Close Encounters of the Diverse Kind

I just devoted my whole summer to Arabic, day in and day out, working hard, with blood, sweat, tears, and everything in between. For all that work, I got a certificate in the mail, an evaluation of "advanced plus" from a third-party language tester, and that sweet, special feeling of being able to say "I speak Arabic."

So what do I do, upon getting back to Berkeley, to keep up my Arabic, to prevent the attrition that happened last time around? Enroll in an advanced Arabic class, right?

Wrong. I, on a whim, sign up for beginning Vietnamese. Commitment issues, anyone?

Vietnamese, though, is awesomely fun. The language, meh: I hate vowels, and suck at tones, so I just have to keep reminding myself that this is good for me, if only because I now know how to pronounce "pho."

The class, though, cracks me up, mostly because it is so. freaking. Asian. The teacher quietly and politely calls s tudents to the front of the class, where they quietly and politely read the assigned dialogue out loud, after which we quietly and politely applaud. Really, though, I find it so funny because the class roll looks something like this:

Kevin Nguyen
Lisa Nyugen
Michelle Nguyen
Steven Nguyen
Tiffany Nguyen
Hannah English Surname
Joseph Tran
Linda Tran
Phyllis Tran
etc
etc
etc

That's right: I am the only non-Asian student in the class. We did a speaking exercise the other day about our nationalities, and we went around the room answering, which sounded a bit like this: "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-American." "I am Vietnamese-Cambodian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Indonesian-American." "I am Vietnamese-Chinese-American." "I am...American?" Good thing the word for "American" has a rising tone--if I sound underconfident, well, it's just the language.

You know that entry in Stuff White People Like about how white people like being the only white person around? (Now you do.) And about how ethnic restaurants are only judged to be good if they're full of non-white people? Well, maybe I should start judging my language class experience by the same criteria: it may not be the most effective teaching in the world, and I may be miles behind my classmates the heritage speakers, but at the very least I am having an authentic experience.

****

(Oh, and I'm going to write about my trip soon, I promise. Until then, I'll whet your appetite with this picture, taken in Bethlehem:

I think my new strategy for blogging about this trip might just be to, every post, promise that I will blog soon, and include a picture with the promise. It's not a bad strategy--if I post every, oh, few days or so, I could get through my pictures in only a few years!)

Master of My (Semantic) Domain, part 2

(part 1)

Sample sentences I understood today:

• The national petrol investment company of the United Arab Emirates announced today that it, along with a Qatari investment commisison, would establish an investment fund exceeding one billion dollars, in order to undertake an operation of capturing the world investment stage.
  
• Five judges in the high court of Iraq survived an assassination attempt when bombs exploded outside their homes east of the capital of Baghdad, in an incident anonymous sources described as a plot to terrorize the justice system.
  
• An Israeli spokesman said to the Reuters news agency that the Palestinian journalist who accused Israeli soldiers of detaining and torturing him upon his return from Europe to the West Bank "met with fair treatment during his inspection" and "underwent a routine check because of his suspected involvement in terrorist organizations"; the spokesman added that the journalist lost consciousness and fainted during the check for unknown reasons.
  

Sample sentences I misunderstood today:

• That'll be 50 piastres, please.
  
• The bus station is up the road and to the left.
• What do you think of Jordan?
  

No points for guessing where I get most of my Arabic language practice.

Wadi Mouth

I had forgotten, in my three years away from it, how much I enjoy Arabic: it's hard, what with the unfamiliar, hack-up-your-throat phonemes, complicated grammar, huge lexicon*, and diglossic sociolinguistic situation. Arabic's difficulty is what initially attracted me to it--I had a professor, my freshman year of college, who constantly complained about how hard it was, and so I registered for Arabic 101 to see what all the hype was--and its difficulty is what keeps me around. (Luckily, I have a clear distinction in my head between "grammar" and "dating.") There's just so much to love: weird number agreement rules, nominal cases, root-and-pattern morphology, and a dual. I mean, who doesn't love a good feminine dual now and then? (Grammar, people, not dating!)

