Trekspam: Postscript
May. 11th, 2009 08:43 amFor what it's worth, "nyota" means "star" in Swahili.
Make of that what you will.
Make of that what you will.
25 Random Things Meme
Feb. 2nd, 2009 08:07 pmAll right, all right! I’ll do the damn meme, Facebook. Yeesh. Pushy bastard.
25 Random Things About Me:
1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.
2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.
3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.
4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)
5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.
7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.
8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.
9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.
10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)
11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.
12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.
13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.
14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.
15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.
16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
17. I’ve had malaria.
18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.
19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”
20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.
21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.
22. I collect mermaids.
23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.
24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.
25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.
Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!
25 Random Things About Me:
1. For me, some very strange words are intrinsically onomatopoeic—such as garnet, swelter, and bottle. It's an odd extra of the synesthesia, I guess.
2. I chose Kenya for study abroad because I was already studying Swahili. I was already studying Swahili because one day in high school I saw a book in the library that said Teach Yourself Swahili and I figured, why not? Life is just full of these little oddities.
3. I am a first degree black belt in tae kwon do. No, really. No, really.
4. When I was in elementary school I spent every single recess from third through fifth grade meandering around in circles on the school’s crummy little track. I was dreaming up story ideas. I never realized how weird this was. (In sixth grade I discovered that I could do odd jobs in the library at recess.)
5. I started conlanging for real at the age of 12 or 13 when I included a sentence in “Yoshese” in a Super Mario story I was writing. I believe the sentence was “They don’t call him ‘Fireball’ for nothing!”
6. When I was ten, I struck up a long-lasting friendship with a children’s book author because of my name.
7. At one point in my house we had three cats, a budgie, a rabbit, and intermittent frogs and goldfish.
8. According to my mom, I have a defective imaginary audience—that chorus of people we think is watching our every move and judging us. Mine rarely shows up, and when it does it’s after the fact. It makes me immune to self-consciousness most of the time, but it also puts people off.
9. Between the ages of about four and seventeen, I was the Human VCR. I could recite or sing almost everything you told me after hearing it once, and I can still recite everything I learned back then. This includes the entirety of “Yakko’s World,” Rockapella’s “Capital,” and songs I didn’t understand—I learned “Cielito Lindo” from a Speedy Gonzales cartoon, and could sing a song in French. The trick was to memorize the sounds, not the words themselves. Either normal brain development or antidepressants robbed me of the ability.
10. Kermit the Frog was my first crush. (I was four.)
11. I have skinny-dipped at night in a phosphorescent ocean.
12. My hip still sports a big old scar from the great rollover car crash I was in when I was six. I got out of my seatbelt for ten seconds to reach for some markers on our cross-country trip, and of course those ten seconds were the ones we crashed in. I was thrown from the car so violently that I blew the back doors open; I apparently skidded to a halt and shredded my right side. I woke up in a thorn bush and for the next six months was picking thorns and broken glass out of my scalp. But all my abrasions were superficial, and I didn’t even break any bones.
13. I used to play the stand-up bass in orchestra and jazz band in school. That got me involved in all sorts of crazy capers.
14. I am a tea snob and can tell you the correct temperature and brewing time for white, red, green, black, and herbal teas. People laugh at me until they realize that the tea I make tastes a helluva lot better because it’s done right.
15. I once threatened to steal Penn Jillette’s ponytail, until he pointed out there was no way I could reach it with our height discrepancy. I still plan to steal his house someday, though.
16. My birthday is International Talk Like A Pirate Day.
17. I’ve had malaria.
18. I have a huge crush on Dr. Henry McCoy from X-Men. My friend drew several comics in which she and I hounded him the way Twilight fans hound Robert Pattinson, although to my knowledge Twifans have not, so far, given the object of their affections a bubblebath in a big washpan in the front yard.
19. For years I had a “Padawan braid” at my left temple while I kept the rest of my hair short. People knew me as “the girl with the braid.”
