Good Deeds

Hi all,

I’m back for a last-minute plea to anyone who still reads this thing. I’m sure you’ve been bombarded by requests like these recently. Maybe you’ve already voted, even. Please take a second to read on.

My friend Scottie is an artistic associate, founding donor, and staff member of Sideshow Theatre Company in Chicago, IL. Sideshow Theatre Company (“Familiar Stories.  Unorthodox Methods.  Perpetually curious.”) is participating in the Chase Community Giving program. This is an incredible grant opportunity: Chase is awarding $25K to 100 small non-profits across the country, all based on the number of votes cast for each company on Facebook.

Just recently, Sideshow was in the top 100. But just barely. They’ve been working butts off over the past weeks on this project, and the results are showing. IT IS A TIGHT RACE, and even just a handful of votes could mean the difference between a huge grant and no grant at all. The voting ends tomorrow.

This grant would cover OVER HALF of Sideshow’s current annual budget. And it is totally within our reach–they just need your help, now.

HOW CAN YOU HELP?
1. Vote for us! It takes literally 20 seconds and four clicks of a mouse, and you can do it here:
http://apps.facebook.com/chasecommunitygiving/charities/1265079
2. Encourage others to vote for us. Check out all those friends you have on Facebook. Five hundred? A thousand? Tell them about Sideshow. Get them as excited about this company as you are. Even just posting it as your Facebook status or Tweeting the link above could mean $25,000 for our little non-profit theatre.

Sideshow has a volunteer staff of eleven people. We’re competing against other non-profits ten times our size. We need your help.

Everyone gets 20 votes, and you can only use one vote per company. If you have friends working for other non-profits, vote for them too.

If you want to know more about Sideshow or about the Chase Community Giving program, visit www.sideshowtheatre.org or email Scottie at scottie@sideshowtheatre.org.

THANK YOU, so much, for your help and support of storefront theatre in Chicago. We couldn’t do it–and wouldn’t want to do it–with out you.

ALSO: If you live in South Bend and vote for Sideshow, I will make you the best cookies in the world (really. They are THAT good) as a small thank-you. Just leave me a comment on Facebook or on here to let me know.

Chatter

This is just to say that I had the most fun weekend ever with my dear friend Scottie and her mother Frances.

We ate: drunken noodles at the awesome Thai place downtown, cinnamon roll french toast at a vegetarian restaurant in northside Chicago, and moules et frites at the Hop Leaf, which is right down the block from Scottie’s apartment.

We drank: bottomless chai tea, not too sweet; delicious Belgian and Belgian-style beer; Cosmos (probably too many); much tea.

We saw: Nathan Gunn at the DeBartolo; a sketch comedy show entitled “Scientology: the Musical” at the Annoyance theater (what a great name); Gosford Park; Sideshow Theater Company’s latest production, “Ekphrasis: Cave Walls to Soup Cans”; the skyscrapers of Chicago at night from a boat.

All in all, quite a successful weekend.

Summer wrap-up of shame

Hey wow, summer is definitely over. Notre Dame is in the second week of classes already, it’s already chilly and sweatery in the mornings (seriously, midwest, why do you hate me? It is BARELY September.), and I’m well into full-on procrastination mode. So in the interests of the aforementioned procrastination–which I’m going to go ahead and call “holding myself accountable”–I’m going to go through the goals I oh-so-hopefully set for myself at the beginning of the summer and see what I’ve actually accomplished in that brief and magical period between one long, cold winter and the next.

1) Pass my German class. Yes! Goal 1 achieved! I actually did work pretty hard on this one.

2) Pass my Syriac class. Also achieved, though as there were no actual graded assignments, tests, or exam in this class, I feel slightly less accomplished here.

3) Not starve. I would say I was an over-achiever on this front.

4) Not accrue credit card debt in order not to starve (this will be accomplished by making more money! And spending less on frivolities!) Hm…yeah…pretty much sucked here.

5) Go back through my Hebrew textbook from 11th grade and relearn all the vocabulary, the paradigms, do the exercises, etc. Basically re-learn Hebrew, but for real this time. I made it through the construct chain in lesson 15, and that’s as far as I got. I think what I did was actually very very helpful–after 8 years of this I finally FOR REALS understand what the vowels do when you make a noun definite. I probably shouldn’t be admitting that, because it’s in chapters 1 through 4, but there it is. I’m still hoping to continue the reviewing at some point.

