Summarizing Myself

Despite de-summer-izing myself recently, summarizing myself was long overdue. Facebook lets people casts themselves however they want to in an "About Me" section.

Some people say it simply. Andrew Schatz used to have, "I'm a licensed Platinum Member of the Republican Party. I even have a card, my member number is 559629888-S892." One of the best About Me's I've read.

Jessica's is pretty good, too, but a different style. "I love my people. I love. a lot. Im happy and bubbly and kind of really ridiculous.

I'm a ball of energy. I dance in my underwear and love to sing at the top of my lungs. I drive with all the windows down and the radio all the way up. Im a hopeless romantic. I curl up and just read for fun. I take pride in being a professional partier. I eat crackers in bed and dance till I drop. I like being myself, being stupid and honest and real."

Mine has been out of date, however. Check out my old About Me:

I wrote a first draft of this paragraph. I used to dislike eating fish. I have generally poor taste in girls, am often tempted to provoke people because society covers up who we are, am working on not sounding arrogant, do my best thinking in the shower, would analyze your socks off if you'd enjoy it, am an aspiring writer (if i will become one), am unsure how to judge the flexibility of my ambitions, am dazzled by wit, and spend hours a week learning Chinese without knowing why. I love God, enjoy summarizing myself because it is inexhaustible, and am romantic about the idea of being romantic.

I read that and barely recognize myself in it. I was so aggressively difficult. Wanna judge me? Bring it! I challenge you to say I'm doing life the wrong way. I can face me, why can't you? I can confess myself tenderly but honestly. Criticism? I already know it.

Now I look at my About Me and it feels foreign. I guess those things are true of me, but I would never summarize myself like that. Except I did. A year ago I considered my change in how much I like fish to be important, somehow, to who I was. I don't study Chinese any more. I'm still not sure why I did. And what was all that about my taste in girls for? I can't believe I needed to say that.

I know why people include random things. Partially, I think, it's a cultural incline toward post-modernism, which is incredulity toward grand narratives. People don't really think there is a theme to their life. But to the extent that they do, random facts juxtaposed with core values (did you notice how I slipped in the phrase about believing in God?) questions the reader's ability to distinguish important from insignificant. And if you think it's stupid that I like The Office and admirable that I donate 90% of my income to the poor, then you should be wary of weighting the first little and the second a lot. For all you know, watching The Office determines my value as much as donating all I own to the poor. Don't judge me, the About Me says.

Anyway, I had to compose a more up-to-date About Me. Wouldn't want the Internet falling behind in knowing me. But it's difficult to get the right tone. Too pedantic, too narrow, too effervescent, too depressed. My old one at least captured my life pretty well. But in the two or three days I thought about it, this is what I came up with.

I really like About Me-ing because for a writer a definition is a creation, and I am always being made new. I like neologisms (the awkwardly new), kids (the newly awkward), and applesauce in blue Gator Dining bowls. It's tasty. I lived in China for seven months but am still American. I hear I'm more mellow than I was in high school, which makes me nervous. I don't want to be a squash. Recently I've regressed some, I think, like a golf swing gets worse before it gets better. I look forward to heaven because then it's all better. I try. I try.

It's not very good. That's okay, though. People don't friend me for my About Me.

Eat Cats! with Litotes

In Turlington today a woman dressed as a chicken passed out vegetarianism propaganda.


We must infer that the "me" of her sign refers to the general population of chickens, not to the woman in the costume herself. Apparently the woman considers herself similar enough in nature to chickens to imply that eating one is linguistically equivalent to eating a person. Who's "me"? We're all "me"! Only this "me" knows how to read and write and stand in Turlington because the "me"s who walk by are the ones with power to change circumstances and the "me"s that go cluck cluck aren't capable of embracing any kind of ideology.

I haven't taken any literary theory courses, but I think that's deconstruction: using the "text" to show how the text undermines itself. The woman wears a costume for solidarity but in doing so necessarily shows disparity.

Well, the chicken let me take her picture, so I felt obligated to take the card she handed out. On the front, there was a cat's cute head facing a pig's cute head. In large letters, the postcard questioned, "Which do you pet? Which do you eat? Why?"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by. See, I think propaganda relies on politeness. Hear an entire argument before you respond, politeness requests, and then don't be nit-picky if you must criticize it. The problem is that propaganda tiptoes and politeness only tackles runaways. I pet cats and eat pigs because society has conditioned me that way? Because cats catch mice and pigs don't? Because pig fur is coarse? Because I don't like snorting or mud? Because there's more edible meat per pound on a pig than on a cat?