20. Until I was 19, I had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Then Liz, my best friend in college, introduced me to it. Blame her.
21. Liz and I also started CSI Night our first year in college, which remained a weekly party over the next four years. Sometimes we actually even watched CSI.
22. I collect mermaids.
23. I know how to cast a piece of jewelry using the lost wax process.
24. I have had a theme song since before I was born, courtesy of my mom, who would put headphones on her pregnant stomach while she worked and pump in Annie Lennox’s “There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart).” According to her, I could recognize that song long before I noticed any other music.
25. I once got to be in the OR to watch a brain surgery. I was really enjoying it right up until I passed out.
Most of you with Facebook accounts have probably already been tagged 25 times, but if not consider yourself tagged. I like random facts about people!
Blindsided By Foreign
Mar. 20th, 2008 01:33 amAbsolutely Incredible Kid Day
Companies That Care Day
Great American Meatout
Maundy Thursday
Holy Thursday
National Agriculture Day
Ostara (Wiccan)
Purim (begins at sundown - Jewish)
Proposal Day
Spring Begins
Vernal Equinox
Snowman Burning
Ta'Anit Ester (Fast of Esther - Jewish)
Birthday - Fred "Mr." Rodgers (children's host)
Independence Day (Tunisia)
Companies That Care Day
Great American Meatout
Maundy Thursday
Holy Thursday
National Agriculture Day
Ostara (Wiccan)
Purim (begins at sundown - Jewish)
Proposal Day
Spring Begins
Vernal Equinox
Snowman Burning
Ta'Anit Ester (Fast of Esther - Jewish)
Birthday - Fred "Mr." Rodgers (children's host)
Independence Day (Tunisia)
Last night ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
chibicharibdysand I were at the bus station waiting to go to our writers’ group,* and I was feeling a little mopey because it has turned out that I am her replacement—she’s moving back to Hawai’i over spring break, and I won’t get to hang out with her anymore, and we were just becoming in-real-life-meatspace friends!—when this dude came straight over to me, smiling.
chibicharibdysand I were at the bus station waiting to go to our writers’ group,* and I was feeling a little mopey because it has turned out that I am her replacement—she’s moving back to Hawai’i over spring break, and I won’t get to hang out with her anymore, and we were just becoming in-real-life-meatspace friends!—when this dude came straight over to me, smiling.Let me just reiterate something here: I suck at faces. Even when my vision is 20/20, I have trouble recognizing people who are not a) part of my immediate family, or b) people I’ve been familiar with for years. I used to have trouble in clothing retail because I didn’t recognize customers when they came out of the dressing room. I hate movies that have casts featuring a bunch of similar people in similar outfits, because I can never tell who is the villain.** So when random guys start moseying up to me in the bus stop, I am going to be just a bit nervous. Is this an acquaintance? A stranger asking for the time? A stranger asking for money? A stranger with a gun asking for money? A relative? It could be any of those things.
And then, when he says “Habari gani?”—which is something you say to a random person in Kenya where you’re on an old town street discovering the meaning of the phrase “solar radiation” while somebody walks by with a handcart full of water tanks and kids behind you are yelling “Mzungu give me a shilling,” and not something you say to a random person at a rainy bus stop in Eugene with college kids and crazy people around carrying home fruits they got in the grocery store—I get really confused.
Fortunately, that only lasted for a second, and I was already responding with the automatic, “Nzuri sana!” Then I figured it out: this was my old Swahili teacher, Marko, whom I have’t seen in over a year.
Ha ha! I knew that! Who says I didn’t, huh?