6) Go running with the dog at least 3 times a week. Ahahahaha. Nope.

7) Eat a healthier diet (this is the point at which we enter the Land of Wishful Thinking.) Sure. Beer is healthy, right?

8 ) Hang out with friends a lot while still accomplishing goals 1 through 7. Definitely hung out with friends a lot. Like, a whole lot. See note to number 7.

9) Do some creative writing. A bit…yeah, no, I’m lying. There was no creative writing. I did think/discuss/ponder/outline the project I’m working on with Luke and Mike Johnson, though.

10) Read books that are dense and intellectually fulfilling as well as fluff. Does reading half of War and Peace count? (Why do I find it so hard to get through Russian novels? I LOVE them while I am reading them, and then I put them down and never ever pick them up again. What is wrong with me?)

11) Shop at the farmer’s market more often (i.e. ever). I think 3 times counts as “more often.”

12) Read all the school-related articles and books that I wanted to read but didn’t have time to over the school year. I read one book. It took me all summer.

13) Write my Personal Statement for graduate school applications (okay, I actually DO have to do this one). But sadly, I have not, in fact, done it.

14) Research graduate schools thoroughly, impartially, and not as haphazardly as the last time around.Yeah, no. Still planning on this one, though.

15) Go to bed and wake up earlier. Okay, now I’m just embarrassed.

16) Finish the quilt. Seriously, Past Self. You’re making me look bad.

17) Blog more. ARGH. Past Self, you are never setting any more goals ever. That will teach you.

What else did I do this summer? Well, I brewed beer with Luke, drank waaay more than I probably should have, slacked off a lot, had many many long conversations, got to know the new people in the program, learned how to say “Yesterday I did not study the Syriac language, but instead I studied the German language” in Syriac, learned that German is both easier and harder than I expected, made some extravagant desserts, painted my new house, acquired a ton of new books (my dad is awesome!), read an autobiography of Thomas Merton (way less impressed than I’d hoped to be, actually), learned how to whitewater canoe somewhat, managed to keep the dog from killing herself, passed through the Canadian border by myself for the first time, watched a ton of great television (disproportionately centered around Joss Whedon), won a t-shirt at Trivia Night that says “talk nerdy to me” (shut up, it’s the awesomest thing ever), finally found a whiskey that I like (Laphroiag)  and generally rested up. So all in all, not the worst summer ever. Now if you’ll excuse me, I still have two episodes left in season 3 of Buffy, and there’s some beer in the fridge, and some crepes filled with lime curd left over… Oh right. Back to work.

Sick.

So verbs in Semitic languages are almost always composed of a root made up of 3 consonants. This makes translating alternately easier and harder: easier, in that you get the meaning from the root and then the other letters added on the front and the back tell you what the tense, number, binyan (verbal pattern), etc. are; hard, because some verbs have one letter missing/variable/otherwise funky. So the word “qwm”, which means “arise, stand,” is termed a “middle-weak” word, because its middle root, W, is mostly a placeholder and drops out at every available opportunity. The “placeholding” root varies–usually W or Y or aleph.

In Syriac, I have learned, these are called “sick” letters. They are “sick in the middle” or “sick at the beginning” or “sick at the end.” Naturally I found this beyond hilarious. There are a ton of very common “sick at the end” words–the words for “to see,” “to drink,” “to call,” “to fill,” are all of this type. Yesterday we were going over some participial form for this irregular verb type, and the professor (who is just wonderful) went through them: “You see? hazyo’, shatyo’, qaryo’, malyo’. They’re all SICK.”

I am pretty sure he had no idea what I found so funny.

The Summer of Dork

I’m on an overload of dorky media this summer. It started innocently enough in the spring, when Battlestar Galactica was in its last season and suddenly everyone I knew was saying what a GREAT SHOW it was–deep and interesting with religious commentary etc. So I decided to order it on Netflix and see what the fuss was all about. That’s ongoing–my friend Jessie and I watch about 4 episodes a week. It IS good, though I’m getting ready for them to raise the stakes a little.

That was fine, but then I watched “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” on Hulu, as Penelope recommended, and it was so awesome that I had to find out everything else Joss Whedon has ever done. I ripped through Firefly in about a week and a half–also so awesome, though some of the characterizations are a little shaky–I want to see what Whedon would have done had he had the chance to make a second season.