Politeness, if I had taken that road, would absorb the intended effect of the argument: we are inconsistent with which animals we decide to eat. We should be consistent.

But you have to go further than that to find the meaning. Consistency isn't inherently good! In between the flier's conclusion and the flier's logic is a gap. The implication is that we shouldn't eat pigs because we don't eat cats, but one could just as logically reply, "You're right. I should add cats to my diet."

In literature, there's a technique called litotes that has the same gap between what it says and what it means. "Litotes" (pronounced lye-toh-teez, with the emphasis on the first or second syllable) sounds like a kind of legume to me, to be served with lentils, cous-cous, and cats, but in fact it's a name for understatement. More specifically, "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary." For example, you see Florida demolish the Citadel in football last Saturday 70-19, and you say, "Not bad." That's litotes.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry this rhetorical device was "not uncommon" (to quote from my translated copy of Beowulf--I hope the translator consciously used litotes to describe litotes). One king in Beowulf was found as a baby abandoned at sea, and when he died years later they set his body off to sea, loaded in a boat with all their tribe's treasures.

With no fewer gifts did they furnish him there,
the wealth of nations, than those did who
at his beginning first sent him forth
alone over the waves while still a small child.

Logically, this is a tautology. "His gifts were greater than or equal to the gifts he had at the beginning--that is, none." Duh! The use of litotes adds an element of irony, which is the knowing distance between what is meant and what is said.

What I find fascinating about the Eat Cats card and the Anglo-Saxon use of litotes is that in order to understand what is meant, you have to already know what is meant. In another situation, the statements could have the opposite meaning. In South China, for example, they eat cats and dogs, so if I got the flier from them, I'd think they were trying to win me over. The dead man's treasures are a harder example, but if I didn't understand the poet was doing it on purpose, I might think it was just a stupid line to fill up space.

What are we reading when we come across phrases like these? Devoid of content, these strategies, I think, give us a chance to practice the point of view of the author. We have to think like a vegetarian to read arguments about why we should think like a vegetarian. It's enticing. Next thing you know, I'll be out in Turlington dressed as a chicken myself.

Toward a More Perfect Score

The LSAT is two Saturdays from today; I'm in high gear preparing for it. I'm excited to take the LSAT for the same reason that I'm nervous: since it tests fairly inflexible skills (you can't learn to reason in a day), the LSAT will test my aptitude more than my achievement. If I score well, it'll be extremely gratifying; if not, I'm just not the person I thought I was. How's that for a reality check.

What's fun, though, is that even though I'm studying, I'm not really studying. It's like I've made a juggling routine, the tricks of which I can all do individually, and just need some practice before I can do the routine flawlessly, too. That's fun because I'm practicing the nuances as much as I am the big picture.

The LSAT testing conditions are very strict, you see. In fact, I think I need to fax them Monday to say the name on my government-issued ID is William I Penman instead of Will I Penman. They wouldn't let me in otherwise, I don't think. Taking the LSAT will be like going to camp, only in the winter and with one bathroom break. There's a checklist I received by email:

Test takers are allowed to bring into the test center only a clear plastic ziplock bag containing the following items: #2 or HB pencils, LSAT Admission Ticket stub, valid ID, wallet, keys, medical and hygiene products, highlighter, erasers, pencil sharpener, a beverage in plastic container or juice box, and a snack (for break only).

I can't wait to pack my clear plastic ziplock bag (maximum size, as the extended rules say, of one gallon/3.79 liter).

To get in the zone, I've scanned a sample answer sheet so I can get used to the layout of the scantron page. And, of course, I've been using pencils. I don't want to get to the day of the LSAT and be flustered by good ol' #2.

I hit a snag, actually, when it became apparent that America does not sell pencil sharpeners. I was halfway through my week, felt stressed out, and needed to just do some practice sections. My pencils, however, were all blunted beyond acceptable multiple-choice-ability. I searched our house--no pencil sharpener. I walked over to a bookstore--no pencil sharpener. I walked further, to another store--no pencil sharpeners. They had pencils, but no pencil sharpeners. Mechanical pencils, may I remind you, were out.

