sundries

[rm]

Ho, ho, Chicago vacation approved, which means when Patty and I are in Chicago, I'm actually off the clock, as opposed to working from the hotel and calling in sick to go to a wedding.

Sleeping with the eye-mask is life-changing. Like, when I found out I had celiac disease and stopped eating gluten life-changing. I've always had very bright bedrooms. And now, suddenly I dream, or at least remember them. Oh.

Fun at graduate_maria continues. More items going up tonight! And I'll do a listing of things with one and no bids tomorrow. Check it out, she still really needs our help. Right now we've given her some hope, but the problem really is not solved.

kyburg posts about a legal immigrant who may be deported because of a paperwork snafu and needs a whole lot of help.

So, German with Rosetta Stone continues.

I worry about my ability to retain information. The lessons last night were mostly easy (and I did all of them, pictures, just spoken, practicing my own pronunciation, writing), but then when I tried to tell Patty about them later, I could explain the grammar things I'd figured out (how "ein Junge" seems to become "einem Jungen" when something happens to the boy and how it looks like "ein Madchen" even though you'd think "girl" would be feminine, because kids are gender neutral and therefore default to masculine), but couldn't remember the word for horse or airplane. Although when I woke up this morning I had those back ("ein Pferd" and "ein Flugzeug").

Meanwhile, my pronunciation is way better than my French, right off. I think both because I hear a lot of German and because the sounds I have to make in German are less "bad sounds you are not to make" in terms of English language speech therapy my accent is not terrible. But I'm still sure, probably in a way that's not helping, that I'll never be able to speak the language because I'll always be too ashamed.

As noted last night, the Prop 8 ruling is coming down today. As noted in the comments to that post, it's also quite unlikely that that's the end of this, or will make any marriages start happening again immediately.

I think, sometimes, because LJ can often be an echo-chamber of those we more or less agree with, how fucking hard it is to be gay. It's not just "oh, the laws suck and haven't caught up with reality yet." I have at least two people on my friendslist with profoundly strained relationships with their parents because they are in queer relationships. And I don't mean strained like "but what about grandkids?" I mean strained like making threats, demanding lies, gender-policing, shame, bullying, removal of resources, isolating from friends and family, other abusive behaviors, etc.

And here I am, out and loud and very much not much one for bullshit, but a week doesn't go by where I don't think to myself that when my mother had me in her mid-twenties I bet she never thought her life would look like this: breast cancer and a gay daughter. My parents aren't even mad or disappointed in me, but all I know from living in the world is that I've probably made them sad.

So, do I hate how much of the LGBTQ rights debate has come to rest on marriage when everything form healthcare to employment to housing can be denied to you simply because you're queer? Ayup. In spite of this, does the marketing person in me think the equal marriage rights issue is sensible from a PR perspective and a potential cascade from which all other rights will come? Ayup. Do I remain deeply conflicted because of the way the necessity of mainstream political activism combined with the AIDS crisis basically destroyed and remade the gay community in a totally different image (in your image, straight world, not ours) in just a few decades? Yeah.

But what's done is done, and hopefully soon we can simply live.

(This rant brought to you, in part, by having to explain the AIDS crisis to someone yesterday. I'll take being too young to remember when cashiers were afraid to take your money if you were male and read as gay because there might be AIDS on the dollar bill and people thought you could get it off toilet seats. But "I'm sheltered"? History is not an R-rated movie, and Wikipedia is a totally appropriate starting place but not a primary source. Thanks.)

The downtown mosque has been approved. Racist assholes are still freaking out though. And what the fuck was with the ADL weighing in on this one? And did people miss the part where us Jews aren't the only Semetic people out there? Argh argh argh.

Meanwhile, The New York Times points out of the obvious by saying the labor market is punishing to women. Then, of course, being the New York Times, it comes up with winners like, "Men and women are not identical, of course. Many more women take time off from work. Many more women work part time at some point in their careers. Many more women can’t get to work early or stay late," as if these are all biologically based facts.

Really, I'm starting to even wonder why I read the Times, and that's hard for me to say, as a native New Yorker, an educated person, and a J-school alum.

The Tea Party and 'historical fundamentalism.' (Sometimes this is saying you need to be subscriber, sometimes it isn't - apologies for their annoyingness).

Free-range lawn care and goat rental.

The Piano that Lives in the Hall now has a damaged microscope on it.

I know more things about my tentative Dragon*Con schedule. I've already hit one major conflict. If neither of the panels gets moved by the master scheduler, I'll be pulling off of one of my YA Lit track items (I'll be on others!) in order to give my mourning-related presentation at 8:30pm on Friday on the Anime/Manga track. That is some primetime loveliness. More when I know it, because depsite my typing this, I know nothing.

I completely regret ever linking to that thing about Tom Hardy and whether or not he's had sex with men, since it's keeps changing and won't go away. This is hopefully, yet surely not, the last word on that.

I have read two really good Big Bang fics for the Whoniverse in the last couple of days. I must note, however, that military don't call women "Mum." You're just hearing "Ma'am" in an accent that's unfamiliar to you and you're writing it down wrong. It's a very distracting wrong too. So, you know, FYI. And yes, really, I'm sure.

Confession, I didn't pay enough attention really to White Collar or Covert Affairs last night because Patty had just come home and I was multitasking other things, so I'll need to rewatch both shows.