Then I was telling my roommate Carmen about Firefly and she said, “Well, my sister is really into Buffy the Vampire Slayer–want me to borrow the first two seasons from her?” And I said YES YES PLEASE and, well, now Luke and I have watched the first two seasons and I may have cried on multiple occasions. (Side note: The only distressing part is that the character I identify with BY FAR the most is Giles. Which, well, is probably to be expected–he’s a big nerd who deals with ancient texts and supernatural forces; me, ditto–but, well, people call him a fuddy-duddy. Do people call me that?  Basically I am afraid I am rapidly becoming a short-sighted fussy librarian. Or maybe I am FULLY EMBRACING my destiny of becoming a short-sighted fussy librarian. You be the judge.)

THEN, because Carmen apparently loves/hates me, she brought over ALL the sequels to Ender’s Game, which is one of my favorite books ever. So now I’m reading those too. Conclusion: my summer has been a very odd melange of German readings about HIV/AIDS and workers’ strikes, Syriac fragments of the Peshitta, books about liberation theology and the martyrdom of Oscar Romero that I’m reading aloud for an MA student, and science fiction/fantasy media. Add all that up, and still my dreams are mostly about Clementine peeing on the rug. Go figure.

The problem with learning Hebrew

Okay so this is my biggest problem with Hebrew, one that’s dogged me in for the entire 7 years since I began studying it (wow, that’s a lot of time to have accomplished remarkably little), and since I can’t get any paying work done today (I am recording books for a visually impaired student, my recorder is full, and I am waiting for my boss to track down the software that allows me to transfer the files from the machine onto my computer) I am going to tell you, dear Internet, all about it. What follows is a rant masquerading as an educational post.

In order to really understand Hebrew–not just muddle your way through, but to GET it, and to know WHY weird forms do what they do, and in order to predict any forms at all, you have to understand a good bit about sound rules in Hebrew.

Linguistic background ahoy: Every language has a set of “permitted” and “forbidden” sequences of sounds–that’s why the word “blurg” sounds like it could be a real word, even though Liz Lemon made it up, but “blgur” doesn’t–English doesn’t permit the sequence “blg”. English is super unusual actually in permitting ANY sequences of three consonants–the word “strike” is a word that just wouldn’t happen in, say, Japanese, which (I think I’m right here?) only allows Consonant-Vowel syllables. So when English words get adopted into Japanese, “filler” vowels get added between any two consecutive consonants, so that the loan word will follow Japanese sound rules. Cool stuff.

Sound rules in Hebrew, at least the ones that are relevant for students, are basically vowel rules. Some vowels can’t follow each other. Some vowels don’t like being with gutterals, some vowels don’t like being too far away from the stressed syllable, some vowels don’t like being in an open unstressed syllable (CV is open, CVC is closed). So you have your basic pattern, and then the vowels shift to different vowels when they get into a situation that’s uncomfortable for them. Example: You can’t have two shewas one after the other (the shewa is the short, neutral vowel you make when you say, “uh…”). So when you would, instead the first syllable goes to an “i” and the second drops out. le-nebi’im, “to prophets,” shifts to linbi’im (I’m using e for shewa because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to insert special characters).

The problem is, these vowel shifts and syllable structures and sound rules, etc. are both incredibly basic to the language–necessary for predicting ANY forms and for recognizing most–and really difficult to understand theoretically if you don’t already know something about linguistics. I still remember poor Dr. Perkins, maybe the smartest person I will ever meet, trying to explain the difference between an open and closed syllable to me while I stared at him blankly and nodded, thinking to myself, “Well, I don’t understand it, but how important can it be?” Ahahaha. To a native speaker, not important at all. It’s all intuitive; you KNOW what sounds right and what doesn’t and you don’t need to bother to reason it out. But to someone learning an ancient language, or at least Hebrew, where you run into sound changes all the time, it’s really important.

There are ways around it, of course–I took the route of trying to memorize every weird form instead of learning the patterns that made them all make sense, then just sticking with it long enough that it began to come intuitively. That’s fine, but here I am, seven years later, and I still feel like translating is like trying to shoot ducks in the dark. Maybe the best way would be to give everyone an introductory linguistics course before they started learning the language–but then Hebrew is a language that’s really important to a lot of non-specialists. A lot of the people who want to learn it just don’t care enough about the fundamental structure of the language to take the time, and why should they? I only learned about sound changes by accident, really–my introductory linguistics course was taken to fulfill the requirements for an English degree that would get me into a school of education in Virginia, because I thought I might want to teach English in public schools.