At this point I was wishing I was just taking the LSAT in China, because in China they know how to sell pencil sharpeners. For cheap, too. There was a store right down my street, and I could've bought ten of them, with ten different designs. And they all would've broken after one use, probably.

I eventually cut my losses and used (gasp) the pen I had in my pocket the whole time. My fight to study for the LSAT was not over, though. Confident that the overpriced UF bookstore in the student union had Gator-ified pencil sharpeners, I made it to the union a few days later (after asking all my friends if they had a pencil sharpener I could have and being told that no one in America ever needs a pencil sharpener) and bought one. For $4. They had an 89 cent version, but the expensive kind had a "high quality carbon steel blade." It's like Excalibur. I will vanquish the LSAT. And, it has a second hole in case I need to sharpen crayons. In case there's a surprise drawing section after the logic games.

To complete my LSAT paraphanelia, I dropped by Walmart today to buy an analog (non-digital) watch. I tested all the watches in the $9-12 range for ease of time adjustment. As long as it can go from 12:00-12:35, the watch can serve all my purposes. It's a good thing my standards are so low, because the watch I bought is pretty ghetto. I ripped off the band because I don't actually want to use it as a watch, and the metal came apart no problem. The watch itself aspires to telling the date but is unmoveable from the 16th and tells the days of the week in Spanish.

But now I have my watch and pencils. All I have left to do is be me. And not forget to bring my bilingual timepiece.

The Unspellable Word

When I was in China, I thought it was so limiting to use characters (where each character codes for a syllable) instead of an alphabet. How could they invent new words with a fixed and already assigned number of words? But now I can't speak with complete disdain; I've found a new word that's unspellable. I don't mean appropriating a word from an African language with clicks, which we obviously can't pronounce, and thus can't spell. I mean a word whose pronunciation is so common you wouldn't even think about how unusual the unspellable word really is. In fact, it's half a word.

"What's up?"

"The usual."

But speaking with complete words gets boring sometimes and we leave off the end sometimes. Instead of "whatever" girls say "whatev." One girl in my English class actually asked a guy, "So what are you doing over Christmas vaycay?" The stress was on the first syllable. "Vacation," she clarified. So it shouldn't be strange that we do the same thing with the word "usual."

"What's up?"

"The "--us? youj? yuj? uzh? us(ual)? There's no way to spell the first half of "usual"! We don't have a good way to spell it in any case. "Vision" writes the sound as "si." It's "uge" in "luge" (but not "uge" as in "huge"!). It's "s" in "treasure," "z" in "azure," and "g" in "rouge."

My favorite is taking the Chinese pair "zh" and making "uzh." What's ironic about that is that Chinese doesn't have this sound. My Chinese teacher in Chengdu spoke great English but never mastered "usually." "Youyou-ly," she would say as an approximation.

To solve the problem of the unspellable word, I called Marian, my go-to person for all the linguistics questions I have. "Oh," she said. "The voiced postalveolar fricative. That is an interesting problem." The symbol, as it turns out, is ʒ (which is itself spelled "ezh"). If I hadn't pulled up the Wikipedia page, though, for the "voiced postalveolar fricative", I wouldn't have been able to copy-and-paste the character in. I can't type "ʒ." It does look like a 3, but u3 looks like an energy drink or Bono's upgrade, so I can't forsee people writing "the u3." If it happens, though, I called it.

In the meantime, we have an unspellable word.

The Penman Hummus Theorem

You can learn a lot about people from what they emphasize in life. If life was everlasting, emphasis wouldn't mean anything, since all proportions are equal when the denominator is infinity. But luckily I'm going to die, and you can know me by what I do. In other words, I only have so many entries I can write, and this one is about the Penman Hummus Theorem.

I wanted to give this blog some time, let readers accumulate, before I unleashed the idea. Didn't want to start logging in the forest of life if no one's there to hear the sound of the trees falling. But I'll graduate in a few semesters and Wikipedia doesn't know I exist. Infamy, here I come:

The Penman Hummus Theorem: The best single indicator of the degree to which an American is Democrat or Republican is the degree to which that person likes or dislikes hummus.

