Time flies...

...when you’re having fun. Seeing as a week has gone by since the last update you’d think time had flown, and maybe it has. Or maybe I’ve just been too busy and too preoccupied with other things to notice that time hasn’t exactly been flying at all.

Some time ago I read on the news that the past week would have seen the most depressing day of the year. (I can’t find the original article but this’ll do.) Not sure if this psychologist guy picked the right day, but it’s certainly been the right week. Drama for me over the weekend, not a weekend filled with happiness either for MG. MvD said she didn’t have a good weekend. ZB topped the list with a dead cat, another cat diagnosed with aids (no shit) and her granddad in hospital. LG was buried in work for all of the week. And finally, AL needed support on Thursday because her boyfriend had fired a range of clichés at her. It wasn’t her, it was him – she deserved to be with someone who could spend more time with her, etcetera.

I think AL summed up the situation quite nicely. ‘It was nice, I liked nice, I want nice.’ Although I’m sure she experienced a more intense degree of niceness, I can totally relate to that. Big bits of what didn’t happen in the end were nice, I liked nice and I’m sorry nice didn’t happen. I’m glad we’re still okay together though.

I managed to get out of the Newcastle Festival dem. I didn’t want to be in it in the first place, but JF seems to have problems interpreting negation particles in his own native language, so suddenly I was on the dem team for both New Scotland and Dunedin. Then came Dunedin on the Wednesday night and a most painful experience dancing Bubbles in the Pond with RW. Her diagnosis was shinsplints, and the only remedy is rest. So I didn’t dance on Thursday, and also at the Annual on Saturday I only did four dances. Garry Strathspey (with GD) was maybe not the best choice, seeing as it was a strathspey and involved Highland Scottische setting. Ouch. The two fast dances I did – Kelpie (with YK) and Fiona’s Party (with AL) – were easier to stomach (or shin, whatever), and waltzing with MM resulted in dizziness rather than sore shins and ankles. Anyway, injury is a good enough reason not to have to commit to the Newcastle Dem. And incidentally, it also gives me a lot of sorely needed spare time!

My dad’s in hospital after falling in the bathroom. Apparently he damaged a disk. My mom says I needn’t worry. So I won’t. But it adds to the most fantastic week ever...

So yeah, the only really good thing to come out of last week – apart from still being good friends with VP – is... Swedish sociolinguistics! (Warning: messy story coming up, but it makes sense in the end.) WB is doing this course called ‘English Language, Society and Culture’ and they were talking about language planning. Homework for that course, at least for the undergrads, was to read a random book on language planning from the library. WB picked a book by Wardhaugh (1987), Languages in competition. Sounded interesting, so yes it is now on my desk but still on his loan. But anyway, I decided to take a look at that particular shelfmark in the library and found a book called Språkbyte och språkbevarande (by Hyltenstam & Stroud, 1991). It is genuinely the best introduction to language shift I’ve read so far, and not coloured by irritating RLS stuff like Fishman’s books. They also mentioned a model for describing language shift that no one’s picked up before. Quite possibly because it was developed in a Swedish study of the Swedish-to-Finnish language shift in Finland (Tandefelt, Mellan två språk, 1988). Took out that book as well, but I haven’t gotten to the chapter on the model yet. (Reading several books at once to maintain sanity.)

Oh, I also got an e-mail from CT. I lost his e-mail address before so it’s nice to hear from him again. Quite a typical style, very enjoyable. Apparently he sees a future for a Tocharian rap group. Must remember to send a more lengthy e-mail back in the very near future.

Zieleroerselen

(Use Babelfish for a vague idea and a good laugh at the pitiful standards of computer translation.)

Ik ben aan’t bijkomen van de wervelwind aan emoties van de afgelopen week. Wat er nou precies gebeurd is, weet ik niet; wat ik ervan vind weet ik al helemaal niet. Het begon allemaal in de nacht van zaterdag op zondag vorige week, toen ik op MSN zat met VP. Op een gegeven moment kwam het hoge woord er dan uit: ik vond hem eigenlijk best wel leuk. Een echte uitspraak of dat wederzijds was kwam er niet, hij wilde me eerst beter leren kennen. Dat hebben we toen eerst maar afgesproken. Eng was het wel, want wat als ik nou de verkeerde keuze heb gemaakt? Hoe zeker was ik er nou van? En als het fout ging, hoeveel zou er dan kapot zijn?

Maandag dan samen geluncht en een beetje in de Meadows gekuierd. Ja, lief lachje en zeker knuffelbaar. Dinsdag na dem class vlug die kloterige cd-speler thuis afgeleverd en naar de Human Be-in gegaan, waar hij was met de mensen van de Asian Friends Society. Een beetje gemengde gevoelens hier. Hij was nog steeds zeker knuffelbaar maar dat initiatief moest wel van mij komen, denk ik. Jammer alleen dat er nogal veel in het Chinees gepraat werd. Maar goed, dat hoort er vast bij, dat is het doel van die hele Asian Friends Society. Op het Chinees praten na was dit toch wel een fijne ervaring, de enige domper was dat ik naar huis liep met iemand die blijkbaar ook in VP geïnteresseerd was.

