The Apple Twist Game of Life

I offered Ron an apple today and he did what I, for lack of a better term, am going to call the apple twist game. You know it. You have some girl you're interested in, and you convince the apple it's meant to be by twisting the stem off as you recite the alphabet. When the stem comes off and it happens to be on the first letter of the girl's name (or, if you're desperate, her last name, or middle name, or any of the letters in her name or that make you think of her name...) then you know it's true love.

That's kinda how my week has started, only my twisting has met with a lot of resistance. Now that I'm in Advanced Chinese, I realized that I really don't want to take Chinese any more. I started taking Chinese freshman year because I hated Spanish but thought cultured people should learn another language and study abroad. So I learned Chinese and went to China, and had crazy experiences and sucked at Chinese in decreasing amounts for seven months. And now I'm back and I can have a brief conversation with any Chinese guy I meet at the pool. I can impress my language partners because they don't know an American with as good of Chinese as mine. I can talk about Chinese culture and life.

And I'm still horrible at Chinese. Some people ask me if I want to go back, but right now when I think of going back I dread not being able to say anything. This sounds silly, and I might've said it before, but in America any word I can think of I know the word for. "Drowning"? It's "drowning." "Recoil"? It's "recoil." "Magical"? I know that one, too. Taking another year of Chinese would make a dent in what's left to cover, but not enough for me to set a goal to do it. I don't think there's anything to be gained by continuing.

I haven't done anything drastic, although Dan urged me to. I get to withdraw penalty-free from two classes every 60 credits and I'm seriously considering withdrawing from both my Chinese classes. Culture class is a waste of time, and I'm coming into language class a month behind. If anyone has any wisdom, speak now or forever hold your peace.

And with that matrimonial phrase, I return to the apple twist game. I remember when I was little I liked some girl whose name started with 'e'. My twisting skills weren't highly developed at that point, though, and the stem didn't come off when I got to 'e.' So I kept twisting, subconsciously making my fingers slip so it had an air of legitimacy when I finished the alphabet, came back to 'e', and broke the stem. "Wow," I thought. "It's meant to be." I think in some way this is a good analogy for my life right now.

Before I end this post, I wanted to mention a few housekeeping issues. First, I've decided to start labeling my posts, so when you visit the real website and not the Facebook version, you can sort all my posts by the labels. So any post where I've used a fake name you can see already catalogued with the "fake names" label. Or entries in which I talk about entries (or almost blow up my house) under "housekeeping." And so on.

Also, my blog has Gator colors now. In fact, I looked up on UF's website what the official hex codes were so I'd get the color right. Links, even to my old blog, have yet to appear in the sidebar because life is too stressful for that. Next twist, please.