It occurs to me that part of the problem with the slowly emerging Jack/Auggie fic is we're getting so much new backstory on Auggie every week that I still feel like I am in the middle of a rapidly shifting landscape. But how great was the lie detector scene???? "I have four older brothers, so you'd think I'd learn how to lie." Oh man. Also, still so Jack's type -- tragic past, stubborn beyond what's good for him, thinks he knows better than the folks in charge, keeper of secrets, nice clothes. Also, how much does this CIA remind you of Yvonne Hartman's Torchwood?

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

Awesome, thank you, that piece of grammar information, while, against the Way Rosetta Stone works, helps my brain, since I have enough grammars from other languages that I'm trying to make this fit those.

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.

I'm afraid I'm very structure-oriented when it comes to languages, so my reaction to things like Rosetta Stone (or my French class) is to want to wave my arms about shouting "There's a system and you're intentionally obscuring it!"

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you; this is what I just tried to articulate below.
Maybe some people learn to navigate systems best by being told "Do this. Don't worry about why," but I am not that person, and nor, I'm pretty sure, is rm.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of in the middle. I get frustrated by rules for which there are a bazillion exceptions, and I like the way I learned ASL where grammar is more organically learned. That said, I know what a declention is, so if there's declining, they should just tell me.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

I was just thinking about that, as well as dance and fencing. Maybe when there's a physical component to the learning, the "why" becomes less important. It's definitely dancing about architecture to talk about this stuff, but for me, if it's mostly intellectual learning, I need to see the bigger structures through which I'm traveling; if there is a kinetic element, it's usually enough for me to focus on the movement.
And yes, they are declining, though in a fairly minimalist (they are Germans, after all) way. You might find the word order rules for indirect statements and questions interesting too.
The good news is that unlike most of the modern languages I've studied, German is still studied more for reading and writing than for conversation, and it's not hard to find textbooks that assume a basic comfort with grammar and talk about declension and such.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

That last paragraph looks like I'm implying that more people study German for reading and writing than for conversation. That's obviously untrue.
I meant that there are still enough people who study German in order to focus primarily on reading and writing it (Hi!) rather than conversation that there are resources out there appropriate for grammar nerds.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I have to say that as someone who's studied Latin and Greek, you've got resources that aren't used by something like Rosetta Stone.
My advice would be to do a lesson and then look up the grammar somewhere. Even if it doesn't all fit with things you've learned in other languages, having dealt with patterns and paradigms before, what you do understand should help put things into context.
I did this all the time in first year German because my professor had very specific ideas about how much grammar information we could/should deal with, but not knowing how it fit into the larger grammatical and syntactic structures of the language made me NUTS.
If you ever want to have a conversation about maidens and dogs and pastries and what time it is, let me know. My German is getting rusty and I'd like it not to.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Oh cool, yeah, I mean, all I can say right now is that "a boy is on the airplane" and "a cat and a car!" but yeah.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I took a year, over a year ago. My vocabulary is limited to basically that plus random shit I know from opera.
Also my first semester prof was OBSESSED with cars so I can talk about them a lot, but I don't want to.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Ein Ball auf einem Auto!

I made a sentence. It's like I have this weird limited vocabulary through which I can say completely ridiculous shit now.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

The fact that each time we learn a language, we're essentially starting from infancy is what makes my job hilarious/frustrating/heartbreaking/awesome on a daily basis.

[weirdquark]

At one point my friends and I realized that we were able to say "that person is a vampire" several different ways in Japanese with what we managed to pick up from watching anime. This came much faster than figuring out how to ask where one might find the bathroom.

[hoyland54.livejournal.com]

In the first chapter of the book I had for German 1, there's an exercise with a list of people and you're supposed to decide whether to use the formal or the informal with each one. One of the people was a vampire. The pressing issue of how to address a vampire was never really resolved, though I believe the prevailing school of thought was that it depended on your relationship with the vampire and not enough information was given.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I think shit that has the biological imperative to kill you should be address formally. But that's just me.

[missysedai.livejournal.com]

This made me LOL.

Also, I'm in complete agreement.

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

In the German dubbing of The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf uses du with the Balrog. Just throwin' that out there.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I don't know du yet. What is that?

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

The informal you, as opposed to Sie, the formal version.

ETA: You use du for close friends, fellow students, family, God, animals, and - apparently - Balrogs.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I have had long conversations about using the familiar for God with conservative Catholics. Long, long conversations. We're boggled by it.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

That would make sense, though, since Gandalf is at least the equal of the Balrog.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Is informal and formal always about hierarchy though? If two parties are worthy of serious respect and equals, would they not still use formal address with each other? (Certainly, if you look at formal manners in English a hundred or two hundred years ago this would be the stylistic case even if we lack a formal "you" and an informal "you").

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

That is true, and he does end up whupping some Balrog ass shortly thereafter. I always wondered if he was being deliberately provocative.

[shadowvalkyrie.livejournal.com]

Well, he is Gandalf; if you're on of the most powerful beings on Middle Earth, you can call anyone "du" (or whatever else you like to call them). ";-]

[illariy.livejournal.com]

Heh. Great point. If anyone feels disrespected, they won't be able to do much about it anyway. *g*

[gement.livejournal.com]

This conversation is Relevant To My Interests.

(I'm writing Torchwood x-over with my own characters and it's a case of an unstoppable privilege hitting an immovable privilege, with both sides terrified of each other and being disturbingly polite.)