Have you ever run into an old language teacher? It’s awkward. Their first instinct is always to start chatting away with you in Spanish, or Japanese, or Swahili, or ASL, and you find yourself suddenly attempting to wrench your thoughts into that language’s structure and remembering how the hell you say anything, in any language, including English.*** And this is your teacher, after all, so you’re under the vague impression that this is a pop quiz. SHIT! So your brain goes to Red Alert and races around trying to locate its somewhat buried files on How To Speak Foreign, and when it finds the language it’s in a huge case—labeled “FOREIGN”—that contains all the information you’ve amassed about all languages other than English, ever, in a huge tangled pile. Then, like the badass doctors in the movies who race the clock to save someone with whatever the hell is lying around, your brain plunges a hand into that mess, seizes a random handful of linguistic information, and flings it at your mouth. “Stall them with this!” it shouts as it assembles squads to sort out which language is which.
And so you blurt out a bizarre pastiche of words and syntax, and your teacher smiles as you flounder around until the boys at the lab in your head can crank out some semblance of the correct language.
Of course, once I got past that initial lurch, things went a little more smoothly. I had spent four months speaking some Swahili, so I managed to get a few sentences out as we sat on the bus and chatted—though my attempts to include chibicharibdysand speak Swahili at the same time were futile. It was good to see him again.
chibicharibdysand speak Swahili at the same time were futile. It was good to see him again.The only trouble is, now I still am thinking in Foreign. It’ll take me a few days to sort out all my vocabulary and grammar again. Thank goodness this happened after the essays.
*Contrary to the fears I expressed earlier, I gotta say: this writers’ group is a pretty cool one. The critiques are good, and earnest, and while they aren’t always the same as my reviews, none of them is ridiclously pompous. I mean, you know, not any more pompous than is normal for writers.
**Thanks, Star Trek, for the color coding and the forehead makeup. It helps.
***Also, if it is ASL, you are invariably carrying a tote bag, a hot dog, and a travel mug.
The Life Experience ~ Fall '07
Dec. 18th, 2007 05:20 pm What I Learned This Season:
- The sun sails from dawn to dusk and back very regularly along the equator, without a whole lot of pausing for twilight.
- If I were a magical thinker, I would totally believe Ganesh and I were buds. The number of times he has popped up—sometimes to save my ass—is uncanny.
- Things rural Kenyans know about our culture: Doctor Who, The Flash, X-Men, George Bush, Coca-Cola, English, WWE, Barack Obama, and of course Chuck Norris.
- Things rural Kenyans don’t know about: secularism, pet cats, Spanish, states other than California and Texas, and of course bears.
- Things I knew about rural Kenya: tin roofs, farm animals, squat toilets, chicken slaughters, malaria, mosquitos
- Things I didn’t know about rural Kenya: cell phones, hot water for baths, ant holocausts, malaria being treated like chicken pox, tae kwon do, flying somersaults, ugali
- The recipe for ugali is as follows: boil some flour.
- The phrase for “turkey” in Swahili, bata mzinga, literally means “cannon duck.” I don’t know why.
- It’s a good idea to wear shorts under your skirt, because 1) it keeps your thighs from chafing, and 2) you never know when you might have to hitch up your skirt to hike across the god damn ocean.
- Mosquitos will bite you more if you eat bananas.
- One of the traditional ways for a Swahili to make herself alluring is to stand over a censer while wearing a big skirt so that the smoke theoretically goes straight up into all the nooks and crannies to make them smell more pleasant. I do not know why a man would have his nose there in the first place, but who am I to argue with Tradition?
- Sending postcards is expensive.
- Mosquitos that have already consumed blood explode when you swat them.
- I have good luck with people whose names start with some variation of "Kris."
- EVERYBODY uses Facebook.
- EVERYBODY.
- Kenyan outlets are something like 250 hertz, which will give your iPod superpowers but which Nintendo DS’s refuse to even acknowledge.
- Bagels are like the holy grail of food.
- The book Clan of the Cave Bear is a well-researched story with some very interesting, if not always well-written, details on the possible lives of the Neanderthals. The sequel, The Valley of Horses, is basically caveman porn.
- Goat meat is pretty good. Not so much goat intestine or liver.
- Donkeys make the second most annoying sound in the world, right after mosques.
- The Swahili I learned from my book is the kind spoken in Tanzania, which is more formal than the kind in Mombasa.
