Journal Entries
I can't speak French (NaJoPoMo Pt. 16)
Posted Nov 16, 2011
(Apologies to the mods in advance: this does have a fair amount of a foreign language in it but it's all uncontroversial and I've translated straight away.)
So by popular demand (i.e.Ivan and Sho), a journal about studying Urdu. Choosing that course is certainly one of the best decisions I've made in a long time and the classes have established themselves as the highlight of my week.
For a start, it's a really nice gang of people with a range of abilities: before I signed up for the course I was worried people would be too mature and frankly dull, and that I'd be uniquely young. I'm not the youngest in the class and we're certainly not too mature. I find myself having more of a laugh week on week as there are a couple of people who are there for pretty much exactly the same reasons as me: it'd help professionally but mostly we just want something fun and reasonably challenging. There is a guy who probably shouldn't be in the class because he's so much more advanced than the rest of us and he can be a touch rude with us absolute beginners, but he doesn't bother most of us.
I've got a great little arrangement with the teacher where she teaches me a new phrase or two I can use with the lads every week: that's always a laugh because the lads just don't know what to make of it and they're at their most vulnerable to teaching when they're off-balance. They're mightily confused as to why I'd bother learning Urdu but they seem to really appreciate the effort I'm making. I've noticed they're stopping speaking Urdu and Punjabi in front of, lest I know what they're trying to say secretly. I'll have to learn Slovak next to stop those kids 
Technically Urdu is a far trickier language than one of the Romance languages I was considering learning instead: it's spoken extremely quickly and there's a lot of issues with near-homophones, often with one innocent meaning and the other with an offensive meaning - for example 'bhoray' means brown, 'buRhay' means old and 'buray' means shit - and a lot of the sounds are extremely subtle or debatable. I'm starting to really enjoy, or at least be excited by the challenge of, transliterating the script (I still hate writing it) but there's a lot of guesswork involved, particularly around vowels: the main vowel is the aleph which is normally an a, but can be an i, a u (as it is in the first letter of Urdu) or a single e or o - ee and oh/oo are quite important sounds in Urdu so they have their own letters.
Urdu is a bit like English in that it's a very mongrel language and while the main root is Sanskrit/Hindi, it borrows heavily from Arabic, Persian/Farsi and English to name just a few. I really enjoy this because I'm a giant nerd and I like to try and spot where different words come from and why. For example there seems to be an interesting divide with naming rooms whereby if a room is named for what you do there, it's a Sanskrit word so bedroom is sonay-ka-kamra and literally means room of sleeping, whilst if a room is named for who does what there, it comes from Persian/Farsi and so kitchen is bawerchee-khana and means 'room of the cook'
I also enjoyed spotting the breaks in the numbers: aik (1), do (2), teen (3) are Sanskrit, char (4), panch (5) and chhay (6) are Persian and then it's back to Sanskrit for saat (7), aat (8), nau (9) and das (10). What's really interesting (to me if no-one else) is the Sanskrit numbers are fairly comprehensible to anyone who knows a couple of European languages as they're really quite similar to their European counterparts. Having basic German and French has really helped me as I'm able to get to grips with sounds English doesn't really have but those two do and I can sometimes spot similarities that come from Urdu and French/German coming from the same language family.
I'm also finding my nerdy nature handy in other ways too: I'm quite well-versed in Islamic culture and have picked up some vocab through that and I've got a decent grounding in Indian and Pakistani history and that can come in handy in understanding where words come from and what they might mean.
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Latest reply: Nov 16, 2011
I don't like Mondays (NaJoPoMo Pt.15)
Posted Nov 15, 2011
And for some reason Tuesdays are even worse. I'm not having half the issues I used to have with my job but since we came back in September but so far the worst days, and the only days I've struggled, have all been Tuesdays.
It seems counter-intuitive, you don't often hear people complaining about Tuesdays and I spent the bus ride home wondering about why it might be such a drag this term. Mondays the kids are normally too tired to kick off, I tend to have trips on Wednesdays, by Thursdays I've normally lost the will to care and so have the teachers and Fridays are only half-days so they can't get that bad.