One of my real favorite things about Arabic, though? The swearing. No, not the Arabic swearing--Arabs will never teach me swear words, a fact about being a woman in the Middle East that frustrates me even more than the excessive modesty requirements--but the English swearing, in Arabic: every other word, it seems, sounds like an English swear word. To wit:

(note: the "a" here is pronounced "uh" and the "q" is pronounced like a "k," but further back; see above, "hacking back-of-the-throat phonemes." All of the words are stressed on the first syllable, except for ittafaq, which is stressed on the last.)

fakkar: to think
fakka: small change
fakha: fruit
ittafaq: to agree
faqat: only
faqim: to be dangerous
faqd: loss

And those are just the f/k or q combinations; I haven't even gotten started on things like the Egyptian Arabic magabitsh, 'she didn't bring' or aashit, 'she lived.'

All this, of course, leads to the best story ever on this topic. Winter 2005, I was in an advanced Arabic literature class at BYU, in which we came across, in a short story, the word mufakk (keep in mind the pronunciation: moo-f*ck, basically). Someone asked the professor what it meant.

"Well," he said, "let's take it apart. What does that mu- mean? Right, it's the active participle marker. Okay, so a mufakk is a thing that fakks."

We are, by this point, trying to stifle our giggles as the professor continues. "So now we look at the meaning of the verb fakk. Does anyone know what fakk means?"

We smirk in silence. "No one? No one knows what fakk means?" Even the TA is laughing by this point--imagine! A BYU professor, swearing right there in class!--but nobody knows the meaning.

The professor sighs impatiently. "I can't believe nobody knows what fakk means. It means 'to screw'!"

The poor professor lost control of the class then for a good minute. The English/Arabic correspondence could not be more perfect: mufakk means 'screwdriver,' and so fakk means 'to screw in.' And so I will be forever loyal to Arabic for that alone--where else, after all, can a nice Mormon girl get some guilt-free swearing time?





*Ha! Look at me, perpetuating unfounded linguistic stereotypes! You** can't stop me!
**But I can stop me. Sigh. The idea of "number of words" in a language is pretty much meaningless, and so I can't really claim that Arabic has more words than English. I can claim, though, that Arabic writers love using as many synonyms as possible, which means a student's functional vocabulary must be, in a word, huge.

It's All Coming Back To Me Now

I'm in Amman this summer courtesy of Uncle Sam; the U.S. government, quite reasonably, wants Americans who speak Arabic, and so is generously paying for folks like me--that is, 'advanced' Arabic students--to live in the Middle East and improve their language skills. (I'm serious about the "generous" part: my entire studio apartment in California could probably fit into my courtesy-of-your-tax-dollars kitchen here.) I feel very lucky to have stumbled into such a good deal--I mean, what could be better than getting paid to go to two hours a day of class and then spend the rest of the day bumming around the streets of the city, eating hummus and falafel and fuul and tabouleh and occasionally practicing my Arabic. (I'm getting pretty good at, "Excuse me, may I please have some more hummus?")

The catch? I am not, in fact, an advanced Arabic student. A few years ago I was--upon returning from Egypt I tested to the advanced-mid level by the Foreign Service Institute's scale, good enough to earn me 0.5 bonus points in the State Department's hiring process--but, given that, until a week ago, I hadn't spoken a word of Arabic in slightly over three years, and given that in that three years I've studied four other languages, nearly reaching fluency in one, you can imagine what my Arabic retention was like: nil. I could remember most of the grammar rules--that's the fun part!--but had absolutely no vocabulary, and therefore couldn't speak or understand even a simple sentence. (To illustrate, I found, a little while ago, a video of myself, speaking Arabic, in a documentary I was in a few years back. The freakish part? I couldn't understand myself.)

