(no subject)
Mar. 15th, 2005 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Found this song in my iTunes library. It was called "track 5" and had no artist.
Googled the most distinctive bit of lyrics I could find-- "carve your name into my arm"-- and mostly I found the lyrics quoted in the blogs and personal profiles of, well, foreign teenage girls. Without, of course, the artist accredited. Finally found the name.
By then I realized that the track was incomplete, so I deleted it. But it was my nifty bit of detective work. Utterly pointless; it's not a particularly good song.
Have to clean out this damned music library. So much of it dates from one brief frenzy on Audiogalaxy back when it was cool and, well, existed. I binged and have all this disorganized stuff, and I wish I could just figure out what's what, but...
Ugh, the coughing won't stop.
Watched a movie with Dave-- finally gathered the strength to pop in Insomnia, the original 1997 Norwegian version of it. I swear the hotel reception girl was in 13th Warrior. And the detective woman, played in the remake by Hilary Swank, she was oddly familiar too.
Dave and I watched Insomnia, the Al Pacino version, either early in our dating or before we were actually dating, I don't remember which. (Looking up the year it came out would probably help.) It was a very, very weird movie. The original Norwegian one was also weird. They were very similar but quite different. In the remake, Pacino's character is very much a helpless figure, trapped in a spiral of events beyond his control, and it all sort of resolves in the end and there is quite a strong statement made about the Hilary Swank character's relative inexperience and how this should shape her perception of things, etc.
The Norwegian one has no such message. The Swank character leaves the cartridge on the nightstand and walks out, and the Pacino character drives home.
The Pacino character in the original Norwegian one is a great deal more sinister, darker, more violent. Less befuddled, more insane. Scarier: he's not even trying to do the right thing.
Lots of neat lighting stuff (the premise in both movies being that the sun never goes down because they're above the Arctic Circle and it's summer), lots of disorienting camera cuts, lots of funky sound design.
I imagine it would have been more interesting if my Norwegian were better. I couldn't distinguish among the accents, which were a detail my cousins had remarked upon when talking about the movie. I couldn't even distinguish between the Pacino character's Swedish and the Norwegian spoken by the rest of the characters. (It was significant: several characters claimed not to be able to understand him, although the languages are quite close-- I do recall listening to Andreas [my cousin] speaking with a Swede, a lengthy conversation, and at the end on the way home he shook his head to me and said "what an ugly language"-- he'd understood most of it but had to repeat himself a lot, and was disgusted because the Swede had obviously considered him a rube, because his accent is heavy Bergenese, the major city in the west of Norway, as far from Sweden as you can get and considered rough and rustic by other Scandinavians.) My other cousin, Aleksander, is a linguistics major and we had a fascinating conversation about the different qualities of the dialects of Norwegian... but I really don't know the language, except for the tremendous quantity of its vocabulary that is cognate with English. Old Norse and Old English were mutually comprehensible, which is something the Vikings Novel hinges on... I've entirely lost whether I'm in a parenthetical aside or not. I think I am quite tired. I am also, inexplicably, feeling glum and beat-down, which could be the movie, or could instead be the reason I agreed to watch the movie instead of trying to do anything more useful tonight.
I miss studying languages, I miss the way different languages feel in your mouth, I miss the thrill of being newly-able to express myself in an entirely different idiom. I miss the feeling of thinking differently instead of translating in your head. I miss making foreign shapes with my mouth and hearing that suddenly I don't sound like an English speaker anymore, hearing that I can understand the sounds I'm making-- and the thrill of discovering that others can understand as well. I miss climbing around inside the intricate hierarchies of verb conjugations in Japanese (they load so much meaning into the verbs; what conjugation you use is so dependent on to whom you are speaking-- and things we think are important they haven't even a word for. No pronouns, no articles, and word order is utterly unimportant provided the verb comes last); I miss their clean vowels and the bent simple consonants and the nasalized g that none of the books mentioned-- but when either of my professors said "arigato" it came out "ari(n)gato".
I really miss the everyday metaphors, the little relics of culture that shape the languages, like how in Spanish you often preface statements with "ojala", which roughy translates to "i hope", but literally translates "God willing"-- God being Allah, phonetically, and it being a remnant of the Moorish occupation. And the entire subjunctive verb tense, really-- it is so rarely used in English anymore that I often have to stop and double-check to be sure I am doing it correctly, but it is all-important in Spanish because their culture is much more aware of the uncertainty of life.
It is frustrating. I wish I could have made something of studying language. But, as with so many things, I seem to possess precisely half a talent for it. I am talented enough to grasp about half of the subject at hand with incredible alacrity, to have several exceptionally good skills and to love the subject, but when it comes to actually being good at it, doing well, I fall short. I wonder if I have some sort of learning disability. I am like this with language-- phonetically, instinctively, I do very well indeed, but then I cannot memorize, cannot use a dictionary to save myself (honestly, I am dictionary-retarded), and can translate only by feel and instinct, often doing very well but being utterly unable to back up my translation with any kind of scholarly thought.