Let me give an example before I rigorously defend the theorem. I was raised in a conservative home notably lacking hummus. When I turned eighteen and registered to vote, I think I put Republican. But this spring and summer, during the excitement of the Democratic primaries, I studied abroad in China. I had one friend there, a British girl (thus outside the theorem's scope), who was adamant about the wonders of hummus. I tried it, swallowing a huge piece of bread tipped with hummus, and was stoically unconvinced.

Like things usually happen once hummus gets involved, though, events were transpiring beyond my knowledge. I relied on the New York Times for my news--liberal. I read Dreams from My Father--fantastic. And when we couldn't take Chinese food any more, we went to the Turkish restaurant to eat overpriced hummus.

Now I enjoyed hummus on limited occasions. That is, I voted Obama for president and Republican for everything else. Everyone I know is the same. My roommate, a closet Democrat, likes hummus only when he's eating by himself. Matches aren't often so specific. Rank yourself 1 to 10 on how liberal you are and 1 to 10 on how much you like hummus and the numbers are freakishly united. No formal studies have been conducted--yet--but I've tried to ask lots of different kinds of people--friends, enemies, girls, my black friend--and almost all of their answers bolsters the results. R² is better than any other factor I know of.

Well, even if there is a correlation, you argue, it could probably be explained in terms of geography. But they call California a blue state for a reason--they gobble the stuff over there. The Penman Hummus Theorem is a better predictor than red or blue state statistics would be. Florida is a swing state, but if I want to know who you supported, I wouldn't look to your age, or your gender, or your race, or your height. I'd ask if you like hummus.

I have my theories about what causation underlies the Penman Hummus Theorem's correlation. Republicans don't like foreigners or their food. Hummus is mashed-up babies, and Democrats like abortion. In the movie Aladdin, when they're escaping the Cave of Wonders, the lava shoots up to form the word "hummus" (subconsciously linking the ill-effects of estate tax on the government to a food--those cunning liberal Disney animators who want to limit Republican taste).

But I don't have to be right about why the Penman Hummus Theorem is true. It's enough to have contributed one theorem to the repository of human knowledge (and if it were to show up on Wikipedia, I would humbly bear the fame). I can die now, happy and hummus-ed.

A Moral Dilemma

I went to go see The Dark Knight at the student union Friday. Every week they have showings of recently out-of-theaters movies which are mostly attended by foreign students who probably don't understand them very much. (For example, I saw Tropic Thunder a week or two ago, and there is no way a non-native speaker would understand the bare outlines of the plot: that actors were trying to make a movie but it became real and they had to become the mature band of brothers they were pathetically acting.)

Well, the last showing was at 11:30. I couldn't get there until 11, and when I did the bulging, informal line wrapped to the end of the hall and was starting to snake its way back. A line heading two ways with no physical marker distinguishing them is like marriage: as soon as the doors are opened, the two become one and what looked like a civilized arrangement becomes unfairly entangled.

Knowing all the people I do, though, on my way to the turgid back of the line I saw a friend. A back-up friend, anyway. One of those friends who you're friends with when you don't have any real friends. The feeling is mutual, I'm sure. No offense, Lauren.

I stopped for a friendly hello and we chatted for a few minutes while we both knew I was analyzing the line situation. I finally confessed I was thinking of just standing there and being a tag-along, which Lauren encouraged me to do. But the moral determinants of my decision were too great to avoid thought. Lauren didn't believe it could possibly take me longer than ten seconds to decide.

"It's an easy decision," she said. "Either you do... or you don't."

"Either you go to war, or you don't. Either you marry somebody, or you don't," I retorted. "Easy." I'm taking the LSAT in three weeks and will be more pleasant once I don't impose logic on my relationships.

But now I feel like I need to explain why it was such a difficult decision, with lots of ellipses to show how long I thought about it.

