, um, are you guys still looking for a cat? Only a friend of mine has picked up a stray and can't keep her."

Shawn and I went to see this cat that the family had named Nightmare (a good name, honestly, but reminds me when we first got Kirk who had initially been named Vicious and he was the furthest thing from.) Shawn and I walked in the door (Mason was at his St. Paul College class or he would have been with us) and the kitty literally ran up to Shawn, Shawn scooped her up into her arms, and I was like, "I see we have found our cat. Let me go get the kitty carrier."

This story gets even more amazing, because I was expecting to have to do that several weeks long, slow introduction to the other cats. But, no, she just slotted right in. Once we made sure she was feline leukemia and other dread communicable diseases free, I was still keeping her separate but letting the cats see her (carrying her in my arms, switching rooms so they could smell her, etc.) But, when Buttercup scratched at the bedroom door, I thought, "I don't want him to think he can't come in." So I picked her up and let him in. It became very clear that there wasn't going to be any hissing so I let her down. Buttercup (who is a thousand times her size) very much carefully deferred to her and followed her around. She was so at ease that he relaxed. Our eldest cat, of course, is done giving f*cks so she just gave the newest edition the stink eye and went back to sleep. It's been happy cat harmony ever since.



Picture: Buttercup (big orange) and Willow (the black void with ears) on the same bed.

So, that's been amazing. Buttercup really needed a companion. As mentioned, our eldest, who is NINETEEN, is done with all your nonsense, and so is not at all interested in being jumped at or played with. Willow totally chases Buttercup's tail and they play like siblings (as opposed to the hissing, REAL fighting that will happen if someone DARES to touch the eldest.)

For those who are curious, I did NOT make it to the Dump Trump rally last Thursday when the Traitor-in-Chief was in town. Mason's school schedule is such that I was picking him up at St. Paul College right as the protest was officially scheduled to start. I came home and made dinner and still COULD have gone (the light rail would have gotten me into downtown in fifteen minutes) but, after checking in with social media, it looked like enough of the rest of you came out that one more body would not have made that much difference. So, I wimped out and stayed warm and dry. I feel a tiny bit guilty about this, because protesting is one of the ways I've been resisting this presidency and there aren't a LOT of them being organized these days, and this was, in many ways, The Big One. On the flip side it sounds like the protestors who stayed on after eight were more prone to civil disobedience and it was probably just as well for me to stay out of that. The pictures of some of the signs were amazing and heartwarming as always. I'm proud of the people who were there.

In other news, beside writing like crazy on Unjust Cause, I've continued to find fun ways to study Japanese. I came across a podcast called "Anime - Japanese Immersion." It has the audio-only of several episodes of popular anime. I listened to the first six episodes of DeathNote and thought, "Wow, I can really follow this story!" and then I started up one I had never seen called Kimi no na wa and I'm sitting there last night saying to Shawn, "Is he dead? Are there aliens?Time travel?? WTF is going on in this thing???" The only thing I think I know is that it's important to know people's names. There's some kind of mystical bond that has to do with names?? I'm going to go to Wikipedia in a second to see how wrong I am...

Oh, I'm not wrong.

But I feel insanely stupid. I should have recognized the title. This is Your Name, the wildly popular anime movie I never saw... but everyone has been talking about. There is totally a mystical bond regarding names, as the two characters are body swapping. Okay, no aliens, but definitely a space-related event: a comet... and there is a time gap between the two characters. Huh, okay, so here I was thinking that I was getting absolutely nothing out of this exercise, but I wasn't nearly as far off as all that. It's just that the plot is THAT weird.

Now I'm kind of disappointed that I've read the last anime in the series so far, 5 Centimeters. It's kind of fun to see what, if anything, I can get from listening to Japanese with no translation. I hope the podcaster keeps doing these. Though I suppose I could recreate the experience by just listening to a show on Crunchyroll and not looking at the subtitles. Thing is, with this, it's impossible to cheat. There's no subtitles to read, no pictures to help with context. I could start buying Drama CDs, which are a thing in Japan. They are studio recordings of popular manga, some of which never get an anime, so it's sort of like a radio play.