In the few days I've been here, though, I've been surprised at what I'm starting to remember: words bubble up from the depths of my memory, words I haven't thought of in three years, and I find myself confidently answering when someone asks, "How do you say 'trash'?"(zibaala) or "What's the plural of 'daftar'?" (dafaatir). It's a totally bizarre feeling, especially since remembering a vocabulary item often comes with remembering the context in which I learned said item, meaning that I'm constantly remembering things about Egypt I hadn't thought of for years. (The lady under the stairwell who used to narrate for me what was happening on TV: "They shot him. Now he is dead. Now they are burying the body." The giant sign near my school that said "Alexandria is a love wave on Egyptian land." The carriage ride I took where the driver insisted on telling me about the size of an, ahem, certain part of the horse's anatomy. The large fox/wolf/dog that terrorized the streets of Alexandria for a few weeks. How an Egyptian friend, who attended a military camp every summer, tried to persuade me that Pepsi stands for "Pay Every Penny for Saving Israel" and Coca-Cola, read backwards in Arabic, says "No Mohammed No Mecca." The hurricanes that blew through the city in November. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.)

Much as I'm freaked out by the way my brain is supplying me with Arabic words--randomly! never when I need them! but startlingly well!--I'm happy with it: my two years of Arabic in college were not a total waste, and I haven't lost all my Arabic, just misplaced it for a bit. So everyone can breathe a sigh of relief: I did not, in fact, totally mislead Uncle Sam because I just might possibly belong in an advanced Arabic program. If only that translated to an ability to do more than just ask for more hummus.

Poor Performance or Plain Incompetence?

These are some actual sentences I produced yesterday.

First, the first thing out of my mouth when my friend picked up the phone:

I should take which direction to the airport?

That shouldn't be a wh-in situ question if I'm not echoing something previously said, and how can I be echoing something previously said if the conversation is just starting? I broke pragmatics with this one.

Second, referring to my worry about going up a hill in the wrong direction:

I'm just scared I'll drive it up the wrong way.

Um, that's a verb plus a prepositional phrase, not a verb-particle. I broke syntax with this one.

Third, and this one is so shockingly against all the rules of English grammar that it needs no context:

What should I drive past a?

A hideous, and egregiously wrong, blend of "What should I drive past?" and "I should drive past a what?" I think I just broke the English language with this one.

New Slang

Rolfo says that only I would get a pick-me-up out of learning new slang; I contend that if everyone knew what slang usage I was referring to, they, too, would find it almost unspeakably cool.

I stumbled across the construction in question on a t-shirt in Yogya; I was so enchanted by the words that I bought the t-shirt. (Because, really, isn’t cool slang worth a dollar?) It says, in so many words, saya ndak suka situ mbaca-baca tulisan ini. Kalo situ pengin mbeli aja sendiri, or, in translation, “I don’t like you reading this writing. If you want to, buy one yourself.”

Clever enough. The whole thing is very informal language: ndak is the central Javan adaptation of tidak, or “no”; kalo and pengin reflect recent vowel shifts in their spelling; mbaca-baca and mbeli are significant in that they use the Javanese verbal prefix N-, an assimilating nasal, instead of the more formal Indonesian meN-; aja is an informal version of saja, having, as is common in spoken Indonesian, dropped the initial s.

But all that is old slang, at least to me. The thing that really caught my eye was the word I translated as "you": situ. It's not technically a personal pronoun at all, but a term of spatial deixis. It means, literally, "there." So, again, "I don't like there reading this writing. If there wants to, buy one thereself."

Neat, huh? I mean, personal pronouns are a type of deixis, but spatial and social deixis are typically not so interchangeable. (Does anyone know another language that does this?) Apparently, though—and I’ve done my reading now—using “here” and “there” for “I” and “you” is becoming common in Indonesian youth language. Those crazy Indonesian youth! Here finds their language fascinating. Doesn't there?

