Captcha Fortunetelling
Posted in Other Blogs, quotes, Raleigh
Tagged captcha fortunetelling, other blogs, quotes, Raleigh
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Bertie Botts Every Flavour Perfumes
I saw this and wanted to share with you all: the site WeirdFragrances.com is offering samples of zany perfumes! I’m not entirely sure what their deal is, since the site says that the scents aren’t available for purchase, but the fragrances are things like Fresh Bread, Fourth of July and Grease Monkey.
This is not a paid advertisement (those are over in the margin!), I am not getting cash or a free t-shirt for this. (I did ask for a sample of Magazine Pages, though.) Weird Fragrances didn’t ask me to write about them, but if they happen to find my blog, I suggest Hotel Swimming Pool as a new scent.
Update: Since I posted this 9/08 and it’s now 4/09, and I’ve never gotten this scent in the mail, it’s probably safe to say I’m never going to find out what Magazine Pages scent smells like.
Not My Doing!
Isabelle is my 5-year-old niece. She makes me reconsider my whole childfree thing sometimes, but then I see other kids at the mall, and I remember why I don’t like children. (Actually, I don’t like people, but smaller, fragile people who scream and need changing are worse.)
Isabelle: Aunt Meg, what’s this?
Meg: You making a weird face at the dinner table.
Isabelle: No, what’s this part?
Meg: Your tongue.
Isabelle: No, what am I doing?
Meg: Sticking out your tongue.
Isabelle:No! Aunt Meg! I’m doing a Gene Simmons!
I know I didn’t teach her that.
Grammar In The Projects
I got a couple weeks of work teaching at a GED program run by the local housing authority. The funding situation hcnaged at the last minute, so my starting situation was a bit disorganized, but not so bad that someone who’s taught ESL in China would notice.
My class is held in a building with a HeadStart and some kind of women’s health program, down a street of light-up Bail Bonds and Check Cashing signs. When I came in, the matriarch at the front desk offered to lock up my purse for me, and made sure I hadn’t left anything important in the car. It really didn’t improve my first-class confidence.
The students, though, were any teacher’s dream. They all really wanted to be there and really wanted to do the work. We worked on essay writing, and while their writing level was general pretty low, and they were pleased with their essays at the end of class. One woman said that she couldn’t wait to read her work to her kids to show them how intellectual she sounded. I was so proud!
Stick and I were talking about this at dinner that night, in between convincing Stick’s parents that I’m perfectly safe. Our waitress came back over at this point. “Are y’all doing good over here?” she asked us.
“Sure she is.” Stick said, “But she has to drive to the projects to do it.”
Posted in Raleigh
Tagged adventures with Stick, China, ESL, General, Raleigh, Stick, teaching
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Hurricane Brodie
My 1-yr-old nephew just learned how to pull the babysafe plugs out of the electrical outlets. This means careful monitoring when he’s running around, and also vague embarrassment that he can get them out faster than I can.
Provincetown
Phone conversation with Allison tonight. Friends of ours got married on the Cape this weekend, and I’d already talked to Eric, who’d officiated the ceremony as a temporary justice of the peace, about the wedding. But when girls talk about bridal gowns, they need more and different adjectives than engineers like Eric like to give. (Although, Eric did have a short description of the gown, when I’d been expecting him to say “it was a dress”). Allison is one of my UMass crowd, but now she and her husband live in Texas, so they combined the trip to the wedding with a Mass vacation.
Allison: … and then we went to Provincetown.
Meg: Did you go to all the bookstores?
Allison: And all the sex shops.
Meg: We have different priorities.
Allison: I said “and”!
Posted in Books, quotes, Raleigh
Tagged allison, Books, Eric, quotable friends, quotes, Raleigh, UMass, WarCraft, World of WarCraft
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American Mei You
I planned to write a post about starting a job today, teaching SAT prep. Towards the end of the job interview, when we were talking about where to park and what time to arrive, the main teacher (I’m the assistant) happened to mention that it’s a Chinese Saturday school, hosted in the Sunday school rooms of a Baptist mega-church.
