Mon, 2003-12-08

Tempo	Okazo
12:35a	The Missing I saw The Missing tonight with Wendy and Clayton (who had just come to his first Esperantokunveno) and John (from Esperantoklubo). The Missing was pretty enjoyable. I like westerns more and more these days. It all started a few years ago at Kinesoft when the company went to see Once Upon A Time In The West at Alamo Drafthouse (spaghetti western night, with all you can eat spaghetti). I fell in love with the western genre then, especially spaghetti westerns with Ennio Morricone soundtracks. But other westerns are cool too. Anyway, this was a strange western in that it was directed by Ron Howard of all people, but it worked and I believe we all enjoyed it. There were a few grisly bits I don't normally associate with Ron Howard, and it also seemed to simultaneously follow traditional western themes as well as more modern takes on the western (particularly the modern meme of the strong independent unmarried woman who's a healer, and more awareness of racism issues than older westerns). The film has both old-school brutal savage Indians who do some pretty nasty things as well as noble honorable Indians who suffer injustice from the white folks who are bigoted against Indians (due to the aforementioned brutal savages who do some pretty nasty things). Good interesting chemistry between Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones: they are daughter and father who haven't seen each other since he left his family decades before and she's been understandably bitter about it and he understandably feels guilty about it, but now they start to reconnect as they travel together during the stressful circumstances of pursuing her kidnapped daughter. The camerawork was modern with a fair bit of moving around and such, though it seemed like they did less of that as the film progressed, I'm not sure. The music was unremarkable to me, both the standard Hollywood style and the Indian style passages. We had our own little stressful situation in the theater as some asshole next to us had his cellphone start ringing, not just once but twice, so the second time I asked him politely to turn it off, and he angrily said "Shut up!" Boggle. This being the Alamo, Wendy decided to notify the waiter. Right then, the 2 guys left their seats to go pee (it seems they had each drunk about 6 beers already), and the waiter said he'd deal with them. They returned to their seats and the phone never went off again and they didn't say anything more, though Wendy (who was sitting closest to them) said the surly guy kept ostentatiously putting his beer bottles down closer and closer to her and it was getting weird/creepy. We talked to the waiter after the film ended and he said he'd seen one of them in the lobby and told him there was a complaint about them being disruptive, and the guy was apologetic and said he didn't know why his buddy had told us to "shut up". The waiter was apologetic and said if he'd understood fully what had happened, he'd have just made them leave. The manager came and gave the 4 of us free passes, which was nice. Normally I don't find the audiences at Alamo to be any worse than at other theaters, but if a jerk gets a bunch of beer in him, he can start being disruptive. Mental note: at the Alamo, avoid sitting by people that each have their own iced buckets of beer. (Komentoj: 3 | Komentu)
11:03p	glorious victory on lesson 1 OK, I listened to the first Chinese lesson on CD for the fourth time tonight, and damned if I didn't actually respond correctly 80% or more of the time! This rules! Memory of vocabulary was way better, and pronunciation is somewhat better. So tomorrow I should move on to lesson 2. One problem I have (in general) is reacting quickly in realtime (the same reason I suck at twitchy computer games or trying to play music), so I found that I would sometimes still be trying to formulate my response when the time would be up and the person on the CD would say the right answer, and I'm like "Doh! I was just about to say that!" The first and second time through, I was having feelings of hopelessness, which luckily I kept in check and just accepted on faith that surely I would get the hang of it, and sure enough, tonight was way better. I was even a few times getting some automatic response without having to think about it. Pronunciation of the rising and falling pitches is of course still quite tricky and I know I'm inconsistent on that, but still, this was quite encouraging. I have come to believe that a big part of successfully learning a language is simply to keep at it and not get discouraged. Progress comes in very slow gradual steps. I spent most of this year learning Esperanto and am delighted with how much progress I made, even though from day to day or even week to week, it was rather intangible and sometimes seemed like I wasn't getting anywhere. Last week, however, I found a comic magazine which I had bought from ELNA way back in April when I first started studying Esperanto; I read it back in April, and it was very laborious, having to look up every other word in the dictionary, and struggling to grok the constructions and grammar. When I found it again last week I reread several stories in it, and I was amazed how easy it seemed now. That experience really struck me and gave me the confidence that simply working on a language for a little each day or so really can pay off in the long run. This is really exciting. Chinese is way harder than Esperanto, but I feel quite confident if I really keep going with it, I will one day reach an analogous place to where I am with Esperanto and look back happy at the progress. And going to Beijing for the Esperanto Congress in July should certainly be a good motivator. :) Nuna Mood: pleased Nuna Music: Johnny Cash, Hurt (Komentoj: 3 | Komentu)
11:34p	i wish the us wasn't so stupid sometimes A couple of random links I just read: Canadian flag causes flap in the U.S. Maple Leaf on baggage irks 'sensitive'Americans http://www.canada.com/national/story.asp?id=D333BE79-44EE-407B-B960-BF1FA49CAE39 For instance, an American from San Diego is quoted saying: "What bugs me about Canadians, if I may, is that they wear that damn patch on their bags, the Canadian flag patch. That way, they differentiate themselves from us." Wow. How dare those traitorous Canadians actually publicly admit and be proud of their being Canadian! Excerpt of a NYT article on our tactics in Iraq: http://tedrall.com/2003_12_01_archive.html#107088922317940544 We're doing group punishment, bulldozing houses, erecting barbed wire around villages, continuing to arrest and kill innocent bystanders, etc. We seem to have learned techniques from the Israeli military, without learning the lesson that this sort of brutality doesn't help. To me, this sort of stuff all ties in with learning languages. A lot of US citizens are just willfully ignorant about other countries, cultures, and languages (because, hey, doesn't everyone else want to be American, anyway, and everyone knows English anyway, right? And everyone wants to import fine US culture like McDonald's and Bruckheimer action flicks, right? Anyone who might be different is probably some crazy terrorist anyway, right?) ...This ends up getting reflected in individual day-to-day absurdities like Canada-bashing, as well as huge foreign policy disasters like the Iraq war. It still boggles my mind that we have a president who had never even travelled internationally till he became president. (Komentoj: 5 | Komentu)

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