Entries this day: Dream Today great_lesson_with_Aki

Dream

11:16am JST Thursday 15 September 2005

I was wth Matt the Artist who offered to let me work oon another exquisite corpse with him. He had a base already, and I could see exactly what I would do with it. He then was like, but firsty something something he wanted to show me, and I accidentally stepped on some of his art he had layed out on the floor. Emi was like, "don't worry" and proceeded to lie down fully on the painting, exposed her breasts and turned over to leave two boob prints on the painting. I tried to hide my shock and Matt and I left; I could tell he was upset, but he didn't wantot say anything, so was gong to tell him about doing clearngs warrior style and I asked hm a short question and he just spilled forth with all this unrelated stuff. I tried again, "how do you feel? e.g. sad, angry, happy" and he just went off talking about all sorts of stuff until I woke up.

Today

2:30pm JST Thursday 15 September 2005

Today I met Kin for lunch in Shibuya. We ate at my favorite Mexican place (the one under TGI Fridays) and then walked toward Harajuku station. She was interested in Yoyogi park, so we hung out there for a bit, next to the water fountains listening to one of her CDs.

Kin wants to know the title and artist of a song with lyrics like

what's wrong with the world momma
people living like they ain't go no momma
something something trauma

overseas yeah we tryin to stop terrorism
but we got terrorist here livin
in the USA, the CIA, the bloods and crips and KKK

3:12pm JST Thursday 15 September 2005

Holy shit we just saw Greg and Skyler! They are riding bikes around Yoyogi park, and Greg recognized my Cambodia shirt!!

Wow! We played disc with Greg's Aerobee (disc, not ring) and then I climbed a tree and we walked to Harajuku and then parted ways. Greg told us about Matt and Emi's house warming party tomorrow, so I will be going to that. Kin will probably as well.

Oh my gosh on the way out we saw a guy with a pet rabbit. And a woman with a pet doberman. The guy was not rescuing the rabbit. Fortunately for the rabbit, the woman was holding back her dog.

7:14pm JST Thursday 15 September 2005

I scoped out the Starbucks where Ayana and I used to study, but they close at 10pm, and that won't be enough time to give a full hour lesson if we are meeting at Hachiko at 9pm and then walk there. I looked for other places to meet and found Royal Host is open till 4am and has a 370 yen drink bar, and then I found McDonald's even closer to the station. I'm in that McDonald's near Shibuya station now, going to transcribe until time to meet Aki at 9pm near Hachiko.

great lesson with Aki

12:34am JST Friday 16 September 2005

I met Aki and we had a super fabulous lesson. Her English is pretty good, just a bit slow speaking, but great comprehension. She asked me about me and the best parts of P.B. trip, and then specifically why I had chosen to go to Palestine. I was really excited to explain, but I caught myself before I got too long winded: "Do you want to work on listening, or on speaking?" She goes, "I want to work on speaking," so I was like, "okay, go," and then she quickly changed her mind, "I want to work on listening," with an embarassed smile.

I must interject here that this behavior came as quite a surprise to me. Most Japanese, from my experience would not have changed, for probably one or two reasons: not wanting to conflict with the current request, or not knowing how to phrase the new decision.

I gave her a high five for having broken the stereotype to which I had grown accustomed, and then proceeded to blabber a short but thorough version of how I chose to go to Palestine next month.

After that, she asked me what I did back in the US, and she seemed really surprised slash ecstatic to hear I had been a programmer. Like, oh my gosh why is she so happy to hear that????, but then it came clear: she was having some issues at work with M$ Access. Specifically, "what is a query?"

I explained query, but it turned out her question was more like, "when writing queries, how do I describe the relationships between the databases?", and I ended up teaching her about relational databases, first normalization, a few simple queries and a more complex query.

I layed out a full blown lesson for her, from the simplest 1 DB query (which customers live in Tokyo?) using both a Query Wizard (which I imagine exists in M$ Access approximately as I described it) and in SQL. Then I put together a more complex database as applies to her situation at work, and I put in far too much repeated information, and explained why: we don't want to update 1000 records with the same update.

I split the database into two sections and had one more field to go. I asked her where it should go, and made sure she understood why it should go there, and what would be the implications if it went into the wrong place.

Then it was almost trivial to work through a query that related the two databases together. (The complication is one that I actually have never had to solve; I should ask the internet about it.)

Suddenly, it was *midnight* and we needed to head back for last trains. Great lesson for three hours and I'll see her again next week. Awesome!!