Packing makes me emotional. In the same inexplicable way that PMS does.

I didn’t think I was going to make New Year’s resolutions because I never keep them, but the book I just finished inspired me.

*Brush my teeth after every meal.
(This is because I have let my oral hygiene habits fall into a dire state, and also because it will also hopefully discourage my following up each meal with a second and third meal as my new-found binge eating habit would persuade me to… It seems that my body is reacting to my past semester of not eating much because I couldn’t afford to by eating everything I can at home while I have the chance.)

* I haven’t really decided the rest, but they will most likely include exercising, avoiding excessive amounts of junk food and candy, toning my belly up to the point that I would feel comfortable getting a belly button ring by the end of the summer…

Ummm… soo… Funny and/or embarrassing story:

When Brittany and I got our cat from the lady in VA, we were told it was a male. Or maybe Brittany just read the ad wrong. I’m not sure, because I never read the ad, but I was told by Brittany that we were getting a male kitten.

So we went and got a kitten and had “him” in our dorm for about a month and a half thinking he was a boy. We never questioned it… we just assumed kitten “junk” was just less… obvious… than puppy “junk.” It never even occurred to us that we could possibly be wrong about this.

I just got a voicemail from Brittany saying that they just realized that Sigmund is a girl.

That’s fucking hilarious. And… confusing. And… mind blowing. And… wow. Wow. I don’t even know what to say. I’m kind of horrified, but also so deeply, deeply amused.

Merry Christmas

My family didn’t do the gift exchange that we usually do on Christmas eve because of the recession. It was kind of lame, but overall it didn’t really effect much. In the end, it turns out it really is mostly just about spending time with them. The older I get, the more I appreciate it.

Will came over too… And wasn’t miserable. It makes me happy when he comes to my family events and stuff because my family is so tight and they’re such a big part of my life, so I really want him to be part of that too.

So I’m back in Michigan. First of all, Chloe has gotten really fat since I last saw her. Mom must be feeding her too much. It was partly just a shocking contrast to the little kitten that my roommate and I had, but I know that cat was not so obese before I left last summer.

Also, holy shit there’s a lot of snow. It’s ridiculous. And it’s almost a full 40˚F colder here than it was in DC. Lame.

Lastly, I’m bored. I’ve only been here for like half a day and I’m already bored out of my mind. I’m home alone in the middle of the woods, and there’s nothing to do and nowhere interesting to go. I don’t even have homework to do.

Riley, get home now and entertain me.

The way teens talk, like, serves a purpose
By EILS LOTOZO
Philadelphia Inquirer
Last Updated: Sept. 3, 2002

Philadelphia - It can drive some parents, like, nuts.

We’re talking about the way the word like has become a ubiquitous locution in kids’ vocabularies.

But for Muffy E. A. Siegel, a Temple University linguistics professor and the mother of two teen girls, the increasingly common word has become the focus of an intellectual quest.

You can read all about it in the new issue of the Journal of Semantics, which has just published a paper Siegel wrote about her research into the mysteries of like.

With a little help from some unsuspecting high school students, here’s what Siegel reveals: Though it has been maligned as the bimbo-speak of the California Valley Girl, the use of like isn’t a sign of creeping inarticulateness. It actually serves a conversational purpose.

“It’s really a very useful word,” said Siegel, known as “Ms. Adjective” in linguist circles for her book “Capturing the Adjective,” which revealed previously ungrasped properties of that part of speech.

Siegel started to become curious about like a few years ago, when the word began to pepper the conversation of daughters Andrea, now 13, and Miriam, 17.

“Like isn’t any part of speech,” Siegel pointed out in an interview at her home in the Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion, Pa. “It’s not a noun, or an adjective or an adverb.” What seemed clear to her - and what she set out to prove - is that like belongs to a class of expressions linguists call “discourse particles.”

These were once dismissively referred to as fillers - among them oh, ah, um, well, y’know. But researchers came to realize that they actually conveyed something about the speaker and the content of a sentence.
A word bird

If this seems an unlikely area for academic pursuit, Siegel is known for being a bit of an unorthodox scholar. An accomplished ventriloquist, she has become a teaching legend at Temple over the past 25 years for using a bird puppet named Gregory Grackle to help convey the unique properties of human speech in her courses in linguistics.

At first Siegel was stymied in her research.

“I tried these controlled circumstances, and it didn’t work. If I took a kid alone with me in a room and asked questions, I got hardly any likes. And the literature on discourse particles backs me up. You think of it as something that shows someone feels uncomfortable. In fact they go up when you’re with friends.”

Enter daughter Miriam, who happened to be conducting a series of interviews with fellow high school students for an English project.

In the transcripts of her daughter’s 23 taped interviews Siegel found a trove of information.

Among her findings (relayed in the article with the help of graphs, charts and mathematical formulas): The longer someone took to think about the question, the fewer the likes. Boys tended to take their time before answering, and thus relied on the word less than girls, Siegel observed.

Siegel also found that like can be a way to connect with a group.