On Tuesdays I have the bad combination of teachers actually motivated to give me work, I'm motivated to work (plus I've got the work I didn't care about on Thursday to do) and the kids are their delightful selves. The Head of 6th Form has a full day on Tuesdays and our careers advisor is elsewhere so a lot of the crap tends to come in my direction instead of theirs. On Tuesdays I appreciate just how much those two shield me from. There also seems to be a trend developing of weird things happening on Tuesdays, like a student needing a reference for an interview he had to be at in an hours time (because 30 mins is plenty of time to write something like that obviously).
On the plus side I've developed a new game for Tuesdays: freak the students out with my new Urdu knowledge - the Urdu teacher teaches me a new phrase or two I can use on the lads each week, as well as practising the new vocab I've learned: that's normally hilarious.
We're being inspected tomorrow so all the teachers are on red alert and everyone is very stressed. I've submitted all of the 6th form paperwork and I've been assured we'll be ignored. I've got some interviews planned just in case the inspectors want to see us at our best but otherwise I should be able to keep my head down.
Can't believe I'm halfway through NaJoPoMo - it's starting to feel like a bit of a slog now and I'm just waiting to get my second wind.
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Latest reply: Nov 15, 2011
What's happened to the youth today? (NaJoPoMo Pt.14)
Posted Nov 14, 2011
I was watching Misfits last night and I was struck, as I have been a few times in the past couple of years, how the two best British dramas have been made for 'yoof' channels: Being Human and Misfits.
E4 (home of Misfits) and BBC3 (home of Being Human) are pretty much universally slated because most of their output is either dreadful "reality" TV shows or repeats of American shows (in E4's case the repeats are of Scrubs and Big Bang Theory so it's not all bad) so these two seem a bit anomalous because they're both high quality drama.
It's also quite interesting how many similarities the two programmes share, apart from the channels they're on. They could both be described as darkly comic melodrama, both are ensemble pieces with a young, mostly unknown cast, and both are a novel take on established memes (Being Human takes on ghosts, vampires and werewolves while Misfits takes on superheroes/superpowers). Both manage to be very artistic with quite a small budget and new directors/crew.
My love for Being Human is well-known: I have a journal entry about it that's at 200+ posts (Clive and Ictoan have helped with that) but it's such a strong character piece with 3 extremely good young actors. The use of music and sets is incredible and they manage to get a lot done with minimal CGI (Death's Door is perhaps the best example of this). The most recent series was my vote for the best British drama of the last decade. Misfits is crude and brash but pants-wettingly funny and manages to land some real emotional punches. The powers of the gang are rooted in their psychology and this is repeatedly explored and reinforced. There's a wonderful fairy-tale aesthetic to the show which reaches its zenith with the Superhoodie storyline.
If you haven't seen either of them and are looking for a new show, I can't recommend these two highly enough.
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Latest reply: Nov 14, 2011
Lest We Forget (NaJoPoMo Pt.13)
Posted Nov 13, 2011
I was out walking with a friend yesterday along the Leeds-Liverpool canal between Skipton and Keighley and we came across a memorial to a Polish RAF crew who crashed and were killed near to the canal in September 1943.
It's a handsome memorial and clearly well-maintained. At least one of the crew who died was Jewish as there were a couple of Star of David motifs as part of it. In quite a touching display there was a small pile of stones and pebbles on top of the memorial (a Jewish tradition to show a grave has been visited) and it was on a particularly beautiful part of the canal. There was a bench where people could sit and quietly reflect which we both did. It was a really appropriate find given it's Remembrance Weekend and I took my poppy off and left it on the memorial - I normally leave my poppy on the nearest war memorial on Remembrance Sunday as a mark of respect but this felt more 'right'.
http://www.towpathtreks.co.uk/photodisplay.asp?ino=1133
I had no idea about this memorial, not the crash it commemorated, but my friend (an Australian by birth which might explain certain things) had no idea of the Polish involvement in WW2 so we talked about that: I have Polish family so I was always brought up with their stories from the war (and how the Poles are pretty much the only nation who view the Treaty of Versailles as a good thing as it led to Polish independence) so it never really occurred to me other people didn't really know of their exploits. For his part, my mate talked about Gallipoli and the New Guines campaign and what an impact they had on the Australian national psyche. People like these are part of our shared history and it's good they've been memorialised and me and my mate can talk about them and share our stories.
