I had a tough time in Polish last week - lots of talking and listening, dictations. I've figured out that my problem is exactly the same as when I was studying French and German years ago: I do not hear when one word stops and the next one starts. Thus I hear a string of sounds that I can't resolve into meaning, even though, if I SAW the words, I would understand immediately. So my dictation exercises are a disaster - a few fragments of real words strung together with my phonetics.
Over the years, this problem has dissipated in French and German. I've had some trips to France, and have gotten more used to the sounds. I try to speak German with my downstairs neighbors and I understand pretty much everything that is said to their 3-year-old. I think (although I can't be sure) that my problems in Polish will eventually resolve themselves by themselves. (I remember a particularly devastating experience in German class as an undergrad, when our professor decided to benchmark us against some standards, and gave us an standardized oral exam, of which I UNDERSTOOD NOTHING. Same deal here with Polish, I'm hoping. Then, when I went to Germany, I found that I could understand educated people just fine, and slangy people if they talked slowly.)
The bottom line is that although I'm a visual person, and I actually have to SEE the words in Polish as I say them, in German and even in French I have eventually, through contact and familiarity, gotten so that I can automatically generate the words, and I don't even think of the written word.
It's regressive, sort of - to the child's level of language. I was thinking today that I don't even remember how to spell some of the German words I know. An odd sort of victory - but it means the language has really been internalized, which is a victory for me.
Lunch today with my advisor. Interesting and good things brewing. More to follow, if they come to fruition.
Tuesdays are hectic, this one more hectic than most. I look at my weekly schedule and I see all these huge, wonderful blocks of time for reading/writing/thinking, and then those blocks get nibbled away-at by appointments and lunches and whatnot. As I am counseling B (who must make a lot of progress on his thesis or risk being booted out of this school), you have to treat the self-appointments as every bit as important as the ones you keep with others.
Not that I'm one to talk. Wednesdays are supposed to be an all-work, all-day for me (at home) and already I have a lunch meeting and another at 3:15 tomorrow, which shoots holes in the entire day.
Zygmunt Bauman urges us to be always mindful (conscious, self-reflexive) about the quality of the public sphere, and I think this sort of mindfulness can also be seen, by analogy, as necessary to one's intellectual growth, or it will be stunted by a never-ending series of urgent-but-ultimately-unimportant obligations, commitments, meetings, etc. That's pretty much what happened to me from 1986-2002. Don't you-all make the same mistake.
Man, I haven't written for a week! What the hell have I been doing?!?
Holing up and clutching my stomach, mostly. Terrible pain: what can it be? If I don't feel better tomorrow I'll have to go to the doctor.
Otherwise - reading; trying to learn Polish vocabulary; shoveling. I saw in the newspaper that my hometown (in New England) got 38 inches of snow. I don't remember a storm THAT big since the blizzard of '78, which was great because we got a whole week off of high school due to the state of emergency, which meant we drove around, hung out at each others' houses, and drank to excess. Ah, the 70s.
I had a fun "aha" moment with Polish today. Mostly I bemoan the dearth of cognates. But today, I was working on the present tense conjugation of widziec, to see, when I realized the similarity to videre, to see, in Latin. My friend L has hypothesized that the Catholicism of Poland influenced the language, making it more Latinate, and I think she's definitely right. If I pronounce the words and really LISTEN to the sounds - as opposed to just looking at the weird pileup of consonants - I can understand the relationships.
I usually do not look forward to Polish class, because I always feel so unprepared. But it's all part of the learning process, probably. I am trying to speak Polish a little to myself around the house, to get basic phrases ingrained, the way they are for me in German or even French. I have to keep telling myself: language is a process, not a finished state. Perfectionism: is there anything it can't spoil?
Elsewise - some intriguing ideas about socialism and public space. More, undoubtedly, to come. I have to dream up a term paper concept, like, NOW.
