俳句

陰陽や
二匹の海豚
絡み合う

ばら色の世界

Ahh life is so lovely...this morning I got up after having been awake until four calculating the curavture of the tractix, which frustrated the hell out of me for several hours and then suddenly I got the trick and it was beautiful...I went to class, which was lousy--my professor is so grumpy and uptight and she hides it behind smiling and making lame jokes and acting like she's a sweet person who's just justified in being frustrated with some things, but really, she just needs to get over herself and relax. *laughs* Okay so some people come a bit late to the class; either she can just realize that three minutes don't make a big difference (and that we waste a lot more time than that each day with her getting things wrong and being confused), or she can just say to everyone in a respectful tone that they need to come earlier so we don't start getting behind. But making grumpy angry comments and repeating five times while smiling weirdly and laughing humorlessly that she's just going to have to lock the door five minutes into class because the people who come late are just wasting their money is not helpful, or very respectful. But it doesn't matter, she's not a bad person, she just seems to have a lot of pet peeves and to feel very entitled about them. *laughs* Right now I feel more amused by it than anything (although if I'd been one of the people who was a few minutes late, I would feel pissed lol). But we got our exams and homework back and I did really well and that made me happy because it gives me more room to slack off later in the course heh heh. Then I sat in the commons with Eric and Nora and Ben (I think that's his name) and Eric and Nora did the crossword puzzle and I eavesdropped and started my number theory homework. It was nice. At eleven I had to go meet with Donna Jo, who is so sweet and happy and a nice antedote to my geometry teacher, and Donna Jo sweet-talked me into switching to a linguistics course major as well as the honors minor. Yeep. But apparently all I have to do is to take the structure of ASL class spring of senior year, one other class (whatever I want--there's morphology next semester, as well as a seminar on creoles which could be awesome), and a two-credit senior seminar fall of senior year to write a thesis. And the thesis can be anything I want! Hee exciting. Much better than two fifteen-page papers on core topics that I don't get to choose. So I think it's a good choice. After that I went and talked to Jason and he loves the idea of my doing my final project on the writing system of online communication and how it's affecting the way kids learn writing. Yay! I'm excited; that'll be fun. And I wore my emergency boots which are so nice and clicky, and my purple folkdance skirt which is so swooshy, and my coat which I adore even in its owl-less state (*sniff*), so walking around made me so happy. And I only got like four or five hours of sleep last night so I really should be napping, but I'm in too good a mood to feel like sleeping, sooo...I'm writing this instead!

Here's one interesting thought I just had: Traditionally, children are taught how to write in school, by adults and for adults. Any writing kids do tends to be for the eyes of their teachers, or if not then some other adult. Diaries and notes to friends are exceptions, but in general, that's how writing has been passed on: adults who learned from adults teach the little children. Now, with many pre-teens and teenagers spending lots of time emailing and IMing their friends, suddenly there's a vernacular teenaged writing system, the way there have often been vernacular teenaged spoken dialects. Kids have always spoken to each other, and a lot of the time the way they speak to each other informally is different from how they speak to their teachers or other grownups. Now, for the first time, kids are growing up with a context in which they are writing to each other--to people who aren't trained to correct their spelling and punctuation or to make sure they follow the prescriptive rules of the writing system. And in that context, a colloquial writing system is free to develop, with different "rules" for punctuation, spelling, new abbrviations, new uses of symbols to convey tone or meaning. I've had the thought for a while that IM is unique in that it's writing that wants to convey everything you can convey conversationally--tone, inflection, facial expression, emotion, hesitation, volume...But it's never specifically occurred to me before that with the spread of online communication, this is the first time there's been a large body of written conversation between young people, where they're not being judged against the rules they've been taught. Interesting.

And the video! It's deeply satisfying when something works after you spent so long trying to get it to work. And it's deeply satisfying when you can see someone who's such a constant and central part of your life as a real living breathing moving person for the first time, even if it's just as changing pixels on a flat screen. I've said this before: when you see someone in person, there's so much sensory information that you get that you don't even notice or think about--the way they hold their shoulders, the way they tilt their head, the way their hands move, the way their clothes fit, the way their hair falls as they move their head, the way their mouth moves when they talk, and so on. That stuff might not be crucial to your actual communication, but at least it's there. When you talk online, all you get are the words the person chooses to type. And when you talk on the phone, you only hear the voice. And when you see a still picture, that's only one instant in time, with no sense of movement--you can't have a full image of someone without seeing them move. That's why I cared so much. It's just so satisfying. Of course, their Spanish is adorably wrong in many places and the pronunciation is dreadful. *laughs* "Treinta minutos luego..." ha ha. I mean my Spanish is rusty, I'll admit, but that doesn't sound right to me...they also said "para treinta minutos", and when Andrew said "minutos" he pronounced it /maynutos/ lol. I told Mark I'd give them a C for boringness, bad grammar, bad pronunciation, and most importantly, not showing Andrew enough! Lol but being more fair, it was a good video, as videos for classes about making cookies go. The outtakes are, of course, the best part by far, although they feature a regretful lack of Andrew. In any case, it makes me so happy. He's a real person! He moves! He mixes butter and sugar together! He puts things in ovens! *laughs* Yay!

Well, it's almost one, and tomorrow I have to get up shamefully early, like nine, for the tutor training thing, and then I have to tutor, and then we're baking pies for our middle-of-the-night science center party, hee! And this week's assignment for real analysis was loooong, so that's gonna be a drag. I feel so good about my life right now...does that mean something terrible's about to happen? *laughs* I'm doing three different forms of tutoring, plus grading, plus I'm speaking at a math conference in January, plus I might get to spend next summer actually teaching math to middle schoolers, plus I'll get to write an awesome linguistic thesis and then graduate with a degree in math and linguistics, and I can go to Japan and teach for a year, and I'll make money from that, and I can go to grad school, and I'll have all this tutoring and teaching experience, and I can find a job, and get more experience, and it's really scary but really exciting! Now if only I could make myself go to language table...*laughs* But the point of this paragraph was supposed to be that I'm not gonna get a lot of sleep tonight and I won't have time to nap over the weekend, so I'd better go ahead and nap now! So, I'm off to nap.

あきらめかけた景色もきっと
二人でならばら色に見える

Surely even this world we started to give up on,
If we're together, can seem rosey.