Entries this day: Dream So_far Teaching_Akiko chinese

Dream

9:04am JST Wednesday 11 August 2004

Sean Murray was working in a testing department at NASA. He showed me an experiment that he was working on: a type of metal that when heated, produced more apparent heat by focusing the heat in one area. He tossed the material into the trash bin when he was finished and asked if I could help him count a bunch of money (checks that had been sent to NASA). I was like "yeah" but I had to go.

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I was back in Decker Prairie area, but it had been many years, so that the entire layout of the city was unrecognizable. My bicycle was falling apart bit by bit so I turned to the first business that I could find and busted in there all "Hey can you fix this for me?" and it turned out the owner was from a different native culture but spoke Japanese and he fired some fireworks into the air to get the answer, which was "no."

(He changed genders and) she sat me down, explaining that I had come into the shop uncouthfully and suggested that I be more tactful in my dealings with other people.

It turned into a counseling session of sort, or therapy for me by telling her about my day, which apparently was really bad, for I started crying just thinking about it. Knowing I was near a Japanese culture, I stuffed my emotion and stopped crying, and tried to tell the story, but something else was happening with people moving around so I got sidetracked.

So far

1:56pm JST Wednesday 11 August 2004

So far today I have listened to a recording of a phone call where a guy gave tips for how to use Google AdWords effectively, done laundry, written a few emails, taken a nap, and written this, all the way up to this point here ---->.

Teaching Akiko

4:30pm JST Wednesday 11 August 2004

Awesome.

Akiko is an awesome student for me. I'm not sexually attracted to her, she is proactive, and she knows Motosumiyoshi area really well and invited me to ask any questions about the area.

In the long run, the second two are the most important awesome things.

Oh, and her English is generally high level. She gets caught up at times, but pretty good overall, and she likes to write the harder sentences instead of having me write them.

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Dude, a heavily bearded guy sat down on the seat across from me and I think he kinda freaked out the woman who was going to sit down. She chose to sit down, but I think it gave her a start.

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I'm on a quest to get my げんき I Japanese book hole punched so I can intersperse notebook paper with the pages of the book in a big binder-like thing. That's the technique Junko used, and I think it will help me get my next kick-start on studying.

chinese

4:36pm JST Wednesday 11 August 2004

I'm headed to Chinese lesson now; I haven't studied, haven't a desire to hole-punch any books; I might quit. Argh.

5:06pm

Haha the pic of Sally and Jennifer just showed up when they were doing karaoke with bananas after Jennifer's party. I'm really glad we went to San Fran; it was a fun fun fun trip! Yay for quiet couches!

Okay: I know what I need to do for Chinese learnin'. Figure out how to pronounce this shit. I can't commit it to long term memory without correct pronunciation.

7:01pm

That was certainly helpful! I can now pronounce zh, ch, sh, and r, none of which are similar to how we would pronounce the same letters in English. They are all very similar in sound, actually. Wow!

Okay, more studying. (I'm on the train in Shibuya station (I'm going to miss Shibuya station when I leave Tokyo) to head home.)