Waiting For the Other Heel to Drop

As part of my Lenten vow, I’ve been satisfying my fiction cravings by reading in Indonesian. I’ve read some decent books so far—a few English novels in translation, one Egyptian novel in translation, and then, in an even bolder move, a few contemporary Indonesian works. One of them, They Say I’m a Monkey, a collection of short stories, was great, which is saying a lot because I usually don’t like short stories. Quality aside, though, the book was hard to read, at times, because the stories had a strong element of fantasy—pet leeches that turn into snakes when attached to the top of a character’s head are strange enough in your own language, but downright confusing in a foreign one. I had to look up the word “lintah” in about three different dictionaries before I finally had to accept that yes, the main character’s mother really is cuddling with a leech.

Even more confusing, though, at least in a literary context, is the fact that Indonesian doesn’t distinguish gender in pronouns, even the third person, which means that “he” and “she” are the same word. I started one of the stories, in which the main character was only referred to with the third-person pronoun, assuming that said character was a man; after all, he smoked cigarettes, wore sneakers, and rode in taxis by himself. So when a man across the hotel bar buys a drink for the main character, I thought, “oh, interesting, a glimpse into Jakarta’s underground gay scene.” When the main character reminisces about a former lover, Glen, missing his sweet words and the heat of his body, I thought, “well, I knew this book was progressive in its attitudes to sex, but wow! A homosexual hero! That is daring!” When the main character pulls out a long black gown, open in the back, that was a gift from Glen, I thought, “Amazing! A cross-dressing homosexual main character! Who would have thought?”

Then, finally, the main character, wearing the gown, with a pair of high heels replacing the sneakers, returns to the hotel bar to take the stage as the bar singer. I was floored, my thoughts racing: “I mean, I know Indonesia is relatively liberal about homosexuality, especially for a Muslim country, but still! What a daring move on the part of this writer, to center a story around a gay, cross-dressing, bar-singing hero…or, wait. Wait a second. Heroine. This character’s a woman. Duh.”

So, apparently, I am sexist: women can smoke cigarettes and wear sneakers too. They can even ride taxis by themselves! And they certainly look a lot better in high heels and slinky black gowns. Who knew?

Some Things Never Change

When I was a senior in high school, my Latin class's trip to Italy got cancelled because of September 11. A reporter for the town paper came around the school looking for suitable quotes for her piece on the topic. Instead of using deep thoughts from my peers, like "Man! This totally sucks!" she featured a quick interview with me, in which I said, "I am a bit disappointed" and pointed out that the trip's cancellation was rather paranoid; Italy and Afghanistan are not exactly close neighbors, and the danger to a bunch of 16 and 17-year olds travelling abroad would still come more from alcohol poisoning than terrorist attacks.

When the article was published, my friends all teased me endlessly. I sounded like an idiot, after all: what sort of high schooler, when denied a chance to see the glories of ancient Rome, tamely says "I am a bit disappointed"? Way back then, I tried to blame the reporter--I would never phrase things that way! She must have misquoted me!--but, having just reread the opening line of my last blog entry, I see now that I would, in fact, phrase things that way. So then, Local Reporter, wherever you are: I'm sorry. I should never have tried to blame you. Your reporting skills are better, and my sound-bite-giving skills worse, than I ever imagined. I am, all in all, a bit disappointed in myself.

Talk the Vote

Recently, I've been working on my graduate school (re)application. (I deferred and now have to reapply, with the assurance that I will be accepted again.) If I want a certain scholarship--and I do--I have to study a foreign language. I can't decide what I want to study next (7 down, several thousand to go), so I figured, hey, why not let the internet decide? So, here we are, a poll: what language should I study in graduate school?

Afrikaans (to quote a certain mountain climber, because it's there)
Arabic (I miss hacking up parts of my throat)
Dutch (super useful for Indonesian linguistics)
Farsi (to be the NSA's wet dream--Arabic, Indonesian and Farsi)
Indonesian (they have some lit classes that look fun)
Irish Gaelic (Welsh was fun, so why not Irish?)
Sanskrit (it's dead, so I would never have to speak)
Turkish (vowel harmony, plus see "Farsi" above)
Vietnamese (tones, topic-comment structure, reduplication, classifiers. Whee!)