Continuing with the immersion theme, I've also been listening to Japanese radio while I write. I just googled Japanese language radio and found a bunch of things I can stream to have in the background as I write. I've been keeping up with Duolingo and Memrise, too, so perhaps some day I will have a small command of this language.

Oh, the other more important thing is that I got my schedule for this weekend's Gaylaxicon. Here's where you can find me, if you go:

FRIDAY: SATURDAY:

SUNDAY:
All of the paneling looks amazing, but I have to admit that I am the MOST excited to play the Tingleverse RPG. 

But, let's be real, what we all care the MOST about is more cat pictures:

 I am not anywhere near a Japanese language expert. I mean, I am studying Japanese on Duolingo, having taken one or two community education classes with a native-speaker. That's it.

But, there I am, doing the dishes, watching the third season of "Free!" when we get to this really poignant moment. This friend of the hero's, who has been struggling with swimming (it's a sports anime about competitive swimming), ends up having a break-through because a friend he thought lost to him (the hero) makes a big personal sacrifice in order to swim with him/compete with him. The hero looses this particular race, but the friend is turning around, towards healing. It's a BIG moment. I was already crying, because one of the things that I love about sports anime is that always, ALWAYS about The Team, and how we don't win alone, even when we compete on an individual basis. You always fight for your friends. ALWAYS.

At any rate, my rant is this.

When friend turns to hero after winning the race, he says:

Haru. Tadaima.

The translators chose to write this as: Haru, I'm back.

NO.

Tadaima is something you ONLY say TO YOUR FAMILY, when you walk in the door to YOUR HOME (when you walk into anyone else's house, you would say, "Pardon the intrusion," though literally "I am disturbing you," Ojamashimasu).

So, what his friend is saying, which is far, far more meaningful in this context is: "Haru (my family, hence NO honorifics). "I'm HOME."

It is even more important, that Haru replies: Okaaeri which is the intimate, familial form of Okaerinasai. "Welcome home."

That's how your FAMILY greets you when you return home. YOUR FAMILY. Your mom says okaeri. The butler or your auntie you haven't seen in a decade would say okaerinasai. Your BEST FUCKING FRIEND would probably say okaerinasai.

These two men not only acknowledge that this friend is home, but that they are family because they share this love of the sport.

This is so much more powerful then, "Haru, I'm back."

What the hell, Viz Media translators? TOO GAY FOR YOU??? I mean, it's the only thing I can figure. Free! is a fan favorite for all the slash, so I can only figure that someone at Viz Media said, "Oh, you can't have him say: I'm home. Too gay! Besides, those dumb English-speaking fan fic writers don't need any more fuel!" Although, I thought the second season of Free! was all about the gay subtext, but maybe there was backlash? Except the Japanese would feel this like a gut punch, like I did (which, frankly, is rare since most of the time I catch one word out of six hundred and five billion.)

/rant.

I will return to the regularly scheduled programming next blog. 

 I don't think I'd have a single title to report if last night wasn't a REALLY SLOW shift at the Maplewood Library.  

Perhaps you've heard, Minneapolis/St. Paul and surrounds have been bombarded with snow. 6-8 inches, easily. Yesterday, when I was driving around the visibility wasn't EXACTLY whiteout conditions, but the fourth or so block way from wherever I was, was that hazy blur you get in those kinds of snow storms.

So, of course, the library needed me to come in at 5 pm.

In a surprise to no one (but probably library administration) hardly anyone wanted to be out at the library last night.  Well, that's not entirely true. While I was shelving books in the adult comic book/manga section, I overheard two gentlemen discussing where they were planning on sleeping after the library closed. Let's say, instead, last night wasn't a high book turnover night.  So, when it was my turn on the AMH (colloquially known at Maplewood as "the oven,") there was not much for me to do.  I even asked my supervisor if I should be doing something else and she looked at me somewhat askance and said, "Read a book."