- The Deaf accent trumps all others.
- Fridges and ceiling fans are the GREATEST INVENTIONS EVER.
- Al Gore is a helluva sport.
- There actually exists a canonical Sherlock Holmes story where Holmes and Watson get baked and have a gay moment.*
*While I can slash away with the best of fans, I can’t actually understand the consistent slashing of these two. I have no real argument against it except that they just don’t seem like a couple—sort of like my somewhat obtuse argument against Bert and Ernie’s closetry being “But they’re Muppets.” However, this does not mean that Holmes and Watson cannot have gay moments.
Kenya Dig It? ~ NIMESHIBA!
Nov. 30th, 2007 02:49 pmRight, where was I before the goat slaughtering interrupted the flow?
Oh, right. The chicken slaughtering.
Kaloleni was the beginning of our intensive Swahili lessons, which was the one thing I completely won at on this trip.* But even so, I had a question at the beginning of the first day of class ... the same question we all had.
( The most important phrase you'll ever learn in Swahili )
Kaloleni was also the beginning of my elaborate, highly detailed food fantasies. Cheese, for example. I began missing cheese,** and most other dairy products, like nothing else. Cinnamon rolls floated past my consciousness, followed by stir fry, Mexican and Tex-mex of all varieties, pizza, and Pita Pit.
( Because this is what I ate )
*Five years of studying it beforehand makes you ready to brag about it.
**If you want to traumatize yourself, try describing cheese to someone who doesn't know what it is, like my host family. "So you take milk, and then you let it go bad. Then, if you want it to be really fancy, let it grow mold!" They have the sensible opinion that this is crazy. But they still eat yogurt.
Oh, right. The chicken slaughtering.
Kaloleni was the beginning of our intensive Swahili lessons, which was the one thing I completely won at on this trip.* But even so, I had a question at the beginning of the first day of class ... the same question we all had.
( The most important phrase you'll ever learn in Swahili )
Kaloleni was also the beginning of my elaborate, highly detailed food fantasies. Cheese, for example. I began missing cheese,** and most other dairy products, like nothing else. Cinnamon rolls floated past my consciousness, followed by stir fry, Mexican and Tex-mex of all varieties, pizza, and Pita Pit.
( Because this is what I ate )
*Five years of studying it beforehand makes you ready to brag about it.
**If you want to traumatize yourself, try describing cheese to someone who doesn't know what it is, like my host family. "So you take milk, and then you let it go bad. Then, if you want it to be really fancy, let it grow mold!" They have the sensible opinion that this is crazy. But they still eat yogurt.
Kenya Dig It? ~ My Name Is Mzungu
Nov. 21st, 2007 01:23 pmIf you read guidebooks or language books or something about Kenya, you will doubtless be aware of the open-air markets. These are not simply where you can get oranges or coconuts or something. You can get anything you want on Market Street from, underpants to stereos. Here in Mombasa, Macy's has no walls.
What they don't mention is how shopping is not a happy language-tape discussion.* Walk down this street and pretty quickly you'll begin to feel like you're the belabored tall guy in Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham, with hundreds of merchandise-wielding Sam-I-Ams descending upon you in a bid for your money:
Would you, could you buy this soap?
You'll buy the perfume too, I hope!
Would you, could you buy a ring?
Or any other sparkly thing?
Would you, could you buy some pants?
A shirt? Some socks? Just take a chance!
Buy this suitcase! Buy this shawl!
Buy this khanga! Buy them all!**
The really unfortunate thing about it is that this does not happen to everyone who goes to shop there. It happens to me and my fellow students because we are obvious foreigners, or, not to put too fine a point on it, white.
It's been a bit of an interesting discovery for me--finding out I'm white. Salt Lake City is the sort of place where the phrase "race relations" has about as much bearing on everyday life as the prhase "freak tsunami" does. So while I was vaguely aware I was white, and tried to educate myself as well as I could about being white, there is only so much one can do without practical experience. And here, I'm getting it--I am learning that I am white, and that it means that I get a different sort of attention than I would if I were not white.