Thoughts?

A Real Blog Post

Because I promised one, and because I keep my appointments...

(Name that allusion, please.)

I've been taking Javanese lessons for the past five weeks. I only meet with my teacher once a week, and I'm really lazy about studying vocabulary, so it hardly does any good, but at least now I can recognize what "monggo" means when people say it, oh, about every other word. (It means "please" or "after you" or, more generally, "I'm being polite to you right now.")

My lessons are, in general, a real kick: my Javanese teacher speaks no English, so I get long lists of Javanese vocabulary translated into Indonesian, and at least part of our lesson every week is devoted to fumbling around with an Indonesian dictionary trying to figure out what the heck "terjungkel" means. ("To fall over backwards from a squatting position"; a semantic space apparently highly necessary in a land of squat toilets.)

Last week's lesson was particularly confusing to me. The first four lessons followed what I viewed as a logical progression of vocabulary: greetings, politeness phrases, body parts, numbers, basic verbs, prepositions, and basic adjectives. Just the sort of words I need to start forming simple sentences, or, alternatively, to tell people that I don't speak any Javanese.

The fifth lesson, though, was a little different. Instead of moving from body parts to, say, days of the week, we went to "ways to move or position the aforementioned body parts." My vocabulary list at the end of last week's lesson looked something like this:

selonur: to sit with the legs stretched out
ndodok: to squat
sila: to sit cross-legged
ngeplak: to hit the head with the hand
ngeplok: to clap
njawil: to stroke the arm with the hand
merem: to close the eyes
melek: to open the eyes
mentheleng: eyes wide or bugging out
kera: cross-eyed
sipit: squinty-eyed like the Chinese (her words, not mine)
bangir: high-bridged nose
pesek: flat Asian nose
nyeprok: wide nose
ndomble: sagging lower lip
gugut: jutting chin
nyathis: receding chin
mecep: sticking the lips out
merot: sticking the lips to the side
melet: sticking the tongue out

Why, you may ask, would I need those words as the next basic step in learning Javanese? I asked myself the same thing. The lesson as a whole made no sense, not least because I don't know most of those words in Indonesian. And, please, let's be honest: what good will it really do if I describe someone as "squinty-eyed, with a flat Asian nose"? Number one, seeing as how I work and live with ethnic Chinese, it will do no good whatsoever. Number two, I just look racist. None of these words, I thought, could possibly be useful.

I was wrong. In the week that has elapsed since my lesson, I have heard the words ngeplak, ndodok, and gugut, and have used the word njawil. What's more, I have actually heard, from one of the teachers at my school, a description of her students as "squinty-eyed, with a flat Asian nose." Who's racist now?


*Nota Bene: not me. Actually, no one in this story. This blog entry might be better if followed by another one about how Indonesians are perfectly honest, and, to an American perspective, perfectly tactless in their physical descriptions. Teachers at my school are commonly described as "the fat one," "the short one," and "the black one." I goggle every time I hear this in Indonesian and now, thanks to my Javanese teacher, I can goggle every time I hear them in Javanese.

Oh, And In Case You Were Wondering...

There apparently is no common phrase in Indonesian for "virgin birth." The closest that the English teachers at my school could get was "born from a virgin girl." I feel cheated.

Overtaken by Grammar

Let's all pause in our pursuit of absolute foreign-culture hilarity for a moment here to remember that, yes, I was a linguistics major in college, and yes, I plan on pursuing that field further, and yes, I am a complete and utter nerd, and not just because I have programmed my cell phone to play "The Spirit of God" every time someone calls me.