So, I hunted around for a first volume of some manga or other. I ended up readed Sapuri / Suppli by Okazaki Mari. (Amusing note about the title, it's merely a 'translation' into the same sounds as spoken by an English speaker.  This sort of thing drove me crazy in Nana when I read it because the scanlators insisted on writing Reira when she specifically says she was named after Eric Campton's 'Leila.'  If you're translating everything else into English pronunciations just write her name Leila. It confused me because I'd have to stop every time her name came up to remind myself to say it "Leila" in my head. I've seen people do this with the name Alice, too. It's dumb, because the last thing you want a reader to have to do is break the pacing of the story for something that USELESS and easily remedied.)  At any rate, the book was okay. I had checked it out and returned it within an hour.

At any rate, the roads were pure ice and packed snow on the drive home at 9 pm.  That sucked (though not as much as having to figure out how to sleep somewhere in the rough.)  I saw two accidents on the way home.

Today, at least, we have bright sunshine. However, it's stupid-ass cold, 17 F / -8 C.  Tomorrow is supposedly the Twins' first home game... they play in an open-air stadium. I heard on NPR that they're hosing off the stadium seats (metal, btw) with hot water.  Fans (if they go) are going to be sitting on ice cubes.  

While I was at the library, I also picked up some novels to try.  I have no idea if I'll actually crack these either, but fingers crossed.

How about you?

As you know, gentle reader, I am attempting to teach myself Japanese. Currently, I've found a method that really seems to be working for me, the Pimsleur method. (I think it works because I am a HEAVILY auditory learner who needs a lot of repetition. There aren't even books that come with these CDs. It's 100% listen and repeat. EXACTLY what I like.) I bought the Pimsleur "Conversational Japanese" after having gotten half way through the library's copy, and then I took out Pimsleur's "Japanese: A Short Course." What's been fun is comparing these two.

My conversational Japanese is all about keeping it simple (and picking up the ladies, but that's another story), so for making chit-chat they taught me this:

Person A: O-genki desu ka? (You okay?)
My response: Genki desu (I'm okay!)

Japanese: A Short Course has the same set up, but uses different words.

Person A: Ikaga desu ka? (How are you?)
My response: Genki desu, okage-sama de (I'm okay, thanks to you.)

ISN'T THAT ADORABLE??  I absolutely love that the polite response to "How are you?" Is "Fine, THANKS TO YOU."  I suppose we have something similar in English in that you can sometimes say, "I'm fine, thanks for asking" and that's generally the same vibe here, but the -sama is a particularly polite honorific and I just find it super kawaii! (cute)

The other odd difference is that on the "Conversational" CD we learned to ask where the train station (eki) is.  On the "Japanese: A Short Course" I'm asking for the street (touri). From this I have surmised that the cool, hep cats take the subway and the dorky, stuffy "a short course" people are stuck walking the streets.... 

You will also note that I am exclusively using Romanji here.  That's because I am a loser and have not committed to learning any Hiragana or Katakana yet (don't even speak to me of Kanji.)  Honestly, this is about goals. My goals for learning Japanese is not to read it or write it.  What I want to do is be able to understand spoken Japanese and maybe be able to formulate a response if spoken to (very secondary goal, although the Pimsleur method is giving me a lot more confidence in that secondary goal.) So, Romanji works for me right now.  I do feel like a loser. Speaking of the cool kids, they all write in Hiragana or whatever.  I can recognize a few syllables, but put them together?  Nope, not yet.

 ...where I'm skeevily trying to pick people up.  

I don't know why this always seems to happen in the language CDs I'm learning from, but here I am on lesson seven and I am already asking:

Me: Nani ka nomumassen ka? (Wouldn't you like something to drink?)
Her: ii desu ne (Sure / it's okay) Doko de? (Where at? Basically: where should we go?)
Me: Watashi no tokoro de.  (my place.)

What the hell, language tape!  I am NOT THIS KIND OF GIRL.  