Why not be Lauren's friend for the night? I asked myself. Well, since there are a limited number of seats, by taking one of them I'm effectively taking one away from someone else... but since the end of the line is screwy, the seat that I would take might just as well be taken by the last guy to start standing in line...

of course, other people cutting doesn't justify me cutting, but it certainly cuts back on the harms involved: if half the people in line didn't start at the back, then there's only a one-in-two chance that the guy I'd be taking a seat from would deserve it more than me...

and if he didn't deserve it more than me, then it comes down to connections and me having friends in line ahead of him...

on the other hand, all the foreign students probably don't know how this works and will stand in line because they don't have friends they can stand in line with...

but maybe that's the cost of being a foreigner, since I'd expect something like that to happen if I were in China...

but maybe I would count that kind of injustice as something contemptible about China...

but life isn't fair...

but that's a stupid justification...

well even if the guy I'm cutting out did start at the back, the only reason I think it's wrong for him not to get the seat is because he was expecting it, but with a crowd of 300+, no one's expectations would be disappointed because no one could accurately tell if they'd get in...

plus, I had planned to join my brother and his friends, and would have felt no qualms about jumping in line with them since I had asked them to save me a spot...

but since I didn't plan on seeing Lauren and her friends, maybe that doesn't count...

but I was planning on going...

but planning can only carry you so far in deserving a space...

but maybe desire can carry you the rest? I was in China when it came out, after all, and didn't have access to it...

well, it's certainly something I could do, since I've been standing with Lauren for almost half an hour now, and no one knows or cares that I didn't come with her...

And so I end right where I started: with the ability to get it, and a lack of wisdom about doing it. I decided that the decision wasn't clear-cut, and that the part about joining my brother and his friends convinced me that it's not always required to start at the back.

So Lauren introduced me to all of her friends, and we waited another few minutes, and then we went in and saw The Dark Knight. I didn't like it. But I did have my own soul-searching moment getting in, so that made it worth it. Or did it...

Victoria's Secret

I was lost looking for Borders the other day. I had gone online, found the store closest to me, read the vague directions ("just off 75 by the Oaks Mall"), found the Oaks Mall, circumnavigated the mall by car, walked inside hoping it was there, and headed toward Waldenbooks instead when I saw it wasn't. Waldenbooks ended up not being what I needed, but to get there I had to pass by what seemed like the largest Victoria's Secret in America. I'm talking a twenty second walk for one side, even if you don't slow down to see--for curiosity's sake--what's offered through the invitingly large doors. The store's strategically located on a corner in the mall, so to get to Waldenbooks I had to walk another twenty seconds to traverse the other side.

I surmised that we have such a large Victoria's Secret to accomodate the nation's #1 party school. And then thought about how I'm probably anomalous for using "surmise" in the same sentence as "Victoria's Secret."

Well, as I was lightly examining the construction of the underthings on display, I realized what was attractive wasn't the underwear; it was the models. I mean, you walk by a leather jacket and you think, "Wow, what a sweet leather jacket." Doesn't matter who wears it, the jacket looks nice. But if you aren't Victoria, your secret is probably not best hidden by her products. I admit, Victoria looks pretty good in plastic.

Going to China teaches you things, though. I just gave a presentation last night to some kids about studying abroad, and was explaining that when Chinese people travel, they don't settle for a suitcase. Most of them, I think, don't have suitcases. Instead they use burlap sacks stuffed with food, provisions, a tent, family members, Communist pamphlets--you can fit everything in one of these sacks.

Well, when I was in Xinjiang sightseeing I saw a woman waiting at the bus stop with several bags by her. But what caught my interest wasn't her prodigious packing skills, it was the rest of her cargo:


That's right. It's Victoria's secret, cloned, bisected, sliced into thin strips, and tied together. Made in China! And I thought "Victoria" was an English name.

Needless to say, this revolutionized the way I view women. As I was walking past Victoria's Secret in the Oaks Mall, trying not to lust from the lingerie and succeeding surprisingly well, I thought wistfully to myself, "It's just not the same when you've seen the mannequins naked."

Kill Your Darlings

In fiction writing classes, critiquing stories means giving people the hard truth about what works and what doesn't. "Rules" don't work very well for fiction. There's the "gosling rule," which says that the first person you meet in a story should be the main character. But some really good stories don't follow that; the gosling rule just happens to work well most of the time. That's the tricky part about writing fiction: finding what works.

The author usually isn't very good at determining what works. In fact, sometimes a particular paragraph or phrase or idea seems brilliant and necessary--but it doesn't work in the story. I've had an idea for a story that's evolved so that when I start writing the story the inspirational idea is a clunky addition. If I force it in, someone needs to tell me to take it out.

Those are the changes that are the hardest to make. "Kill your darlings," they say. It's painful, but your story is much better for it.