I guess what I’m getting at is that all the textbooks present these basic building-blocks of the language at the beginning of the textbook, usually in an introductory chapter, when it’s highly unlikely for them to sink in–students just don’t have the framework necessary. You have to understand the sound rules to read the language; but you have to have a basic sense of/experience with the language to understand the sound rules.

Good students probably go back and periodically review the sound rules throughout the time that they’re learning the grammar. I did end up doing this with Aramaic this past spring, and it paid off–I understand how Aramaic functions much better now. But I never did with Hebrew (because I’m lazy lazy lazy with languages) and only now am I beginning to realize just how big a mistake was. I may have said this before, but the main difference between what I’m doing now and what I did during high school and undergrad was that, back then, the languages were a hobby, sort of, just for fun (“fun” being a relative term, of course). They didn’t REALLY matter, because I was going to be an actor/writer/English teacher–they were just something on the side. The grades mattered, sort of, but everyone knows that you can still do pretty well without really knowing a language. Now that I have to ACTUALLY know them, inside and out, things are a little scarier.

Setting some goals

With one full year of graduate school under my belt (YAY), I am setting some goals for the summer. I thought I’d risk public shaming and put them out here on the world of the internet, so that the four people who read this can bug me about them at their leisure. Sound good? Excellent! They are roughly in order of least to most farfetched and highest priority.

1) Pass my German class.

2) Pass my Syriac class.

3) Not starve.

4) Not accrue credit card debt in order not to starve (this will be accomplished by making more money! And spending less on frivolities!)

5) Go back through my Hebrew textbook from 11th grade and relearn all the vocabulary, the paradigms, do the exercises, etc. Basically re-learn Hebrew, but for real this time.

6) Go running with the dog at least 3 times a week.

7) Eat a healthier diet (this is the point at which we enter the Land of Wishful Thinking.)

8 ) Hang out with friends a lot while still accomplishing goals 1 through 7.

9) Do some creative writing.

10) Read books that are dense and intellectually fulfilling as well as fluff.

11) Shop at the farmer’s market more often (i.e. ever).

12) Read all the school-related articles and books that I wanted to read but didn’t have time to over the school year.

13) Write my Personal Statement for graduate school applications (okay, I actually DO have to do this one).

14) Research graduate schools thoroughly, impartially, and not as haphazardly as the last time around.

15) Go to bed and wake up earlier.

16) Finish the quilt.

Whew. I feel so virtuous now. And by virtuous I mean “tired.” I’m going to go read a trashy novel instead of studying Hebrew (so much for resolutions 5 and 10…).

EDIT: Goal 17: Blog more.

FAIL.

Have you seen this? I have been laughing so hard I cried for the last half hour. Things like graffiti angrily proclaiming “All bow for SATIN,” a chewed-up puppy training book (sorry to say that Clementine’s already done that), and signs that say, “Stop disease in its tracks: Wash your hands after touching Christians.”

www.failblog.org

Also, Dinosaur Comics today is about hapax legomenon! AWESOME choice, Ryan North. My life is officially complete now.

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001434.html

Hm, it’s been a while.

Things I have done so far this spring break:

1) Not run at all or exercised in other ways.

2) Baked and eaten many cookies and bread.

3) Made the most amazing bacon cheeseburgers with Luke. (Homemade rolls! Thick-sliced bacon! Gouda cheese!)

4) Discovered hamentaschen, and eaten many of them.

5) Found out that my cholesterol is a little high (whoops).

6) Read two books (class-related) and several articles!

7) Not read the other 7 on my list. I still have, like, 4 days, right?

8 ) Made 2/3 of a hat for my dad’s birthday…which was the 9th.

9) Ripped it out because it was too small and restarted it.

10) Resolved to go to bed earlier.

11) Gone to bed, in fact, much later.

12) Found out that the dog doesn’t need another surgery! So that’s a good thing.

Well, two steps forward, one step back, I guess.

Also, yesterday I found a very small (size 0-1) double pointed knitting needle in my bag. It was also somewhat shorter than a typical knitting needle. I stared at it for about 15 seconds, trying to reconstruct the circumstances in which I’d acquired this needle and wondering where I had put the rest of the set. Then I realized that it was a toothpick.

Re: last post

Flannery O’Conner on the Eucharist: “If it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.”