(no subject)
My life has gotten busy again. At least I'm managing to stay on top of things, though just barely. Most of my classes are interesting enough so I can't complain. I've also been spending a lot of time with my two clubs - Sierra Club and Anime Club - so the weeks go by far too fast. Heck, every day goes by too fast.
My Japanese is advancing due to my newspapers course, anime, and manga, but I still feel dumb a lot of the time. I think I would have to move there for a while to really advance, and I still don't know when I'll be able to graduate, thus making planning for the future much harder. I'd go abroad under the school's program but if it's going to make me graduate even later than I really would rather not... I just need the music department to recognize my credits and give me a minor (or at least get me close to it) so I can leave this school and move to Japan. Who knows if they'll be willing to give me anything, though, which could mean a full semester more of classes to graduate.
I've been kinda-sorta thinking of going to grad school, but I think I had best do a year of work before I go into that. I'm thinking of going for JET, especially the program where they set you up in a government office, but not knowing when I will graduate makes it awful hard to get this shit together. I just want to be in Japan next year.
Sadly, I think I'm turning into a linguistics nerd - the mania for classifying and finding rules suits my nature. The question of the orgin of the Japanese language is really interesting to me as well. While we're talking about linguistics, people who call the descriptive nouns in Japanese anything other than nouns must be eliminated (well, convinced). And linguists who use non-IPA symbols - the whole point of IPA is to have a standard so I don't have to re-learn the symbols for every article! Use it, you fuckers! Also, people who call the Ryukyuan languages "dialects" of Japanese are extremely suspect (that is, they're probably nationalistic wack jobs). Then again, "Chinese" is not one language either, no matter how often they insist that it's just differences in "dialect". Though this is what makes linguistics dangerous to me - it's all grey areas - there is no clear line between a dialect and a language. Lots of terms have weak definitions or their definitions are not agreed on. It drives me a bit batty. Goddamn my anal tendencies.
Also, I've been reading to much weird political stuff (Lew Rockwell's site). That and hanging out with the Sierra club people (the president is ironically a sort of anarchist) has brought back my old revolutionary tendencies. Politics is a dangerous thing for me to get involved in - I don't really need the hassle and I'm skeptical about what can be accomplished - but somehow I can't resist. Now I'm involved in trying to get the school to actually recycle as a policy and to redo their food contract to consider things like organic food and such. I feel a weird mix of things, really, as on the one hand the food is not that great and far too expensive due to the school granted monopoly (which offends my libertarian leanings), but even off school property it's not cheap so I'm not sure how much of a positive difference can be made. Eh, whatever, some schools have better systems in place so why not us? Why should Sodexho get a fee from other companies that sell food on campus? Is it weird that I am opposing this on both free market capitalistic grounds and hippie save the earth grounds (or rather, is it weird that anyone would think these two are in conflict)?
Uuugh, must sleep...
My Japanese is advancing due to my newspapers course, anime, and manga, but I still feel dumb a lot of the time. I think I would have to move there for a while to really advance, and I still don't know when I'll be able to graduate, thus making planning for the future much harder. I'd go abroad under the school's program but if it's going to make me graduate even later than I really would rather not... I just need the music department to recognize my credits and give me a minor (or at least get me close to it) so I can leave this school and move to Japan. Who knows if they'll be willing to give me anything, though, which could mean a full semester more of classes to graduate.
I've been kinda-sorta thinking of going to grad school, but I think I had best do a year of work before I go into that. I'm thinking of going for JET, especially the program where they set you up in a government office, but not knowing when I will graduate makes it awful hard to get this shit together. I just want to be in Japan next year.
Sadly, I think I'm turning into a linguistics nerd - the mania for classifying and finding rules suits my nature. The question of the orgin of the Japanese language is really interesting to me as well. While we're talking about linguistics, people who call the descriptive nouns in Japanese anything other than nouns must be eliminated (well, convinced). And linguists who use non-IPA symbols - the whole point of IPA is to have a standard so I don't have to re-learn the symbols for every article! Use it, you fuckers! Also, people who call the Ryukyuan languages "dialects" of Japanese are extremely suspect (that is, they're probably nationalistic wack jobs). Then again, "Chinese" is not one language either, no matter how often they insist that it's just differences in "dialect". Though this is what makes linguistics dangerous to me - it's all grey areas - there is no clear line between a dialect and a language. Lots of terms have weak definitions or their definitions are not agreed on. It drives me a bit batty. Goddamn my anal tendencies.
Also, I've been reading to much weird political stuff (Lew Rockwell's site). That and hanging out with the Sierra club people (the president is ironically a sort of anarchist) has brought back my old revolutionary tendencies. Politics is a dangerous thing for me to get involved in - I don't really need the hassle and I'm skeptical about what can be accomplished - but somehow I can't resist. Now I'm involved in trying to get the school to actually recycle as a policy and to redo their food contract to consider things like organic food and such. I feel a weird mix of things, really, as on the one hand the food is not that great and far too expensive due to the school granted monopoly (which offends my libertarian leanings), but even off school property it's not cheap so I'm not sure how much of a positive difference can be made. Eh, whatever, some schools have better systems in place so why not us? Why should Sodexho get a fee from other companies that sell food on campus? Is it weird that I am opposing this on both free market capitalistic grounds and hippie save the earth grounds (or rather, is it weird that anyone would think these two are in conflict)?
Uuugh, must sleep...