As Ivan said yesterday, it's important that we remember them because it'd be dreadful to consider what might happen if we forget.
My mate was also amused/surprised to see how traditional I was around the memorial: he doesn't often see me being quiet and respectful so I had to remind him I was raised Catholic and some parts of that have stuck.
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Latest reply: Nov 13, 2011
I think I'll get out of here, where I can run just as fast as I can (NaJoPoMo Pt. 12)
Posted Nov 12, 2011
So the story of my first love I did last week wasn't strictly speaking accurate: the guy in question was my first relationship. I've made an oblique reference to my real first love in the letter to my 14-year old self and here's the full story. Thing is, she wasn't exactly human.
As I mentioned in that letter just before I turned 15, my life got really crappy and I ended up being homeless, estranged from my family and without a clue what I was going to do with myself, all just in time for Christmas. One of the teachers at my school, who has become a sort-of foster parent now and pretty much the closest thing I have to a dad (my actual dad isn't the nicest person in the world), wanted to give me a present but given how unsettled things were he wasn't sure what he could give me. I was staying with him and his wife while social services tried to decide what to do with me and he asked me to go in the garage to grab something for dinner and that's when I saw her: his old hybrid town/country bike. Older than I was, pretty rare, and kept in great condition.
If any of you are familiar with Firefly, the scene where Mal sees Serenity for the first time and falls in love with it is pretty much how I felt when I saw this bike for the first time. (For those who aren't familiar check out the last 10 seconds of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhASt-DGOns as it is that scene).
I loved cycling as a kid, I was the only one of the 3 lads in my family to even learn how to ride a bike and once I had it came naturally as breathing to me. This bike was a real beauty and I couldn't stop looking at it until my foster dad came and found me (he was worried I'd been gone so long: I realised a few months down the line I was on runaway/suicide watch) and there and then gave the bike to me. The next morning I took it out for a ride down to the beach (this beach A5839121 in fact) and the world went away. All the trouble I was going through was forgotten because I was so wrapped up in how smooth and responsive this bike felt, how it felt like it was a part of me and how I felt I could just race away from it all.
One of the other teachers at my school, who became another sort-of foster parent and is now part of my family, gave me Lord of the Rings for Christmas and the description of Shadowfax as a force of nature, semi-divine, the bolt of silver on the flowing green, was how I felt about this bike so she came to be known as Shadowfax (yes, I know Shadowfax is a stallion in LoTR but I felt something as graceful and beautiful as that bike was had to be female).
Over the coming months, when things got too much, too scary or too unsettled, I'd take Shadowfax out and sprint away from it all and I ended up making a couple of little dens in the dunes and woods on the Sefton coast so I could run away for a night or two and escape from it all. She was freedom and most importantly she was a measure of control which was something I had precious little of in my life while social services, my school and my (natural, as opposed to constructed) family wrangled over what to do with me (the school, led by my foster dads, ended up winning). They could argue, but so long as I had Shadowfax, I had control over where I was going.
As things settled down she was a companion for me: it might sound daft but it sometimes felt like she had moods and everything. I could tell when things were wrong with the bike by the tiniest differences in the way it rode. At university she was a safety net for me: even if I ran out of money or there was no public transport I'd be able to get back to my foster folks in a few hours by sitting on her and peddling. I got to explore the Peak District and big chunks of Yorkshire on her, which was one of my favourite bits of Uni. For the last 18 months or so of Uni she started to show her age and took a lot of maintenance to keep going: it'd have probably been cheaper to replace her but I couldn't do it so I worked on her mostly weekends, keeping her together. When the time came for me to leave Manchester (which I was devastated about - seriously, look at my journals from 2006) I loaded her up and she carried me home.
After I finished Uni I cycled the entire trans-Pennine Trail from Southport to Hull on her and then a couple days after I got back I was in a car accident and Shadowfax was written off. I was mostly uninjured but she was mangled beyond repair and I was *devastated*.
So there it is, the story of my first love and a relationship that defined me for nearly a decade.
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Latest reply: Nov 12, 2011
HonestIago
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