Well, when I drafted a script for the Crest commercial Ben and I made, the slogan was "People buying Crest is not like Crest." Toothpaste comes out a tube and won't go back in. People buying toothpaste, on the other hand, are free to return it. So I had in mind juxtaposing shots of a guy trying to make toothpaste go back in the tube with the shots about the craziness of the video. But that made the video even more difficult to understand, because you had to infer what about people buying Crest was not like Crest and how that mattered. We filmed it, strung all the scenes together, and it didn't work.

Ben broke the news to me that we had to change it. And so we killed my darling toothpaste squeezing scene and the commercial was better for it.

But I still like the scene so much that I'm resurrecting it so everyone can enjoy Dan making a mess on Julie Vaiarella's table. AGHHH!

Tied for First

Several entries ago I posted the commercial Ben Rush and I made for the Jungle Smash video contest:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9pcjYiN3fw

Our video sets up an elaborate, ridiculous situation about people buying toothpaste and then contrasts it with the serenity of actually using toothpaste. I thought it was a pretty good commercial. It was at least good enough to be criticized in the comments for the contest.

Well, the winner was supposed to be announced November 3rd. November 3rd came and went with no update from the creator. Then a few more days went by. People began asking in the comments whether the contest was still happening or not. No response.

I thought the contest must have been a scam after all. Ben and I spent so much time and effort making our Crest commercial and then it was for a contest that wasn't even going to be judged. (I was crestfallen, perhaps.) I emailed the guys from the blog I heard about the contest from and they said they'd pass it on to him.

And then, late last week, our video appeared with a few others as a finalist, with the winner to be announced in two days. Four days went by, and then I got an email saying Ben and I had tied for first. Where do we live so he can mail us a check?

Wahoo!!! Ben and I allotted 80% of our $1000 prize to ourselves--it's like a part-time job that I don't have!--and the rest to our amazing actors. I thought it would be a nice touch to give everyone a celebratory tube of Crest in a gift bag, but then I remembered I can't even wrap presents very well, let alone give a pretty token of our appreciation.

Our video starts with a guy buying some toothpaste so he can enter a contest, and when he sees someone else at the store he somehow gets in mind that if both their videos are good, they could each get half of the prize money. And then in real life the prize is split and we get half the original prize. Correlation or causation? I think Ben and I have a future making commercials together if we can dictate people's responses that closely. We'd be the new wave of marketing: like hiring a Jedi to advertise your product. A Jedi that makes a sweet buck for his work. And one who actually brushes with Colgate.

Wahoo!

Education and Racquetball

A friend I'll call Sarah and I like to play racquetball together. Sarah isn't very good at sports and has in mind that I'll teach her how to play. We've worked our way into a rhythm of hitting the ball around a bit and then playing a few games. Yesterday Sarah got frustrated because she couldn't return my serves and declared I wasn't doing a good job teaching. I was certainly able to admit that could be true, but I didn't know what to replace it with. Sarah didn't have good form hitting the ball, didn't have good timing, didn't use the back wall effectively. She knew it, too, but couldn't fix it.

I thought about our lesson the rest of the day and realized that there were several factors contributing to my ineffective teaching.

First, I don't know how to correct the bad habits Sarah can't correct. Simply put, she hits like a girl: her arm moves like a shaken hose, only having force at the tip. I noticed that was different from the way I hit, but we haven't made much progress getting her to be less noodly hitting the ball.

Second, I learned racquetball on my own, so I have no authority in telling people what's good and what's bad. In juggling, for example, if you can do a pattern, you must know how to do it. Racquetball takes two people, though, and just because I frequently beat Dan doesn't mean I actually know what I'm doing. I feel bad telling Sarah she's doing something wrong when I might be doing something wrong, too, and just not know it.

I mention this only because it made me think about a theory of education. I think education is naturally like this picture:


The dark red is your knowledge area, and the light red is your ability to communicate it. The most basic parts can be communicated easily: there probably isn't a lot of difference in the way I explain the rules of racquetball and the way an expert would. His dark red square would be five times the size of mine, but my light red is almost as dense as his would be at the middle. The closer you get to the limits of your ability, the less able you are to explain what you're doing. I can barely juggle seven balls, so if I saw someone struggling, I'd just be able to root them on. What's wrong with their pattern? They're not doing it right, I guess. I don't know. Why can't Dan beat me in racquetball? I don't know, I'm just a little bit better than he is.