I get more attention. Attention that usually centers around one thing: the indisputable fact, held to be self-evident here, that white people have money. And the power that comes with money. I cannot say that I now know what it's like to be in a minority culture, because it doesn't work like a photonegative. Here I get a lot of people coming up to sell me things, charging me absurdly marked up prices because hey, I can afford it, or just trying to wheedle some money out of me for pretend services like "showing" me how to get from one end of the street to the other. Children who speak no other English know enough to hold out their hands and say, "Give me ten shillings!"--not just beggar children, but schoolchildren. Some people just hover around in the hope that my money is contagious, chatting me up in a way that is reserved for foreigners. I've begun answering to "Hey, mzungu!" A mzungu is a white foreigner, most properly a European, but casually anyone. People shout it all the time.
It's somewhat disheartening, because I'm seeing the effect of some deplorable history on my own relations with people. And I know that I'm missing some golden opportunities for actual friendship, because not everyone thinks like this--not by a long shot--but enough do that friendly advances are suspect. And that's annoying.
I don't know what to do about this, but it's a good thing for me to see that it exists. I'm trying to get past it with people I want to be friends with. But till then, when kids shout "Hey, mzungu," I'll answer, because that's my name now.
*Anyone who expects the world to go like a language tape is in for a rude surprise no matter WHERE they are.
**Answer: I will not buy your god damn stuff!
And I've had just about enough!
What they don't mention is how shopping is not a happy language-tape discussion.* Walk down this street and pretty quickly you'll begin to feel like you're the belabored tall guy in Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham, with hundreds of merchandise-wielding Sam-I-Ams descending upon you in a bid for your money:
Would you, could you buy this soap?
You'll buy the perfume too, I hope!
Would you, could you buy a ring?
Or any other sparkly thing?
Would you, could you buy some pants?
A shirt? Some socks? Just take a chance!
Buy this suitcase! Buy this shawl!
Buy this khanga! Buy them all!**
The really unfortunate thing about it is that this does not happen to everyone who goes to shop there. It happens to me and my fellow students because we are obvious foreigners, or, not to put too fine a point on it, white.
It's been a bit of an interesting discovery for me--finding out I'm white. Salt Lake City is the sort of place where the phrase "race relations" has about as much bearing on everyday life as the prhase "freak tsunami" does. So while I was vaguely aware I was white, and tried to educate myself as well as I could about being white, there is only so much one can do without practical experience. And here, I'm getting it--I am learning that I am white, and that it means that I get a different sort of attention than I would if I were not white.
I get more attention. Attention that usually centers around one thing: the indisputable fact, held to be self-evident here, that white people have money. And the power that comes with money. I cannot say that I now know what it's like to be in a minority culture, because it doesn't work like a photonegative. Here I get a lot of people coming up to sell me things, charging me absurdly marked up prices because hey, I can afford it, or just trying to wheedle some money out of me for pretend services like "showing" me how to get from one end of the street to the other. Children who speak no other English know enough to hold out their hands and say, "Give me ten shillings!"--not just beggar children, but schoolchildren. Some people just hover around in the hope that my money is contagious, chatting me up in a way that is reserved for foreigners. I've begun answering to "Hey, mzungu!" A mzungu is a white foreigner, most properly a European, but casually anyone. People shout it all the time.
It's somewhat disheartening, because I'm seeing the effect of some deplorable history on my own relations with people. And I know that I'm missing some golden opportunities for actual friendship, because not everyone thinks like this--not by a long shot--but enough do that friendly advances are suspect. And that's annoying.
I don't know what to do about this, but it's a good thing for me to see that it exists. I'm trying to get past it with people I want to be friends with. But till then, when kids shout "Hey, mzungu," I'll answer, because that's my name now.
*Anyone who expects the world to go like a language tape is in for a rude surprise no matter WHERE they are.
**Answer: I will not buy your god damn stuff!
And I've had just about enough!