Woensdag was er een vergadering van de organisatie van de Postgraduate Conference, waar VP ook bij was. Naderhand in het keukentje van 14BP nog wat gezeten, maar dat was weinig diepgaand. Ik denk dat ik toen op zoek was naar het gevoel van dinsdagavond, maar dat kon ik niet terugvinden. Wel MG op de hoogte gebracht, die nog in Amerika zat en die avond op het vliegtuig terug naar Schotland zou stappen. Na Dunedin vlug naar huis in de hoop dat er nog wat te MSN’en viel, maar hij was niet meer online.

Donderdag met de lunch in geuren en kleuren verteld aan MG wat er speelde, en ’s middags na een saai college afgedaald naar VP zijn kantoortje. En weer die gemengde gevoelens. De persoonlijke aandacht was fijn, de gesprekken over het werk lieten ook zien dat we genoeg dingen gemeenschappelijk hebben, maar toen hij minutenlang zijn Japans ging oefenen met een van de Japanners op zijn kantoor, was er toch weer de twijfel. Is dit onbeleefd? Zelfs als hij sorry zegt? Of was het positief en probeerde hij juist indruk te maken? Het engste was misschien nog wel dat er vlagen bij waren dat er geen vonken over sprongen. Hoort dat erbij, bij verliefd zijn? Periodes van warme wind die om je oren stormt afgewisseld met gevoelloze leegte? Hoe moet ik dat nou weten, ik heb dit toch ook nog nooit eerder gedaan... Toch ’s avonds bij New Scotland nog maar aan MG gevraagd, en die vond het geloof ik wel normaal.

Vrijdag dan een eerste echte date. Of zoiets. Naar de film met een hele lading van zijn vrienden. Opdat het niet helemaal een uitwedstrijd zou zijn, heb ik MG en TtT ook meegevraagd. En dat MG mee was, was maar beter ook. Gedurende de hele film (en zo goed was de film nu ook weer niet) heeft hij niet één keer naar me gekeken, en de hele avond schonk hij meer aandacht aan zijn Chinees sprekende vrienden dan aan mij. Op zoek naar een pub of club om uit te gaan, zijn MG en ik er maar vlug tussenuit geknepen. (TtT was al weg.) Vanaf de bioscoop tot Chambers Street, waar we ons afscheidden van de groep, was het ook één en al Chinees wat de klok sloeg en was het tussen MG en mij vooral stil. Na Chambers Street heb ik de tranen nog tot het festivaltheater weten binnen te houden.

Pas binnen keihard janken. Maar waarom? Omdat de liefde niet wederzijds was? Omdat de liefde eigenlijk bij mijzelf ook niet aanwezig was en ik een stomme inschattingsfout had gemaakt? Omdat er aan de eenzaamheid geen einde kwam? Omdat ik dit hele verliefd zijn-gebeuren niet onder de knie heb? Omdat ik geen idee heb waarom ik hem nou eigenlijk leuk vond en wat ik nou eigenlijk van hem wilde? Alles. En niets. De leegte.

De volgende dag eerst niets aan mijn moeder verteld, maar er later toch maar een e-mail aan gewaagd. Het lieve antwoord dat daarop kwam is misschien nog het beste dat hieruit voort is gekomen.

Maar nog steeds is er dat verlangen. Naar de lieve lach, naar de genegenheid van dinsdagavond, naar het gevoel dat alleen zijn niet hoeft. Als ik dit alles rationaliseer, denk ik dat VP en ik allebei naar hetzelfde op zoek zijn, en dat we dat verward hebben met naar elkaar op zoek zijn? Niet iedereen past bij elkaar, en dat hebben we maar te accepteren. Vervelend is het wel, maar wat niet is, is niet. (En toch is-ie leuk.)

Nou is het oppassen dat ik de muren om me heen niet nog hoger en sterker opbouw, maar dat ik mensen toelaat. Ik ben benieuwd hoe dit afloopt.

(Misbruik van deze informatie zal leiden tot zwaar fysiek geweld.)

So...

At least the Annual crib books are going to look absolutely fantastic.

Weekend!

It’s unbelievable how quickly this week has gone by. Suddenly it was Friday already, and I don’t have the feeling I did anything near what I should have done in the course of a week. It seems like more people are having that feeling, so maybe it’s just the holidays that have messed up our ideas of what is a normal amount of work to do in a week?

I handed in a piece of work on Wednesday. It wasn’t anywhere near good, and there were a lot of gaps, but it was driving me crazy so I decided that handing in what I had was a better option than going crazy over trying to perfect it. LC was saying that it’s actually pretty normal to maybe not quite know what you’re doing and trying to find out which way to go. Meeting with AM next Thursday so we’ll see what we can come up with.