If someone teaches you something, you have an additional layer of knowledge: you remember how you learned it.


Now your light red has paths so that if you barely understand something, you can still explain it to others parroting the way you learned it. I'm not great at differential equations, but I can still talk people through my notes.

And so, since I never learned how to play racquetball and didn't have to fix the same problems, my light red area is pretty thin. Now to just convince Sarah it's not my fault I can't teach her, it's just that I don't have a lot of light red...

De-summer-izing Myself

Florida doesn't have seasons. It has "hurricane season" and "Christmas season" but there's only so much fall and winter you can impose on a place which is called the "Sunshine State." We've given up on fall, but I have a pet theory about Gainesville's winter: we get two weeks of winter spread over "winter" in 2-3 day spurts. That's important, because if you're slow to warm up to the cold, it'll be over by the time you're wearing your coat. People don't really have more than one coat here.

Now that it's past Halloween, I've transitioned to wearing pants. I have two pairs of jeans, and that should last me the month or so in between trips to a washing machine. But now I have to re-calculate.

Look at these rails:


Pretty sweet, you say. I'd like that yellow for my pants, you say. Been there, brushed against that:


I vigorously scrubbed, but I'm not sure if the paint will come off. Don't you have to put signs up in America when there's wet paint?

I also have to improvise when it comes to wearing more than a t-shirt. I've recently gone for the t-shirt scarf look, which I'm not sure is just native to people who've never needed to use a scarf or if this has always existed and we just never progress past it here:


In China I heard the phrase "a scarf is half a sweater." I think it's supposed to be a cute thing to say when your family is cold and all you have is a lousy sweater, but coming out of Gainesville's mini-winters, it's too warm for a real sweater and too cold for nothing. Hence my chic fake Burberry. And that's how I dress in between the rainy season and the not-as-rainy season.

A China Moment

I picked a winner in this year's election. Go Obama! Now we can go back to having only opinions that don't really matter. All this individual equality thing was going to my head. I'm not experienced and wise; who cares what I say? Now no one does, again.

I've been stressed out the last few days. I'm not sure why, really. Taking 12 credits isn't conducive to stress. But I've been on hold for a lot of things, and that's taken a toll on me: the election; the Crest contest; a date; another contest; the impending LSAT. This morning I couldn't make myself do any work, so I decided to go mail my friend's book back to him. In the summer I traveled to a remote part of China with my friend Alex, and then when he had to leave I went to Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan by myself. He had a phrase book (which ended up being useless) which he lent to me on the condition I return it to him when we both got back to America.

Today was the day, then, but in my fragile state the best I could do was go to the store on campus, Do it Reitz (a pun on the name of the student union), and have them tell me what kind of packaging and postage I needed.

While I was there, I had a China moment. It started lightly: I felt like I was barely keeping my head above the water of life. I mailed more things in China than I have in America, so it was also understandable that I wasn't confident in the store. They type the label up for you, so I recited Alex's address to her. Then she asked for a phone number. "What?" I asked, and was reminded of how I was much better at Chinese when I knew what question was coming next. Apparently that's true for me in English, too. "A phone number," she said.

I don't have Alex's phone number memorized, so I wanted to tell her that I didn't have one. For about a second, though, all I could think of was an answer in Chinese: "没有。" I stuttered, knowing that wasn't right.

That's a pretty good China moment. I don't often have the urge to reply to people in Chinese. But it consummated itself a minute later.

"That'll be $12," the girl said. Mind you, the book I was sending is post-card size with fewer than 50 pages.

"That seems pretty high," I ventured.

"Well, we're a private business, so we're not allowed to compete with government prices," she said--or something like that. She spoke in English, obviously, but I didn't really understand what she meant. I only understood the general idea: she wanted $12 from me. I thought about leaving and going to the post office on the other side of campus, but rejected that because I didn't have the stamina for it at that moment.

In China, I was glad to be a rich American, because it meant I didn't have to sweat the small stuff. If I got ripped off a few kuai my budget wasn't off-kilter. Of course, the longer I was there the more I became able to live like a Chinese person would, and the less my spending would be out of the ordinary. But while I got adjusted I explicitly allowed for what I termed my "foreigner tax." That is, if I were Chinese, I'd know not to buy that brand because it sucks and I wouldn't have just wasted three dollars.