I am similarly half-talented at music. I have very good tone, very good rhythm-- but not exceptional, and I cannot read music well no matter what. I can play by ear very well and always skated by on that, and so never became any good at actual music-reading.
I am half-talented at art. I have a good eye for detail and a love of drawing, but a terrible sense of composition and no color sense to speak of.
It is all very frustrating. I want to pursue all of these things but am not good enough at any one of them to be serious. All I have is writing; that is the only talent I possess that I do not have any crippling weaknesses in. But I don't know what to do with it. I do not seem to be able to write anything for anyone else-- not help systems or web pages or newspaper articles or columns of commentary-- and writing for myself is so difficult to focus.
So I tend bar instead, and have discovered that I can charm strangers and mix up a mean bloody mary. Good life skills, I suppose.
Ah, I obviously need to go to sleep.
Googled the most distinctive bit of lyrics I could find-- "carve your name into my arm"-- and mostly I found the lyrics quoted in the blogs and personal profiles of, well, foreign teenage girls. Without, of course, the artist accredited. Finally found the name.
By then I realized that the track was incomplete, so I deleted it. But it was my nifty bit of detective work. Utterly pointless; it's not a particularly good song.
Have to clean out this damned music library. So much of it dates from one brief frenzy on Audiogalaxy back when it was cool and, well, existed. I binged and have all this disorganized stuff, and I wish I could just figure out what's what, but...
Ugh, the coughing won't stop.
Watched a movie with Dave-- finally gathered the strength to pop in Insomnia, the original 1997 Norwegian version of it. I swear the hotel reception girl was in 13th Warrior. And the detective woman, played in the remake by Hilary Swank, she was oddly familiar too.
Dave and I watched Insomnia, the Al Pacino version, either early in our dating or before we were actually dating, I don't remember which. (Looking up the year it came out would probably help.) It was a very, very weird movie. The original Norwegian one was also weird. They were very similar but quite different. In the remake, Pacino's character is very much a helpless figure, trapped in a spiral of events beyond his control, and it all sort of resolves in the end and there is quite a strong statement made about the Hilary Swank character's relative inexperience and how this should shape her perception of things, etc.
The Norwegian one has no such message. The Swank character leaves the cartridge on the nightstand and walks out, and the Pacino character drives home.
The Pacino character in the original Norwegian one is a great deal more sinister, darker, more violent. Less befuddled, more insane. Scarier: he's not even trying to do the right thing.
Lots of neat lighting stuff (the premise in both movies being that the sun never goes down because they're above the Arctic Circle and it's summer), lots of disorienting camera cuts, lots of funky sound design.
I imagine it would have been more interesting if my Norwegian were better. I couldn't distinguish among the accents, which were a detail my cousins had remarked upon when talking about the movie. I couldn't even distinguish between the Pacino character's Swedish and the Norwegian spoken by the rest of the characters. (It was significant: several characters claimed not to be able to understand him, although the languages are quite close-- I do recall listening to Andreas [my cousin] speaking with a Swede, a lengthy conversation, and at the end on the way home he shook his head to me and said "what an ugly language"-- he'd understood most of it but had to repeat himself a lot, and was disgusted because the Swede had obviously considered him a rube, because his accent is heavy Bergenese, the major city in the west of Norway, as far from Sweden as you can get and considered rough and rustic by other Scandinavians.) My other cousin, Aleksander, is a linguistics major and we had a fascinating conversation about the different qualities of the dialects of Norwegian... but I really don't know the language, except for the tremendous quantity of its vocabulary that is cognate with English. Old Norse and Old English were mutually comprehensible, which is something the Vikings Novel hinges on... I've entirely lost whether I'm in a parenthetical aside or not. I think I am quite tired. I am also, inexplicably, feeling glum and beat-down, which could be the movie, or could instead be the reason I agreed to watch the movie instead of trying to do anything more useful tonight.
I miss studying languages, I miss the way different languages feel in your mouth, I miss the thrill of being newly-able to express myself in an entirely different idiom. I miss the feeling of thinking differently instead of translating in your head. I miss making foreign shapes with my mouth and hearing that suddenly I don't sound like an English speaker anymore, hearing that I can understand the sounds I'm making-- and the thrill of discovering that others can understand as well. I miss climbing around inside the intricate hierarchies of verb conjugations in Japanese (they load so much meaning into the verbs; what conjugation you use is so dependent on to whom you are speaking-- and things we think are important they haven't even a word for. No pronouns, no articles, and word order is utterly unimportant provided the verb comes last); I miss their clean vowels and the bent simple consonants and the nasalized g that none of the books mentioned-- but when either of my professors said "arigato" it came out "ari(n)gato".