With that in mind, you may continue reading. One of my favorite aspects of Indonesian grammar--and may I just take this opportunity to insist that it does have grammar, contrary to the beliefs of its native speakers--is the circumfix ke-...-an. For the most part, it's a rather innocuous little nominalizing affix, taking an adjective to an abstract noun: friendly to friendliness, beautiful to beauty, happy to happiness. For a certain small class of roots--and it is to the everlasting detriment of the language that this is not a productive function--this circumfix creates a word that roughly means "overtaken by X" or "caught by/in X." Hence, ketinggalan, "left behind," or "overtaken by staying"; kesiangan, "overslept," or "overtaken by late morning/early afternoon"; and, a word that has become increasingly important over the last week or so as Semarang enters the rainy season, kehujanan, or "caught in the rain."

I have been kehujanan several times already, none of them pleasant. The rain comes on quickly here, and, trust me, it never rains but it pours. One minute the sky looks normal, and the next minute the streets are flooded up to the ankles in water. (Semarang apparently has water-drainage issues, making it famous across Indonesia as a city of floods. My school principal, after seeing the worried look on my face as he told me this, reassured me that the floods "almost never" get above the knee.) Since I don't own an umbrella, and since I rely on my own two feet as my primary method of transportation, being kehujanan poses a problem for me; normally, in an American rain, I would dash from shelter to shelter, risking a few drops on my head, shoulders, knees, or toes, but here, the rain comes in buckets, not drops, and the air afterwards is much too humid to dry me off naturally. Hence, I am usually forced to change my plan and stay put--to flip through a magazine, browse a pirated DVD stand, or maybe write a blog entry--and simply wait it out.

Luckily for me, the rain usually stops as suddenly as it starts. Barely 20 minutes ago, it was hard to see out the window for the rain, and now the sun is shining again and I am free to put the finishing touches on inconsequential blog entries and leave the shelter of the internet cafe for home. So there's your free lesson on Indonesian grammar for the day; stay tuned for next week's installment of "Affixes I Have Loved": the suffix -an attached to a reduplicated base. It's a doozy.

At Least It's Not Crabs

My school principal recently taught me an Indonesian phrase, in reference to my stalker: ada udang di balik batu, or "there is a lobster behind the stone." It means that someone has hidden intentions: a wolf in sheep's clothing, as it were. I get the image, and I get the point, but what I don't get is this: who on earth thought of this phrase, and why? Who first saw someone with an unclear and possibly malicious motive, and said, "Hey, guys, I've got it! It's like a lobster, see, crouching behind a rock. How perfect!"

Hm. Maybe this is a question for the 100 Hour Board. How much would you hate me, Katya, if I asked?

Let's Study English Using Our Respective Idiolects

The above is a title of a "teach yourself English" type of book I found once at a bookstore here. I was rather bothered by this title: first, it's not exactly the catchiest of phrases, and one rather wonders what less-than-savvy marketer let it get past (I mean, it's not as if LSEUORI even makes a memorable acronym!), and second, do we really want everyone studying English using their respective idiolects? I think not. What would English be like if we just, willy-nilly, continued to let me egregiously mispronounce "caricature"? What if no one stopped Alea from misinterpreting basic English syntax? Just imagine the chaos!

In any case, I've seen plenty of examples of English around here that put the "idio" in "idiolect." This is to be expected in a non English-speaking country; Egypt had some great examples, such as my personal favorite, a T-shirt that read "I'M NOT GOING TO PROCLAIM VICTORY OVER THE GREAT SATA SIMLPLY BECAUSE MY GEEK CORPS MANAGED TO MADOC THE NASDAQ SYSTEM." (Yes, those capital letters were on the T-shirt.) So far I've been amused by such gems as misspelled dirty words on supposed "hardcore" T-shirts and bumper stickers, strange phrases on notebooks ("I Love Pig"), and trendy little teen lit novels called "I'm Not Bitch!" and "Vagina's Dilemma." (This last, upon further investigation, turned out to be a nickname for the novel's heroine, Varah Ghita Nabila.)