Honours courses are alright. Historical linguistics is nice but I’ve done it before, Linguistic reconstruction and language classification is interesting but maybe not particularly relevant and depending on the amount of work I’m supposed to do for it, I may not come to every class and only take the ones on contact. Another downside is that most of the courses seem to be turning into the DC show. Apart from the fact that I find his appearance and the sound of his voice extremely annoying, he constantly butts in with all these only distantly relevant comments. The undergrads may be impressed, but I wish he’d just shut his face and let AM and RC get on with their lectures.

Two great tutorials on Friday, especially the last one. The goal was to get some discussion going on what is a language, what is a dialect, how do you define them, etc. GT had dropped a bombshell in the lectures by saying that “English does not exist”. One girl was almost in tears, ‘cause if English doesn’t exist, how come she was studying English Language? So I went a bit ahead of schedule and explained that maybe there are no linguistic criteria to define English language, but there were social criteria and that was the whole point: English as a social construct.

The other good bit was talking about prototypes. They had to define Cockney, also by social criteria. Once they’d been told they did not have to be politically correct, there was a nice list of words associated with Cockneys. East London, East Enders, Del Boy, dodgy deals from the back of a truck, Burbery, chavs, uneducated, male, Tottenham Hotspur fans, short-fused... Good thing there weren’t any Cockneys in the group. But I think all the things about social constructs, identity conveyed by language etc. hit home. Bounce!

I did forget to tell them about this essay writing course the university is having for undergrads. Unfortunately it’s only one day before the deadline for the EL1 essay, but I may tell them about it anyway. Somehow somewhere some of them seem to have picked up the idea that vomiting out a bit mush of long words is a good idea. That’s going to bite them in the back when I’m going to have to mark their essays.

Spent most of yesterday evening online chatting to VP, which was nice. Apparently my name in Cantonese is 嵐歌 which translates as ‘the song of the wind in the mountains’. Very poetic. I also got invited to go to the cinema on Sunday but unfortunately I can’t go because there is a NS committee meeting that night. Expletives suppressed.

Only nine weeks left as NS secretary. And after saving the Annual (I hope) earlier in the week, I also saved the Student Festival cèilidh. It seems like we’re now part of Rukkus which is some form of charities’ night in Teviot. I also hope that RK managed to get us involved in that cèilidh on the Society Oscars night, otherwise we (read: RK) will have upset a lot of people and gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. I wonder how heated the meeting tomorrow will be; that’ll kind of depend on the newlyweds’ attitudes to power and leadership. We don’t have MG there to be the counter-alpha female so we’re going to have to try to fend for ourselves....

Passed the test!

My EL1 marking got approved. A big sigh of relief, because I really wasn’t looking forward to spending another 20 hours reading bad English and overt lack of insight into the grammar of English. The one student I suspected of having copied pieces from a book – he suddenly changed register spectacularly – got away with it, as they haven’t had proper plagiarism warnings yet. Oh well...

New Scotland is slowly getting started again. BW’s class yesterday had no beginners, there were like seven old people. Dem class wasn’t much better and after having had to do BW’s class, I can’t say we were all too attentive or motivated. I managed to book AK for the Student Festival cèilidh. He’s upped his rates again, but it’s short notice so I decided we should go for it. Also called James Gillespies again, as I hadn’t heard from them. Turns out they’d sent a confirmation ages ago, that I didn’t receive. Good thing I called, ’cause they had us down for the wrong date! Major disaster narrowly avoided...

It’s lonely in the house without MG or TtT.

Back to work

Okay, I am recovering from the amazement at RK and AI’s wedding plans. This came as a massive surprise not just to me; disbelief seems to be the most common reaction among everyone I’ve been speaking to.

I finished the last bit of the EL1 marking. I still had some comments to write on some of the scripts. These were the first scripts I marked, when we were still told (erroneously) that we weren’t supposed to write on them. So I made little summarizing comments on a notepad while marking that I now copied onto the scripts. I think there may be some minor inconsistencies in the marking, but no more than two points and if need be I can take those two points away somewhere else...

Also been working a bit on a first write-up, but not very much has been happening on that front. I have lots of bits and pieces, but it’s yet to be transformed in a flowing story. The goal is to have it finished by the end of the week; with EL1 and some honours courses to do I’m not sure how viable that goal is, but we’re going to try.

I also seem to have acquired another flatmate in MG’s absence. TtT came yesterday morning and hasn’t left. It’s actually quite nice and we’re having a nice relaxed bit of Netherlands in Edinburgh.

Current reading: Wijdlopige, brede en waarachtige beschrijving van de ongelukkige reizen van het schip de Visstick en haar gezagvoerder Kapitein Iglo (‘Wide-ranging, broad and truthful description of the unfortunate travels of the ship the Fish Finger and her commander Captain Birdseye’) by, among others, Windig & De Jong of Heinz fame. It is as good as it sounds.

Oh my god...

AI proposed to RK on top of the Eiffel Tower!
Gasp.

The phatic function of communication

...is communicating for the sake of communication. Like when a child says, "Mum?" - "Yeah?" - "Nothing." The whole point of this is just to keep the channels of communication open. This is a phatic blog entry. Nothing happened that is noteworthy.