6 posts tagged “language”
So I met my first cokehead banker yesterday. I opened one of those newfangled tax-free savings accounts (kinda handy! I sure don't see a catch, and neither does my dad's financial advisor, apparently), and the branch manager who took me into the office and did the paperwork had the most obvious over-long pinky nail I've ever seen. Stay classy, Toronto.
Also, I have the biggest Internet crush on this girl here. Quirky, cute, talented, funny. I highly recommend her ukelele-based cover of "Dream a Little Dream of Me," performed in front of her open refrigerator.
Of course, as I develop such geek lust for an online folk singer, my own guitar playing has gone heavier than ever. I spent a couple of hours yesterday learning Opeth tracks, and I've been piecing together a messy riff-fest of my own that's certainly a lot less melodic than what I usually write.
Finally: my phonology professor's Italian accent makes her sound like she's saying "mattresses" instead of "matrices." It's pretty damn adorable.
So on Wednesday I got knocked to the ground by two enormous German shepherds. Thankfully, it wasn't the dire mangling you'd expect; it felt more like a clever prank. The first dog came up to me all a-slobber and did its best I'm-too-cute-to-ignore face at me. Naturally, I reached down and started scratching him behind the ears. The other dog, hitherto unseen, vaulted out from behind a snowdrift (how about that snow, eh? It's the kind of blizzard that makes random people strike up conversations, if only to have somebody to kvetch to) and pretty much jumped right on my back, taking advantage of my posture and sending me sprawling into a snowbank. If dogs could laugh, that's what these ones were doing.
The new semester is trundling along nicely. A recurring theme with my profs seems to be the inscrutability of accents; my sociolinguistics prof was red-faced when I rose to her challenge to identify her accent (she's right in her opinion that linguists, being both a multicultural, multilingual bunch and particularly phonetically self-aware, are trickier to pigeonhole, but "born in the American Midwest, educated in New England" is hardly exotic), while my phonology prof has so carefully clipped and moderated her speech as to be practically post-accent; her name is Italian, but her (infrequent!) solecisms are Germanic ("das Handy" for "cell phone"). The game is afoot.
This weekend also marked the loss of my IKEA virginity. I needed a monstrous bookshelf to round out my apartment furniture, so (summoning Jess for some help and spiritual guidance) we made the trek up to North York for some affordable Swedish furnishings. The place is pretty much what I expected: cavernous, sleek, modern, full of unfortunate Swedish names (Skänka frying pans being my favourite), and with the most bizarrely generous customer service model ever (there's a friggin' shuttle bus that drives you the half-kilometre between Leslie Station and the store). The meatballs, though? Kinda icky, until you drown them in lingonberry and gravy.
Also: holy crap, Sheppard Line. I've heard a lot of grumbling about what a cash cow that line was, and how the local condo developments never really materialized, and it looks like it's all true. Those stations are baroquely huge, gorgeous, but basically empty. At least it made it relatively easy to cart around an enormous bookshelf, running it onto train cars like a battering ram.
(to carry on the in-joke: fuck Bessarion)
Well, those were some eventful days! Yesterday, the ol' bookstore had yet another huge event. This time, it was Deepa Mehta and the star of her latest film, the lovely Preity Zinta (who is apparently a big frickin' deal in Bollywood; I recognized her from the movie posters all along my end of Gerrard Street). We actually got a crowd equal to the one Spike Lee pulled on Friday, with the ethnic mix prompting Mehta to make a joke about how the entirety of Brampton had come down to see her (Brampton being a suburb of Toronto that is so predominantly South Asian, people jokingly call it Bramladesh).
That was a crazy shift in general, actually. Tomasz the indignant alcoholic libertarian stopped by for another loud impromptu dissertation (man, that guy creeps me out), and we accidentally broke a shelf in half while trying to move it across the store (I'll not speak of the horror that was the cleanup effort, as I don't feel altogether comfortable trashing a coworker in a public blog, but suffice it to say that I had a nice told-ya-so moment).