Anyway, the girl at the counter told me I'd have to pay a ridiculous amount to send Alex my package, and I knew vaguely that it was way too high. And as I brought out my debit card to pay for it, I thought to myself, "Wow, this is a pretty high foreigner tax."

But then I remembered I'm not a foreigner here.

A Culinary Adventure

One of my friends, Mike Braverman, enjoys cooking. He does life slowly, and I think that's why. I have no patience for cooking, but that's why people have friends. I screw up Mike's dinners and he teaches me that speed doesn't equal quality.

So a few nights ago we decided to make dinner together. Dan joined along, so the three of us trekked to Publix to select food there. Mike had a plan. "A meal has meat, a vegetable, and a starch," he said. Dan thought anything that wasn't steak wasn't real meat, but I convinced him legitimate meals could be made with chicken. I don't love squash, but after living in China, can eat anything I need to and didn't protest that being our vegetable. French bread topped off the meal. We needed to use spaghetti sauce. Dan and I didn't know if we had spaghetti sauce. I forgot to add that this is the first time we've cooked this school year. I make sandwiches, and Dan's used his George Foreman once or twice, but the stove has basically been out of commission. Maybe that's why I feel comfortable playing music from my laptop there when I'm cleaning:


But no more using the stove as a table. I flattened the chicken with a brick, Dan sliced the squash, and Mike set up an elaborate process to make garlic bread.

Looking back, I think I get frustrated when I don't have proper equipment. We realized that Dan and I do not have a spatula. To Mike's great amazement, though, we do have a garlic press (left over from the great fall purge):


And then we didn't have any serrated knives. After trying to slice the bread, I got too aggravated and we ended up ripping off pieces.

The meal tasted okay. The squash was a little soggy, the bread had too strong of a flavor, and the chicken tasted average--no offense to Mike's cooking experience. I expected that since we were doing things ourselves it'd be really cheap, but it wasn't. I have to say, I'm not inspired to cook more now. In fact, now that I've seen the limitations of our utensils, I feel less inclined to spend time doing something I'm not good at. Maybe I could find a girl to give me lessons.

Does anyone want to get me a spatula for Christmas? Then I could make omelets. I already have a dozen eggs in my refrigerator that I haven't touched from the first week of school, so I'm all set there. Then I'll practically be a chef. After all, I do have a garlic press.

To the Masses: about "Epic"

My post is going to be short since I'm at home this weekend and blogging isn't high on my list of priorities compared to watching UF cream Georgia, seeing Melanie do really well in her marching competition (well, seeing the band do well anyway; it's hard to tell who's who among 300 kids in the same outfit), and talking to all my family. Plus, tonight's daylight savings, so I'm losing an hour doing this. It's an epic night.

I try to be open to new uses of good words, but I admit it's a struggle. "Epic" was a good word. Lord of the Rings, Virgil's Aeneid, Paradise Lost--great epics. And when you know what an epic is, then it makes sense to apply the word to, say, a literary work or a movie, or even an effort. "He's writing an epic poem." Cool. I'm okay with the adjectival use.

Then you figure, well, if "epic" describes an effort that will be remembered for all history and takes place across generations, that you should use it to mean a situation that you think is cool. "That was an epic pass from Tebow." Mm, I resist.

Here's why I resist: I'm not against language changing for new meanings, but I do resist changes that are a crutch for those with small vocabularies. Using "epic" trivially conflates its meaning and forces it to be just another way to say "good." I don't have a voluminous vocabulary, but I don't think it's hard to be more specific than "good." And if you have to make up words so it doesn't look like you have dull-witted, repetitive ideas, then I think you're wasting you're time because people will eventually notice. Ooh! Epic burn.

But it gets worse. Give the masses an inch, and each person pulls for a mile. (That makes for a lot of miles, distributed over everyone.) "Epic" is now acquiring a colloquial adverbial sense. Yes, I hate to break it to you, but I have heard, in real conversation, "That was epic cool." At least the masses discard all semblance of grammaticality and skip "epically cool."

"Epic" in this sense means "really." "He's really ticked off" becomes, "He was, like, epic pissed off." So, for anyone who likes to use the words "good" and "really," but not really, then "epic" is the word for you. It's epic good, dawg. Can't we all talk like this instead of like this?