The sky was a solid gray when I woke up this morning, and it's even harder for me to drag myself out of bed with such weather. I've found that I'm most awake when I go to bed between 1:30 and 2 AM, and that sometimes after a caffeine high I immediately crash into sleep afterward. If it has been a while since I had caffeine, coffee has immediately put me to sleep twice. Sometimes, my body is too weird. It doesn't help that this summer theme seems to be 'let's see the myriad ways in which she can hurt herself!' I fell off my bike, got multiple paper cuts (including one under a fingernail), had a 103 fever, last month had the most awful cramps I've ever had in years, twisted my left ankle, made my skin disease worse and lately have had random purple bruises. There's probably other tiny things, such as running into furniture.
Today is, was my last day of Chinese class. Nine weeks, 8am-12:20pm, monday through friday. Only in the last three weeks did I start randomly having thoughts in Chinese, and also slipped from using traditional characters. However, I maintain that traditional characters are prettier and easier for me to remember. Though it's a good sign that I've started to think in Chinese, it's impossible for me to think in Chinese syntax. I still have a lot of difficulty composing sentences correctly in Thai, and ever since coming back from Thailand I have a lot of trouble spelling in English, hahaha. Language is so much of our lives and is so fun to play with, but most of the time I wonder why I'm vaguely masochistic to put myself through so many language classes. I took a bit of Spanish in high school (of which I wish I paid more attention to), and next fall I'm signed up to take Korean 101. I feel amused and happy but also crazy.
At the beginning of summer I was told that summer in Eugene is really chill and in many ways much better than during the school year. There were fewer people, fewer parties, more free time, nice weather and a lot of outdoor activities to do. Kent had taken 3rd year Chinese last summer, and told me that he misses the class. It's chill, he said, Wu laoshi is super chill once you get used to her and the classmates. He was right. I made new friends and somehow got my homework done amongst all the 21st birthday parties, SuJu obsessing, cooking with people and hanging with people when it was too hot to be active.
Chinese class started out horribly: I asked Robert, a classmate I was acquainted with from second year, “怎麼說 America?” and was immediately horrified that I had forgotten even that. He was probably too tired to even register my blunt stupidity. I would roll out of bed at 7:40, sometimes wash my face if I had enough time, threw on sweatpants if I didn't have time (which was over half of the time), and usually grab an Odwalla bar as 'breakfast.' Then at our 40 minute break, thank goodness for those, I would pedal furiously back to my apartment and sleep for 25 minutes to roll immediately back to class. Later, I discovered the couch in the hallway and would just sleep there during break. Seriously ridiculous. I would stay up late indulging myself in SuJu, drawing, reading, or go out to drink.
It was a struggle to start knowing characters on sight: I think it took me a month into the class to catch up. Later, I was able to write characters a couple of times in early afternoon, write and look at them again in the late afternoon, another time in the evening and just look at them before bed and after waking up and I would be ready for dictation in the morning (usually tuesday through friday mornings). What really sucked was that there were people who had studied abroad previously in China, a couple of ABCs, one Taiwanese, and then the other three or so of us who only had two years of instructed Chinese. Hellllll yes it was a struggle to not feel extremely inferior and awful in the face of everyone else's skillz.
I stopped listening to English music; mostly Korean and Chinese music. Liz introduced me to Khalil Fong, Yang laoshi to Flower Band and Wu laoshi to Kris Phillips. There's more, but they're the only ones who will leave an impression. Look up “Goodbye Melody Rose,” “嘻唰唰” and “冬天里的一把火” respectively....
一把火!
During second year, I really liked Wang laoshi. She was tough but enthusiastic. But this year she was plain, straight-up annoying. She interrupted people and never gave students enough time to compose answers to her reading comprehension questions. Wu laoshi has incomprehensible handwriting tho was enthusiastic and grew on me, and Yang laoshi was just super nice and lenient about my lack of instinct for Chinese syntax. I'm upset that she gave us a take home test for one of our small texts, and a separate test for our actual text book (50 translations, 13 reading comprehension, 8 idioms to translate, thoughts on a movie we saw in class, 36 more idioms to translate, and 3 songs to translate). I will let the contents of the parenthesis speak for themselves.
Other highlights: I met an exchange student from Korea who uses Chinese every day and really likes Big Bang, and she is super nice and sweet. I met another classmate that I had ran into previously: she was inducted into our major at the same time as me, and was going to work with the State department in London. We did a lot of random shopping trips together and did all our skits together. What I did not like: meeting creepers that exoticized Asian women. Eviscerate, creeper!
That's my summer so far. I've been dreading moving out of this apartment ever since I first settled here in January. This place is far too expensive, but I enjoyed it for the most part, especially since I lived with V. I had a badly planned dance party last friday, since the living room was cleared of most of its furniture, but it was fun anyway. I did a lot of ridiculous, stupid biking at night, including biking to my brother's house the night I was told my maternal g-ma passed. I went to Triangle Lake and the rock slides. I went to the bars far too many times; since Thailand, I am so over bars. My other roommate also did not have the nicest summer, so I put up with a lot of bad nights where she would play country and awful, mainstream rap'n'hip-hop crap from 10 to midnight. Last week, my dad took my bed, and now I'm packing to leave by the sunday after next.
Going to move stuff to my brother's, go to parent's house to clear out old things, plan MCC activities next year, play hard and work even harder.
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