11/14/2006: "And a week's passed"

Presumption: (linguistics) A fact inferred to be true by the phrasing within a sentence or statement.

For example: "Why do people suck?" The presumption here is that people do, in fact, suck. The truth conditions are that.. hmm.. there are people, and I suppose that they suck (not sure about that one). Linguistics is an interesting field, I suppose, but feels more like they describe rather than explain. Frankly, that's all we can do in such a field, but one should never confuse these two things. Description is not explanation. Hence I, a lowly undergrad, declare it's a 'soft' science and not quite as serious as other ones.

Been a long week since I last wrote. Fortunately, my wrist is much better (I can write with a pen for decent periods of time now, it doesn't really hurt much at all). My lower back still hurts, especially between sitting or standing, but that can't be helped. It'll go away after awhile, probably in a few weeks to a month or so. However, I did finally upload those Halloween pictures I promised (located under "more" at the bottom of this entry).

I've managed to pick up another language partner (this would be 3 people every week, number 4 for the semester, for those not keeping count), adding another two hours of Japanese speaking and conversation to the week. I can make decent conversation in long-distance phone calls to Japan now, which is a mix of "good", "fun", and "deathly frightening". That's gotta say something, though what, I'm not sure. In those spare moments where I'm not doing anything, I've been working my way through reading some Japanese manga (comics).

Things are generally going alright. Some days are good, some days are bad. It seems more based on what happens when I wake up, though, so I can't blame anything in particular. I might not be sleeping enough, and I also hear I don't have an optimistic outlook. People are being generally unreliable/weird around me as of late, so that's not helping much. One moment things are great, the next you have to justify everything you say or do. One day people say one thing, the next they change their mind. Best yet, I'm supposed to be on top of people's most recent mood shifts, whether I have any reason to know or not. I guess it's really par for the course, but it's still mildly annoying sometimes.

I should go off to bed now, gotta study for two tests tomorrow, have lunch with Japanese Guy #2, then try for a linguistics study-thing.

Odd/amusing thing of the week: There was a man in a platypus costume walking around campus. I really have no idea why.. but they just were, jumping around, waving.. yeah. Good times.

(oh, and again, two photos under "more")


IMG_1487


jason_comrade-ronnie

The kid there is my comrade in arms. We were being good communists together, collecting candy. And like any good communist, we didn't share. We simply took it all for ourselves, ate it, and made our minions below us work even harder.

Or something totally not like that. But the truth is so much better when you take alot of that 'truth' out of it.
Jason