textures | tones

Once again, I’m late in posting this, so expect another post shortly in 12 hours or so. But I have a very good reason (don’t I always?) for being late this time, which I will related shortly. I’m also out of pre-recorded songs so the next couple of hours or so will be devoted to recording at least another 4 songs because my mother and everyone gets back from Jinan today and I will be privacy-less until they leave, this coming Friday. Granted, since my knowledge of their schedule is a little bit off hand in nature, it might be best to assume they’ll be here past Friday and record an extra song, or two, so that means I’ve got a lot to do these next few hours!

The reason I’m late though was because I was sleeping. This will be Saturday night, when I went to sleep decently late, but not very late; I’m trying to get onto a normal schedule you know. But I was woken very rudely Sunday morning by the sun as I’d forgotten to close the drapes and Maria was sending me a message on the computer anyway so I figured I’d talk to her, and talk to her I did, at length, and the entire notion of getting any more sleep was forgotten, until I got off the computer talking with her at which point I closed the drapes and was about to embrace once again the comforts of sleep when there came a knocking at the front door.

I’d forgotten, but people were coming to install new drapes in the upstairs bedroom for my mother. I threw on some clothes, and half an hour later they were done though they tried to get money out of me. I told them, no, take it up with my mother. I was about to go back to sleep again when there came a ringing from my cell phone, it was my father, and when I answered he was all out of sorts and very frantic.

Apparently he’d locked himself out of his new apartment, was on his way to my grandparent’s place for lunch, but needed both his keys and some very important documents that were in his locked apartment delivered the keys to him and the documents to some poor sap waiting in the sun on the street. Since I was the only one with another set of keys, it fell to me to accomplish this. So off I go, jumping in a cab, and heading over. Finding what my father needed was easy, as was finding the guy to give the documents to, and when I had done what was asked of me I was once again looking forward to coming home and going to sleep when the guy who received the documents indicated that they were not complete, that my father had forgotten to sign them, so off I went to find my father to get him to sign the documents so that I can give them back to this guy.

My father was at my grandmother’s, close enough to where I was, but when it became known that I was going over there anyways to get his signature, along came the obligatory “stay for lunch” invitation, and apparently my cousin and his wife were there also, so how could I refuse, who cares if I wasn’t hungry and just really tired and wanting to go home. So I got his signature, gave it to the guy, said a grateful goodbye to the guy, and went back to my grandparent’s place and stayed for lunch, which was pleasant, though I was exhausted.

One topic of conversation we touched upon at lunch was exceptionally amusing and along the veins of a conclusion that Maria and I had come up with that they should just leave written Chinese to the scholars and artists and have the normal, everyday Chinese just use English, because people are forgetting how to read and write anyways since most of the reading and writing they do is on the computer now so they don’t have to actually do any of the strokes themselves. Plus, Maria and I often have difficulties distinguishing the subtle difference between two character, and lo and behold, so apparently do the Chinese.

Two brilliant examples came up while at lunch.

1) For a college examination, a student was asked to write an essay on why they should be afraid of ghosts, or something like that. They misread the question (in Chinese) and thought they were asked why they should be afraid of rabbits, and spent the next very confused 2 hours crafting a response on fearsome rabbits.

2) For yet another college examination, a student was asked to do a bit of Chinese to Chinese translation on the topic of some army person returning to their base, or something like that. They misread the block of text (in Chinese again, of course) and thought that the person wasn’t returning to base, but rather to France. The misreading is even more inappropriate when given that the block of text to be translated was historically contextual to a period in time when “France” as we know it didn’t even exist yet so there was no way for this person to have been returning to it.

So take that Chinese as a written language!

And then it was 4pm on Sunday afternoon, and I was just getting home from my impromptu adventures, at which point I quickly sent off an email to Maria and collapsed into bed to wake up, now! 16 hours later :) I’m so proud of myself. But I fully expect that I am now on a normal schedule, because it was 8:15am when I first got up, a very appropriate time, mostly of my own accord though partially because my iPad was ringing off the hook with email notifications. The IFC had sent another mass emailing out to all their peeps and I was getting all the out of office bounce replies to my Inbox. Really annoying actually…

Today’s song is “Say Yes” by Elliott Smith again. I’m gonna have a devil of a time coming up with more songs to record, I’ve already gone through 28 of them!