Today, though, was an even bigger event: my first real day at the University of Toronto. I made it, folks. They can't get rid of me now. I landed on campus around 1pm (observation: St. George's Station has perhaps more stairs than any other I've seen) and headed to Robarts Library for that vital rite of passage, picking up my TCard. Predictably, the photo is terrible. As my esteemed coworker Vicky put it when I bumped into her out front of the ROM, "Jesus Christ, did you smoke a fatty while you were waiting in line?"
Class #1 was to be my Syntactics tutorial. I wasn't clear as to whether the class was supposed to happen today, so I waited in a magnificently old classroom in University College for half an hour. Sure enough, no class. I used the surprise interlude to buy my books. It seems that those are the only thing that cost less here; I got my entire roster for under $200.
Class #2 was one of my fanciful undergrad throwaways, a Latin course in stately Victoria College (pictured at left). The instructor is this hilarious Slavic (Bulgarian, I think?) medievalist with a self-effacing sense of humour and a gift for informative digressions. From the looks of things, it's going to be a great year in that class. It'll be an utter bird, but I'm going to learn a lot, too. I even made a friend, I think; the girl sitting beside me and I seem to get along well enough. More on that after we talk for more than five minutes.
Tomorrow? Writing Systems. Coincidentally, the girl who rang through my stuff at the bookstore is in that one. Hooray instant acquaintance?
Signs of spring: there was a spider crawling down my wall as I woke up this morning. It was a nice bit of poetic justice (maybe even irony?) that the only object handy for arachnicide was my beat-up copy of Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory.
After the student union meeting tonight (free pizza! Moreso if their usual trend continues and they don't make quorum), I have to meet with my English group and put the finishing touches on our paper on the evolution of the double negative. When was the last time you had a paper that quoted Chaucer, Mencken, Fowler's usage guide, Fabio, Pink Floyd, and Homer Simpson?
Also: I'm never buying Martin guitar strings again. Harumph.
Dispatches from the life of Brad:
- Who's the jerk who put Eating Disorder Awareness Week and Hunger Awareness Week at the same time?
- Last night I got a phone call from Texas saying that some stuff I ordered online had been blocked because it was an "overseas" transaction. Shades of Britney Spears, but at least the dude was funny. "Y'all are gonna hafta call yer bank up an' tell `em ya rilly, rilly want it."
- My trivia team is quickly becoming its own worst enemy. About half of the points we lose are because we manage to talk each other out of correct answers.
- Sometimes I think Powell wants me to teach his class for him, or he's misread me as the kind of browner who gets off on hijacking a class. We were discussing grammatical cases in his class today, and he had me explaining eight of them in a row. At least now I know that I've been pronouncing ablative wrong.
- Am I a bad denizen of Waterloo for never having had visited the much-ballyhooed RIM Park? I just got down there today for an employment fair put on by Guelph, WLU, and UW (tragically advertised as the RIM Job Fair. Somebody wasn't thinking very hard when they named that one). Sadly, the trip turned out to be kinda pointless; most of the jobs there were either menial things no better than my current job, technical jobs I don't have the skills for, or teaching-English-in-Korea gigs (yes, I love language, but I HATE children, and teaching children I couldn't even understand seems like a downhill move). There were supposed to be a lot of sweet government jobs up for grabs, but apparently the gross weather kept DFAIT and CSIS from making the trek down from Ottawa. Sigh.
Fine ways to spend an evening: drunken Mortal Kombat at Kate's place. I'm amazed by how goddamn fancy those games have gotten: 3D arenas, ostensibly-accurate mixed martial arts, elaborate combos...dammit, get off my poorly-rendered 16-bit lawn.
I feel like I haven't been reading nearly enough lately, especially given the very nifty novel Jen lent me. Pat Cadigan's Tea from an Empty Cup has the strange distinction of being the only major cyberpunk novel written by a woman. So far, so good, though it's one of those truly evil books that peppers the dialogue with phrases from a language I don't speak. If anyone knows of a good romanized-Japanese-to-English online dictionary, I'm very open to suggestions.
Also: eight weeks until I'm not an undergrad anymore? Holy. Shit.
