Midaregami

I don’t like the use of disingenuous nonsense like “Best regards,” or “Sincerely,” at the end of emails. I’ve only ever seen it used in emails where the sender is either totally impersonal (i.e., an automated email program) or an officious pinhead who might as well be (e.g., an admissions officer for an institution of learning). In the few instances where the sender is not one of the above, they typically come off sounding like it anyway owing to the overwhelming prevalence of same. Thus, I submit the following email style guidelines to be included in my Handbook of Style for the Internet (Hitting bookstores everywhere in 2007):

First, I’m going to talk about my classical Japanese (“bungo”) class, because it’s really cool, but it’s also (as you may have inferred) fairly difficult.

Much of the course’s difficulty quotient results from its interaction with my other classes. I like to break up my homework so that I go from one task to a fairly different task, but this winds up being problematic when I have to do three or four hours’ worth of reading in Japanese, and barely an hour of anything else. So I wind up having to steel myself for a solid couple of hours poring over the passages we’re doing in class, and the sad truth is this: I never, ever had to work this hard in undergraduate school.

UNM never demanded that of me.

Thus, the problem with bungo is one of time management, and less related to the actual difficulty of the work.

Actually, that is an oversimplification. Bungo is very difficult, but I don’t feel an undue amount of trepidation because it that difficult for everybody in the class. In my Meiji/Taisho literature class (the only pure graduate-level course I’m taking this semester) the story is somewhat different.

It, like the bungo class, requires several hours of preparation for each hour of class, but it causes me significantly more stress, mostly because I feel that I am barely hanging on, while the other students can do the reading much, much more quickly than me. I don’t know this for certain, but I suspect.

Add to this mix the papers I’ll be writing this semester (in total, roughly 50 pages of writing,) and it looks like this grad school thing will be more an exercise in managing multiple time-consuming and -critical tasks than it will be about “Japanese” or “Literature.”

It’s something like a week after the fact, but it bears mentioning that I very much enjoyed my birthday. The festivities were spread out over the weekend, but here are the highlights. I:

1. Saw Serenity.
2. Made and ate spaghetti from scratch.
3. Received some excellent presents.

Regarding Serenity. The same graduate student colleague who turned me on to “Settlers of Catan” lent me the Firefly box set, and despite a few complaints I have with some quirks of the show, it was ridiculously, gloriously good. And, thanks to my late appreciation of it, I only had to wait a few weeks for the release of the movie, “Serenity,” that promised to conclude the series (whose run was tragically cut short). The movie was good, damn good. I am a leaf on the wind.

About the spaghetti. A huge shipment of boxes from home arrived, and among the books and DVDs that define my identity as a dork was my beloved spaghetti maker. We made a batch that very night, homemade noodles and sauce, which, with the nice Chianti Jake bought, combined to make a meal that was, in his words, “retardedly good.” Retardedly. I need to do it again soon.

And finally, a word on presents. I got excellent, unexpected presents that I will enjoy for months or years to come. And flowers. That’s pretty much all that needs saying—that and the fact that I have shockingly cool friends.

More posts are coming—big, meaty discourses on classical Japanese and the nature of suffering, among others—but in the meantime Fluffy asks that I translate the sentences from the previously-posted homework assignment into English, so here they are. Warning: They are not funny. Seriously. They were just random sentences I came up with to fit a particular tree-structure.

All the examples in my Linguistics Textbook use incredibly boring names like “Taro,” “Jiro,” and “Hanako.”

The homework assignment was to create sentences to fit a particular structure that we’re studying in class, which I did. But those names—Unacceptable. I must do better.

This is the actual sheet that I turned in.