I loved coming in this morning, listening to the rhythm of Mandarin conversations, and watching the exchange of mooncakes. I meant to write about how Chinatown, NC found me, smiling at the Beijing 2008 shirts as I looked for my classroom, down hallways full of religious art, prayers on posters and Sunday School projects. I would have felt a bit ignored wandering hall like this in Beijing, but somehow in Raleigh I like being Clark Kent, with my Krypton superpower to understand baby Mandarin, hidden by my American costume.
The prep class went well, we began with Latin roots of SAT words. The main teacher is American, I almost wrote “foreigner”, as if there is just a thing as foreigner in the native-less transplant city of Raleigh. Things ran as expected, down to the familiarity of last-minute copies and an empty copier. This is the fifth or sixth time in my life that I’ve been faced with a lack of paper and of English speakers, you’d think I would have it down by now, but I cannot get beyond Mei you je ge and and pointing to the paper.
I was driving back after class, thinking about how I would write about the school/church, which is literally on the corner of Dixie and Friendly, one of those fantastic moments when I know I’ll be accused of exaggerating.
I noticed, then, that a gas station I passed had taken their prices down. I thought I’d just caught moment as they were increasing the prices, but then I passed another, and another, without any numbers on their sign. I pulled into one, and they’d tied plastic bags over the pumps, and hung a sign. Raleigh is out of gas.
Posted in Beijing, North Carolina, Raleigh, Teaching
Tagged Beijing Olympics 2008, Beijing:Raleigh, China, chinese, driving, Eric, latin, mandarin, mei you, North Carolina, Raleigh, repatriation, teaching, teaching in China, teaching teenagers
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Thoughts On Twitter
I’ve heard that blogging breaks the barriers between Author and Audience. Well, Twitter breaks the barrier between blogger and commenter. It’s group instant messaging or microblogging for your phone or on the web. Whenever Stick’s dad asks me about a tech buzzword, I make an offline comparision and end with “Like one of those, but faster.” Slower offline Twitter would be, um, talking.
I’m not crazy about the blend between group messaging because I follow parts of different Twitter-crowds so a lot of the time I hear half a conversation. (Also because my China friends have this obnoxious habit of posting in Chinese, but I think my troubles with Mandarin are my own problem and not Twitter’s) Also there’s a lot of the boring side of blogging, what folks ate for lunch and what they watched on TV.
I do like the quick chatting with distant friends, and the instant transmission of information, especially the on-the-spot reporting of China news. My dad told me a story about some soviet country in media lockdown, where local ham radio operators reported and relayed the news abroad (or something like that, I was little). I really enjoy the hearing news from my friends — and I have some pretty far-flung friends — on blogs and by email, and then comparing that to the official news. Twitter is accessible by cellphone, which means tweeting from the subway (not going to name names here, but SOMEONE I know really likes to do this!), which means instant reporting from Twitterati on handhelds across the world.
I should admit that even though it’s cool and cyberpunk, I don’t have Twitter updates going directly to my phone unless they’re specifically targeted to me. It would be a cool future feature if we could tag tweets as high-priority, so I could get news without a constant buzz of “@somebody yeah lol” on my phone. I’m sure some spammers would abuse that tag, but it would still be a cool feature.
I’m surprised by how fast Twitter developed spam, and how fast that spam found me. I get these “SoAndSo is following you on Twitter!” messages, only to find out the SoAndSo is selling something or aggressively promoting their site. There’s been a lot of chat about good Twitterquette, my own take is that tweeting a blog post, mentioning your new site and promoting a story you like are all fine. But endless posts pointing to one site or misleading links (which is even easier with the use of TinyURL or a similar program to reduce the characters in a link) is spammy.
Anyway, if you get on Twitter, I’m creatively named simpsonsparadox.
Quick Couple Lines on Palin
Quote from China blogger Matt Schiavenza on Palin, Obama and the media:
The Republicans paint the Alaska Governor as the moose-hunting hockey mom the whole party can love. The Democrats seem to be employing a shoot-the-moon strategy, trying to raise enough doubts about Palin that she becomes a major liability.
If I were Obama, I’d ignore her. Why? The media will investigate Palin on its own, as any young journalist worth his salt will vie to be the One Who Brought Her Down. This isn’t the “liberal media”, simply how things work in a competitive industry.
Couldn’t agree more, Matt!
Posted in Raleigh
Tagged back in the US, China, China blog, election, other bloggers, Raleigh, Young
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