Ooh, writing personal statements for fellowship applications is oh-so-tedious. I really hate the whole "I am so great and so is my project" thing. There's a trick dog aspect to the whole infrastructure: I'll say all the right words, and you'll reward me with lots of money.
I knew this was true when I almost used the word "imbricate" in my statement. Good lord! - "imbricate" has been on my personal list of banned words for almost 18 months now! It's right up there, with "trouble" used as a transitive verb ("I'd like to trouble his concept"); "theorize" as a transitive verb ("let's theorize capitalism, shall we?") and "problematize": "If only Derrida had read my blog, he'd be problematizing its epistemology in his grave."
No, I am mostly reading socialist planning literature from the 1950s and 1960s. It's all so earnest and utopian. They really believed they had the key to solve everything, those guys. It's dated stuff - very - but one can't help feeling a little wistful at that delicious optimism.
One of my favorite blogs, Mimi Smartypants, pointed me to this USDA website about grocery shopping. I am alas straddling between "moderate" and "liberal" in terms of weekly expenditures.
I thought that after B's weight loss surgery, our grocery bill would be greatly reduced. Hasn't really happened. Why is that, I wonder? We cook too much, it's true - but then we make lunch of leftovers, so very little is wasted. It's probably a lot cheaper to make sandwiches for lunch, but I don't like the normal boring sandwiches very much, and I'm too lazy to make more complicated ones.
I can remember my father giving my mom $100 (or even less) to shop for six, for a week. I can't imagine how she managed, since she also used quite a few prepared foods. No snacks though: that's why I'm such a snack food junkie today.
Cold today; colder tomorrow. Were it not for the brilliant sunshine, no one would live here.
Bad design really annoys me, especially when you find it in products that highly-paid industrial designers made a lot of money creating.
Take vacuum cleaners, for example. I used to rail against the designer(s) of my old Eureka canister. It would inevitably roll exactly where I didn't want it to be; the cord return was tricky; and it was a huge hassle, requiring more than two hands, to hook up the rug beater attachment.
But that Eureka was a thing of functional beauty compared to the upright Dirt Devil I bought out here in MN. Its designer certainly has never actually done any vacuuming, else he (and you can bet it's a he: all the poorly designed household products are bought to be designed by people who don't actually DO housework) would never have designed the too-wide floor brush that doesn't fit between the legs of furniture, or the floor-to-hose knob that takes two hands to operate, or worst of all, the "convenient" bagless system that allows you to spew dirt over yourself and your immediate surroundings every time you empty the thing. To say nothing of the air filter that requires a kitchen knife and 20 minutes of work to clean every time you empty the dirt container.
Then there are tea kettles. I got one for Christmas, a sort of Mizrahi or Graves knockoff from whatever discount store they don't work for. The instructions warn that the handle gets really hot, so you have to use a potholder when you are pouring water. Then, you have to use your other hand, and probably a second potholder, to open the spout to pour the water: why would it be set to pivot open when you tipped it?? No, that would be SMART design.
Bottom line: we'll probably continue to use a saucepan to heat water for tea. It's just easier that way. The tea kettle is pretty though, and it looks very attractive sitting on the stove.
...in the saddle again!
Aerosmith IS my favorite band, after all.
Vacation was good, but it's always better to be home. Got in around 4 am this morning, slept til 10, got up and got to the unpacking and the laundry and such. Only 96 emails though, so that was a cakewalk.
Here are two things that totally kicked my butt yesterday/today:
1. The red wine I'd bought before leaving for the East Coast was EXACTLY the same wine as our friends had selected for dinner the previous night. I'd never heard of it and bought it completely randomly but apparently it's a favorite of theirs.
2. The woman we gave a ride home to after the shared cab ride from the airport lives in the same building over in Southeast as our friend D. Since Southeast is completely infested with student apartments, that just seemed weird. What are the odds?
These coincidences are never as dramatic when you explain them to others as when you have that AHA moment of the coincidence. Sorry about that.