I really miss the everyday metaphors, the little relics of culture that shape the languages, like how in Spanish you often preface statements with "ojala", which roughy translates to "i hope", but literally translates "God willing"-- God being Allah, phonetically, and it being a remnant of the Moorish occupation. And the entire subjunctive verb tense, really-- it is so rarely used in English anymore that I often have to stop and double-check to be sure I am doing it correctly, but it is all-important in Spanish because their culture is much more aware of the uncertainty of life.
It is frustrating. I wish I could have made something of studying language. But, as with so many things, I seem to possess precisely half a talent for it. I am talented enough to grasp about half of the subject at hand with incredible alacrity, to have several exceptionally good skills and to love the subject, but when it comes to actually being good at it, doing well, I fall short. I wonder if I have some sort of learning disability. I am like this with language-- phonetically, instinctively, I do very well indeed, but then I cannot memorize, cannot use a dictionary to save myself (honestly, I am dictionary-retarded), and can translate only by feel and instinct, often doing very well but being utterly unable to back up my translation with any kind of scholarly thought.
I am similarly half-talented at music. I have very good tone, very good rhythm-- but not exceptional, and I cannot read music well no matter what. I can play by ear very well and always skated by on that, and so never became any good at actual music-reading.
I am half-talented at art. I have a good eye for detail and a love of drawing, but a terrible sense of composition and no color sense to speak of.
It is all very frustrating. I want to pursue all of these things but am not good enough at any one of them to be serious. All I have is writing; that is the only talent I possess that I do not have any crippling weaknesses in. But I don't know what to do with it. I do not seem to be able to write anything for anyone else-- not help systems or web pages or newspaper articles or columns of commentary-- and writing for myself is so difficult to focus.
So I tend bar instead, and have discovered that I can charm strangers and mix up a mean bloody mary. Good life skills, I suppose.
Ah, I obviously need to go to sleep.
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no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 05:46 am (UTC)I took Japanese for one semester, right before I visited. (Mostly so I could learn to say "I speak no Japanese" and "That man is allergic to tomatoes" [the Conejo]). At any rate, what's the story with the "u" in Japanese? Is it always unvoiced and in "des[u] ka"? Or did my teacher just have a silly accent?
Hope you get some good rest and the coughing clears up.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 05:47 am (UTC)as in
no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 12:56 pm (UTC)I minored in Japanese because I thought it might be cool and I was considering going to Japan to teach English. (I got chicken, though.)
The thing with the "u" is that it's not utterly unvoiced, it's just... well.. no, you're right. Your mouth forms the shape but your voice doesn't do anything. I'm not positive why, it's just how it is. Even in mid word-- sukiyaki sounds like s'kiyaki.
I think the thing is that the Japanese don't think in letters, they think in syllables. A consonant (except the final n can't exist on its own, but has to be paired with a vowel. So the u consonants are mostly silent, and are there to tell the speaker how to pronounce the consonant.
I learned all kinds of useless things, but for me the class mostly degenerated into my utter inability to memorize the kanji characters. I did phenomenally well at the grammar and vocabulary but remained functionally illiterate throughout. (Also, as I was left-handed, my handwriting was nearly illegible, and most Asian cultures are far less tolerant of poor handwriting than this one. And, in fact, Japanese calligraphy cannot be done left-handed.) The professor asked me at the end of the 4th semester if I would please continue, as she thought it would be easier for me the next year, but by then I had decided I probably wasn't going to pursue a career in this Nigh-Impossible language (Honestly, I was getting 40-50% of the kanji wrong even after 10 hours of studying for a quiz), so i didn't stick around, and went off to learn Welsh instead. (So much easier. But the prof wouldn't let me use the dictionary unsupervised after the "see" incident.)
I feel like a truck hit me this morning, so perhaps the rest didn't work, but I'm hoping a few hours of being awake, and a few doses of aspirin, will help where rest failed...
no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 11:13 am (UTC)Wish I could mix a Bloody Mary.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-16 12:47 pm (UTC)I should give them a chance, then. I just didn't think it worthwhile to hunt down a new copy of the song when I discovered it was incomplete.
>Bloody Mary
Know what the secret is?
Bloody Mary mix.
^.^
And if you want to save on dishes, pour the vodka and mix at the same time, so you don't have to mix it quite so much. If you put the vodka in first and then the mix, you have to shake it or at least pour it from one glass to the other and back (that's called 'rolling'). And then you have two dirty glasses. Pfeh.
The thing is I've never tasted one of my own bloody marys. I just have customer feedback to go on.
Hey, do bartenders in Britain earn tips? I can't remember.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-17 09:01 pm (UTC)Do bartenders earn tips? Yeah, sometimes, and some people do remember to leave a bit of money for waitresses and whatnot. It's not expected, though, or guaranteed. In a pub, rather than a restaurant, it's likely for a regular to say "one for yourself" and you pocket the money.