“People think that girls use it more often because they are more insecure, but my data isn’t consistent with that. It’s at least as likely that it has to do with liking to seem informal and close to people.”
It’s, like, a qualifier

But one of like’s most consistent uses, Siegel found, is as a kind of hedge or qualifier.

“When someone uses like, they are saying, ‘I’m about to say something, but I’m not sure I have the words for it quite right,’ ” said Siegel, who found that ancient Hittite and Sanskrit had words similar in function. “Like has different properties than almost, or approximately or nearly. ‘Like six’ doesn’t mean the same as ’six’ or even ‘about six.’ ”

Another use of like is as a substitute for the word said: “He was, like, I’m out of here.” This is also a kind of hedge.

“You’re not saying he said those words exactly,” Siegel said. “You’re saying he said something like this.”

And to those who see the rise of like as an assault on proper English and a sign of the decline of civilization, Siegel has this reply:

“People have been saying that about new words for centuries.” She cites as evidence the introduction to an early dictionary of English, compiled in 1755 by Samuel Johnson. “He said he was writing the dictionary to refine the language to grammatical purity because we have to listen to the language of the learned. He mentions all the people who speak wrong, and they are porters, herdsmen and girls.”

“The language mavens always say, ‘Oh, they’re wrecking the language.’ And it’s always girls and working people. But languages change because they need to change. There are so many more girls and working people than there are language mavens.”

And how do her older daughter’s former high school friends feel about having their utterances quoted and parsed on the pages of a scholarly journal?

“They want to read it,” said Miriam. “A lot of them want to be linguists. They think my mom is cool.”

I discovered a site called Email Roulette on which you write emails and they are sent to a random other member of the site. And you also receive random emails from random members. This was on their livejournal group. It reminds me of Kiki’s sense of humor, and it cracked me up.

“Whenever I get a package of M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the
strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M
duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure,
squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is
the “loser” and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to
go another round.

I have found that, in general, brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the
newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the
blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theatre of
competition that is the modern candy and snack food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or
pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a
weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength.
In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest
of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I
pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars Inc., along with a
3 x 5 card reading “Please use this M&M for breeding purposes.”
This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free
½ pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this “grant money.” I have set
aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we
will discover the True Champion. There can only be one.”

我只八歲的時候，我的父母就離婚了。因為那段時間我還很小，我不真的瞭解離婚的意思，但是後來我父母的離婚給我了很多困惑。為了我父母都想要帶我跟我弟弟的原因，所以我弟弟跟我住了在媽媽的家，可是每個星期一和四我們到了爸爸的家。我父母常常吵架了，因為我爸爸想了花更多時間跟我弟弟跟我，可是我媽媽不讓了他。他們吵的時候我的心裡就覺得很不好。
我長大了以後就決定了我一輩子都不打算結婚，原因就是我有這個那麼不幸福的經歷。但是現在我有一個很合適的男朋友。我們已經約會快三年了。我們還很年輕，可是他讓我想我可能一天會結婚。

I just read something on Facebook about how people are starting to store emergency contacts on their phones under the name ICE (ICE1, ICE2, etc in case of multiples). That way if you’re in an accident, since almost everyone carries a cellphone on his/her person, paramedics will know who to call.
My initial reaction was that it’s a cool and/or practical idea.
But then thinking about it, my feelings almost immediately changed to discomfort with the idea. It just seems somewhat… morbid, I guess. Preparing to be in an accident.

That’s probably just because of my upbringing and the fact that I tend to believe, more so on an subconscious level, that the way you think can effect how your life goes. So if you prepare to be in an accident, you’re more likely to be in an accident then if you just believe you won’t be in one…

I might be crazy.

When my birthday began at midnight Saturday, Will made me a drink, and I was thinking about posting that I had just had my first legal drink. But I forgot, and then later realized that it wasn’t actually my first legal drink… just my first legal drink in the USA. Two years ago I spent an entire year drinking legally in Taiwan.

Oh well. It still felt monumental.

During the day Saturday, Will, Brittany and I went to the liquor store and I bought absinthe and gin. I was wearing birthday hat that Brittany made me that said “21!” It was pretty hilarious/ridiculous.

We then played a game of Trivial Pursuit, drinking an absinthe-based cocktail as penalty when questions were answered wrongly.
At 9, Will and I had dinner at Miss Siagon, which is the best Vietnamese food I have ever had. It’s sooo freaking good. I also ordered a mudslide there and was carded. Yay!

And when we came back, we tried to make “Sorry!” into a drinking game, but got bored and just started taking shots of absinthe instead. The three of us finished the entire bottle. We played “Set” between rounds of shots, which was a lot of fun, especially as our ability to locate sets deteriorated.
Eventually I drunk dialed my brother, Kiki, and Ry. >_< … And then I had a gin shot (?!) which I *know* is always a bad idea… lol…
Anyway, the gist of the story is that we all got seriously wasted, and passed out around 2:30…

I’d say it was an extremely delightful/successful 21st birthday.