Yesterday, though, took the cake (so far). Wednesday is my day off, and yesterday I spent it lazing about the house of an Indonesian friend. She picked me up early in the morning and drove me to her house, where we then chatted, ate food, watched her young nephew run crazily around the house, ate some more food, and...well, you get the picture. To combat the real heat of the day, we spread pillows on the floor and collapsed to watch a movie. The film du jour, apparently, was a pirated version of "The Da Vinci Code," with a dark, fuzzy picture, poor quality sound, and terrible English subtitles. I couldn't really understand what the characters were saying, and couldn't even rely on the subtitles to fill me in. They included such dubious renderings as "shoot go!" for "fire away" and "so correct your liver" for "your heart is true," and, even more bizarrely, "I in shoot, and I is soybean cake bleed" for "I have been shot, and I am bleeding." I don't know what English word sounded like "soybean cake" to that poor subtitler, but I have to admit it certainly spiced up the film.

(I'm sorry, Ron Howard, but that's a sad commentary on your film. Not even Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, and Paul Bettany, some of my favorites, could salvage it. I think you would have been better off just sticking with "And now the story of a mysterious family that lost everything, and the one professor that had no choice but to put it all soybean cake together.*")



*Props, as always, to Misaneroth.

Foreign or Just Stupid? Act II

In a warung, or food stall by the side of the road, my host mother handed me a plate of food. "This is called nasi ruwet," she said, in English. "That means 'complicated rice' in Javanese. We call it 'complicated' because there are so many ingredients."

"Interesting," I said, "but I didn't quite catch that word you used to describe the rice. It's a word I've never heard before, after all. Can you repeat it slowly so I can remember it?"

My host mother leaned forward to make sure I could see her lips, and said, very carefully enunciating each syllable, "Com....pli....ca....ted."

Fun with H., My Favorite of the Maids

One of the features of having servants is that I don't get to do anything by myself; in fact, I think they deliberately hide things (such as the toaster) in order to prevent me from doing mundane kitchen tasks (such as toasting bread) by myself. If I even so much as start serving myself rice, a maid, or sometimes two, comes running into the dining room to do it for me. No! Heaven forbid I be forced to do something for myself!

The other day, the task at hand was cutting an apple. My attempt to do this alone stymied by the fact that knives are among those kitchen implements conveniently hidden from view. Admitting defeat, I wandered into the servant's kitchen to ask for a knife, only to realize that I couldn't remember the Indonesian word for knife. The ensuing conversation went something like this:

Hannah: Um, excuse me...do you have something here for cutting an apple?
H.: Yes! Of course! Here.
Hannah: What is this called?
H.: (very slowly) This...is...called..."pisau."
Hannah: Thanks. Oh, and is there another one? My friend needs one too.
H.: (nods, gets another knife.) This...is...also...called..."pisau."

Sometimes I think people around here get "foreign" and "stupid" mixed up. In any case, I'll never again forget the word for knife.

(This is not nearly the funniest story I've heard about language mixups and knives; a former roommate once, while praying in Arabic, forgot the word for "atonement." Deciding to substitute a random word instead, she ended up thanking God for Jesus' knife. It's a good thing the Lord looketh upon the heart.)

Thoughts, Alone On Campus At Midnight

Never adopt the old-lady habit of turning your headlights on at daylight. You will forget them when you turn off the car, guaranteed. Also, Petra, you are stupid.

Why was it necessary to drive to campus, anyway? Doesn’t the idea of walking sound so much more appealing?

Thank heaven for cell phones.

Hi there, Tolkien Boy. Hi there, Optimistic. Hi there, Roommate’s Boyfriend. Hi there, Roommate’s Fiance. Hi there, Friend From Old Ward. Does no one have jumper cables?

What could the University Police possibly be doing right now that they can't help me?

Never be caught anywhere without a book. Drat.

Why, oh why, won’t the internet work? Oh, please, technological powers that be, smile upon me!

iFilm is one cool program.

Actually, Macs are just cool in general. I’m a fan.

Desert climates get rather chilly in the evening. I should have brought a sweater.

Be polite to the police, even when they make you wait for forty-five minutes in the middle of the night. All can be forgiven, as long as they come bearing jumper cables and a working car as a peace offering.