And I am not kidding you. Pimsluer is teaching me to ask, "At my place?" BEFORE TEACHING ME HOW TO ASK "at the restaurant?" Restaurant is literally "restaurant" in Japanese. It's a borrow word. Sure, you have to kind of say it in a Japanese accent, but C'MON!  Also, I'm apparently a little rapey, because the next conversation goes:

Me: Nani o nomumasu ka? (What would you like to drink?)
Her: Ah... so desu ne... wakarimassen. (Hmmm, let me see.... I don't know.)
Me: Wakarimassen ka? (You don't know?) O-sake? Biiru? (Sake? Beer?)

I can not believe I'm like, "You don't know?" What kind of jerk am I? Am I really shaming this nice woman about her being hesitant and indecisive? Then, I'm pushing the alcohol!??!  Why not kouhi? (coffee) Or o-cha? (Green tea, which, like sake, gets an honorific 'o' in front of it.)

On the other hand, I'm certainly learning all the super casual interactions and, because this method really seems to works for me in terms of how I'm learning and the amount of repetition, I'm remembering everything.  I was talking to a friend of mine who is also studying Japanese and she told me her flashcards are all very "Your company is very efficient!" and other such business-like transactions. I told her that I'm clearly studying to be a frat boy to her salaryman.  Suddenly I had this wonderful image of the two of us in Japan: me, trying to hustle the women on the train, and her, brokering the deal with Nissan.  She can get us reduced rates at the hotel; meanwhile, I'm making small talk with the receptionist at the hotel.... 

Weirdly sort of suits my personality. I mean, I hope I'm not rapey, but you know the sort of super-pushy aggressively overly friendly sort.. that's me.  As I told my friend, I already talk to strangers on the train. This isn't that far off. :-)

So what do you say? Watashi no tokoro de nani ka nomumassen ka?  (Wanna have drinks at my place?) 

 Just when you think the editing process is over, it isn't.

Rachel and I are STILL going through the book version of School for Wayward Demons (now with help from a third beta reader, my friend Josey).  But, in the mean time, you can keep reading here:  "Broken but Strong."

On the flip side, I do think we'll get through it by the 30th, which is our deadline to get it off to the professional copy-editor as part of the whole trying to have a book-type thing before MarsCON 2015.  This is all very crazy, honestly.  But, it's been a ton of fun and... we'll call them "learning experiences."

In other news, I started Intermediate Japanese on Tuesday night.  It's being taught by the same instructor, Tetsuya-sensei.  It's pretty much all women, except this one guy (Mint, who I will forever think of as Mint-san), all of whom took it before.  Also, most of them have actual plans to go to Japan, Idyel-san is actually leaving for Tokyo before the class is over.  So it was kind of amazing that, when we were asked to introduce ourselves to the ONE new student, I was the only one to have practiced full introductions. I seemed to be the only one who studied at all during the break.  Which only underscores for me that 1) otaku rule and 2) learning something for fun is far better motivation that even NEEDING TO KNOW IT BECAUSE YOU ARE GOING THERE.

Yesterday I had a wicked headache.  It was so bad that even after medicine and a bath, I really didn't even feel up to reading, my eyes hurt that much, so I plugged into my JapanPOD101.com account and listened to several more Japanese language instruction podcasts. In fact, I learned an easier way to say "Please repeat."  Tetsuya-sensei taught us, "Mo ichido itte kudasai" which isn't terribly hard, but the podcast's version was shorter and had no real verb, which I appreciated: "Mo ichido onigaishimasu."  Which is basically the difference between, "Say it again, please." and "Again, if you would." And believe it or not, considering how often you are expected to say that super-long looking word, "onigaishimasu," it's actually much easier to say that than to verb, as the kids might say these days.  And just like in my English version, the second phrase more compact and feels less cumbersome.  So that was a cool revelation.

The only problem with listening to the podcasts right before bed is that the migraine relief aspirin stuff I took had a dose of caffeine, so I slept really fitfully for the first couple hours, and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness repeating these phrases and the more irritating one, "O-genki desuka?" over and over and over.

AND OVER.

Anyway, I'll be ready to ask someone how they are... :-)