A general update ( Read more... )

Tonight's entertaining conversation with a New Haven resident ( Read more... )

Within the space of a few hours late this afternoon, I ( Read more... )

Spence's modern Chinese history class continues to make me very happy. Witness the fact that I am actually doing the reading -- I've had enough trouble in the past being prepared for classes in which I am actually enrolled. Today he told us the story of the first Chinese person known to take up permanent residence in Western Europe, a certain ( Read more... )

I can juggle scarves! Well, not very well, due to continued lack of coordination and ability to throw things, but it beats sitting bashing my head repeatedly against the same mental block in the toss pattern, which is what I did most of yesterday afternoon ( Read more... )

I've just spent most of the afternoon trying to figure out how many Chinese characters I know, for one of the Wretched Applications. I personally have no idea, so I had to try and estimate based on course descriptions from all over the internet how many characters a third-year student ought to know, and none of them seemed to agree at all. I even ( Read more... )

Fighting off a funk. Not content with angsting over being unhappy with my life, now I seem to have progressed to angsting over being happy with my life, on the grounds that I am certain to soon mess it up again in various ways. Putting it like that is absurd enough, I actually feel happier already ( Read more... )

In true Christmas spirit, I am now... marking syntactic features in a dissertation on the causes and prevention of plague written by an eminent 16th century Scottish physician. (I'm not just doing this for kicks; marking up Scots documents is actually my sole paying job at the moment.) Recently these documents have been Aberdeen city council ( Read more... )

Well, it looks like somehow I’m giving up and starting a livejournal. I’ve held out this long mainly because I’m still not sure what I’ll put in it - writing in journals often prompts me to sink into labyrinthine introspection, which is seldom interesting and generally causes me to wince upon rereading. Possibly the chance that someone else will ( Read more... )