thursday, friday, new year - part ii

[... continued]

friday:

early class, catch-up for the italian.
inspiration: not just anime nights, but another bi-weekly as well for all the "must-see" movies.

---quoting the lecturer: "ten centuries - what is that? i don't know the math... a thousand years, more or less?"
good grief. which reminds me, i've been helping pg with a piece on language's influence on math skills. the studies that have been done regarding the japanese and korean children's advantage over the american and french are decidedly unreliable, as there is so much else different that it is impossible to determine the validity of the tests or their results.

i propose taking an american community at random and teaching half the kids to count regularly and the other half to count using a new system:
1 ... one
...
9 ... nine
10 ... ten
11 ... ten one
...
19 ... ten nine
20 ... two ten
21 ... two ten one
... etc.

if that's the only meaningful difference between the two groups then we would be able to see the difference accurately. also, according to the accepted results there's far less chance of the children who learn the "new" math being at all disadvantaged as opposed to paving the way for a more efficient english.

---on the way out i was asked by a political science student why my family doesn't move to israel if things are so bad. i told her about a bunch of "me first! me! mine!" people who miss the important stuff because they're only interested in what's "important" according to some vague pseudo-scientific standard.
"really? is that what you think of us?" she asked, shocked.

the truth is, there's so much good in this country and that's the stuff that foreigners and immigrants see and feel. it takes a long time to get past the horrible stuff to see the beauty within; time that not many people really want to invest. that results in non-israeli enclaves, some of which are becoming really influential. which means we're losing the good stuff in israeli culture to a bunch of people who have only learned from them the bad (see principles - there're a few more in the pipeline).

---on the bus home i was inspired by wilde. the picture of dorian gray begins as a collection of interesting truths. i'm sold :)

i was accompanied by comfortably numb while carrying dry-cleaning home in the sun post-drizzle. i was greeted by a small frog waving a "happy new year!" flag - pg's been playing with her mum's art supplies :)
[even more fantastic was what she didn't present me with: a GIR rides piggy only with GIR disguised as a fish! ^_^]

i don't recall at what point in the day my mum called me, but aside from new year's wishes and old year's summaries we discussed the fact that yin's in cape town for new year's with a friend of hers and they're not going with tgtbt and family to the festival. i don't care if they don't dig the music; not seeing such an extraordinary and incredible event when you get the chance???

ridiculous.

i've also been asked by my mum to remove the soul patch. i'm so glad pg's behind me on that too :)

---i went to meet up with someone on the north side of town who was supposed to be waiting for me. when i called him up he told me he'd stepped out and would be back in ten minutes. i took a walk down the road, stopping in at a number of residences to be disappointed that nobody was home, and received a call from him saying that he was stuck in traffic and he'd be back in another ten minutes. i grabbed a toasted hotdog and slowly walked back to the meeting place... about ten minutes later he drove past, looking for parking.

i've ranted about this before: it's about a lack of respect for other people's time. if i had known that the ten minutes didn't include finding parking i might've behaved differently, instead of spending all of that half an hour sitting on a low wall waiting.

i hate waiting.

---i walked home briskly, strapped on my blades and flew over to urchin's to meet her family and help out a bit with their new year's preparations. now that i've met her brother's palestinian girlfriend i can see why she has such a profound influence on him - she's gorgeous.

i amused myself no end with a small, unhinged cupboard door that i'd laid flat on the floor and imagined as being an entrance to an orthogonal world.

a little rain made my travels back home a bit slippery; the guy working the kiosk was straight out of clerks ("i wasn't even supposed to be here today!").

i skidded straight to pg's for a hot shower and a glass of rum. aside from an excellent dinner with her family (there were some awkward moments, and one downright unpleasant one but the food was amazing), we had a really lazy evening. our plans went from the street party and a desert party to going to bed early.

---saturday:

i think that was the most needed sleep i've had since i last wrote a sentence like this. and it was good. we had a slow morning that was only improved upon by seeing us making pancakes and following them up with another nap.

---a chat with pg reminded me of a really embarrassing story from my youth (so of course, i'll share it with you). i was a pretty slow kid, and there were a lot of words that i'd picked up gists of without being informed of their actual meaning. i knew that "rape" was a violent act but i didn't know it involved sex.

i once jokingly shouted at my mother "if you don't let me go i'm going to rape you!" (thinking it could easily replace "kill" without being as bad). awkward.
no less awkward than finding myself at school, responding to "what do you want to be when you grow up?" with "a rapist".

---i left to get to work on the flash project - i was *so* glad, after spending a bit of time double-checking everything, to discover that the problem was on the user's side. they hadn't read the instructions. after a bit of facebooking i took a walk to the hotel to meet a cousin, her son and her mother-in-law for a couple of hours of non-stop chatter. it was a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours and it's always nice to meet new and likable family members :)

pg and i had a good dinner at coffeeholic, then separated so that i could write this and do some readings for the morning. as is apparent, this all took longer than planned: although she did help me digitize a page or two from my travel journal. wp sent me a message this morning that reminded me that i promised to send it to him... three months ago. and i haven't gotten more than halfway through japan yet...

boy, is it late. i need to get some sleep!

...

oh, yeah! HAPPY NEW YEAR!!! two-thousand-ten-one is going to be even better than its predecessor!