6 things meme
This is more Random Babbling than 6 Strange Things, but oh well. What else am I supposed to do when stuck at my desk during midterms?
1. I can't drink soda. Anything with carbonation burns my tongue and I am in pain and ow. Also I'm very sensitive to spices. I'm much better than I used to be. Everyone who went to American public schools, you know that cheese whizz they would serve with taco-chips at lunch? In first grade that was too spicy for me, but by middle school I could eat it. Mom was the same way, and now she can drink soda (because in college that was all the vending machines had). But I don't think I even want to try to become acclimated because 1. pain and 2. tooth decay and 3. another unhealthy consumable? No thanks.
2. I'm roughly half-Irish (as are both my parents) and a quarter Polish and a quarter English. But I feel really close to my Irish heritage. Both my parents seem to choose their Irish heritage over any other. Although, to be fair, it's not like there are a lot of Polish cultural specials on PBS. And Ireland is a very romantic country. Anyway, I'm kind of resigned to being in love with Ireland, no matter how cliched a tourist image I'm buying into. Ever since I was a tiny girl, I've wanted to learn Irish. But there was no one to teach it to me, and I got stuck taking Spanish instead. Bah. I've taken a year of Old English, Latin, Attic Greek, 5 years of Spanish, and 3 of Japanese, but I would have given all of them up in a second to learn Irish. I tried to learn with the book tape things, but I just think I learn better in a classroom. If you present me with a large amount of knowledge all at once, I feel like I have to memorize it all perfectly or else I don't allow myself to continue. And also I am famously lazy, and going to class forces me to learn. (Considers studying kanji. Goes back to reading fic. Ack I feel so awkward about studying kanji at work!)
3. I'm a film nut. I've taken several film classes and I embarked on a project of cultural literacy education in middle school in which I tried to at least know the summaries and impact of the classics, if not watch all of them. I have a tape library with films and series and sporting events and specials. I'm building a similar matching burned cd and dvd library. (Though I haven't checked all of them for fire damage.) This is not to mention my mountains of books. I think that especially with books I'm guilty of buying and then not reading. Reading books always seemed to come after watching TV and movies, and nowadays, after reading fic *and* watching TV. But I am also guilty of taping and never watching and downloading and burning and never watching. Most of the the stuff I lost with that hard drive was stuff that had been waiting for me to watch it for years (I try to not burn things until I watch them as a motivator because I need to burn to free space for stuff I actually want to watch.) like VHD Bloodlust, etc. And I have a good memory of what type of tape or CD or DVD, what it looks like, what else is on there, about what time period I made it. Because I've, uh, looked through them all so often. So while I'm very familiar with the mental picture of the tape label on which is written "Alien," and "Grand Hotel," I've haven't actually *watched* them yet.
4. I love to catalogue. I have slightly over 700 of my taped-from-TV video tapes catalogued, although I haven't cross-referenced *all* my shows in spreadsheets, just about eight or so. I only have about a hundred or two tapes left to catalogue. I constructed a little structure under the TV. We have a shelf that pulls out slightly (probably for a stereo or something). So I constructed little cardboard sleeves that would hold four tapes deep, That way you can just pull out the cardboard "row" of four tapes where the tape you want is, and not have to worry about leaving enough space to shift tapes and keeping them all in order, etc. I've made a movie-special list, and I've put the entire catalogue in word processing as well as on actual notecards (redundancy!) so it's all text-searchable. I have been *very* interested in all these cataloguing softwares I see online nowadays. They make me hot. God. The Amazon links... I need imdb etc. links too, but its an awesome idea. It'll have to wait for tapes and books though, because those are all at Mom's. I did manage to bring my entire CD/DVD collection (to which I've added substantially since I've been here) to Japan, taking up an entire piece of small luggage.
I only have my children's books catalogued so far, although they are all alphabetized by author within their categories of childhood, adult, nonfiction, fiction, and separated by big and small size. I have been known to put many bookcases together for them.
I only have 127 burned CDs and DVDs catalogued, and *thousands* more undone. I'm kind of daunted by it, because if I'm going to catalogue, I should do it right and go through and check *every single disc* for fire damage, which means copying the contents of every disc to my hd just to be sure. And I should also weed out redundancy, like the older versions of Cowboy Bebop that I don't need anymore. Anyway. Lazy. But One of These Days!
5. I was a rabid Celtics fan, an extreme Larry Bird fan, but modern basketball doesn't do anything for me because I don't know anyone anymore, and because the game has become so much more about thuggery brute force and so much less about skill and ball-handling and *teamwork*. Where's the weave?? Now, figure skating. The love is still going strong. I appreciate figure skating both for the people that I know and love and for the sport itself. If someone does a good performance, it doesn't matter if I've never seen them before. I still love to watch it. Of course, I am still all about Michelle Kwan. Among others.
6. I am a grammar nazi. Most of the Engrish in Japan is kitschy and hilarious, but I was walking past a "Hair Crinic" the other day. And I've been on the lookout for a good hair place, trying to overcome my fear of getting a haircut in Japan. But seriously, if they don't take care in the spelling of the name of their business when it is so easy to use a dictionary, I don't trust that they'll take care of my hair.
I'll forgive the Japanese mostly, but I won't forgive native speakers. It's true that the English language is a slippery thing, and there are some things that will never both sound right and be grammatically correct. ("Me, too" springs to mind, but there are non-colloquial examples, especially in tricky subject-verb number agreement situations, and sometimes there is no clear correct answer.) And a certain amount of honest erring is excusable. But there are some mistakes, especially in "published" works like fics (or man, the OC writers really love making their characters say things like "That will be great for Sandy and I when we go there."), that are just egregious. Fix your subjunctive! Fix your objective/subjective case pronoun problems! And for God's sake, fix your *spelling*.