(no subject)

I'm sitting here and working on my Japanese homework today. We've learned some basic conversational stuff so far. "Hi, I am xyz from abc company. Good to meet you." A couple of prounouns, a little vocabulary. I'm enjoying it. We've also worked on the first fifteen hiragana characters. (For those who don't know Japanese, it has three character sets. There are two sets of over forty phonetic characters; one for native words (hiragana) and one for foreign words (katakana). Then there are kanji, a symbolic set of thousands of characters.) I have a little bit of a head start on the hiragana, having worked through them well enough to have them pretty much memorized at one point. I'm a little fuzzy on them, but it's coming back to me.

あいうえお　　かきくけこ　　さしすせそ

It's funny how the drawing pad I bartered with tybis for that I intended as a photo editing tool is probably going to get more use out of my language class for practice writing Japanese characters. My second class is tonight, and I have a notebook to bring with this time too! It's been long enough since I had any formal lessons I didn't think to bring one last time. Now that I've started it again in this limited way, I'm even more excited by the idea of going to school full time when I can manage that. I think I'm really going to enjoy it and will be a very motivated student.

I think I'd like to talk to some people involved in linguistic anthropology programs. I've joked in the past how funny it is that I ended up working in computers when my math ACT score was in the low 20s and I pegged a 36 in English. I've always loved English and writing so much. The subtleties of meaning in different phrasings of the same piece of text. The beauty of extended poetic metaphors. Part of why Ray Bradbury and Cat Valente are a couple of my favorite authors is simply the way they use language. Completely independent of the content of their prose, their words are this magical river of ideas that sweep me away....

I think I'd really enjoy exploring other languages the same way and comparing them to English. Learning about what other cultures' languages say about them. I'd never realized that was a branch of study on its own until I learned more about anthropology lately, but it intriques me. I could even see doing some translation maybe. I don't know. As I've been saying so much lately, I'm still figuring that all out. I think I just need to get into school with a general idea of what I want to study and see what really grabs me.

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My week's been pretty decent so far. Work is work, as always. There've been some meetings, particularly an hour-and-a-half one today, all about the structure of our new company that I feel kind of strange attending. They don't really have all that much relevance for me at this point. I have to admit, I kind of tuned out today and worked on other stuff.

I was in the last car of my train on the L back to Rogers Park on Tuesday and saw a guy taking pictures out the back with a digital SLR. I asked him whether he'd ever been hassled by security for taking pictures and that turned into a fifteen minute talk about photography and stuff. We had to say a quick goodbye when I got off at Howard and he kept going, but I gave him my name on Flickr in case he wanted to look me up. He's a photography student and was kind of fun to talk to.

Yesterday I had the afternoon off work, so I made it over to Elmhurst a little bit after one. I shot some pictures of the facade of the York theatre, where the Theatre Historical Society is housed, and then went inside looking for the THS itself. It's one door up, I was told by a concession stand operator, who then allowed me to photograph the lobby. It's clearly been remodeled pretty significantly (and I know from Cinema Treasures that the auditorium has been split up too), but it was still pretty, with hints of former grandeur.

The society itself was really nice. I arrived about the same time as an older gentleman, and the two of us sat down for a half-hour long movie that was an overview of United States movie palaces, and a ten minute movie that was mostly footage and info about the renovation of the Oriental Theatre in the Loop. I looked at the various displays. There was a complete carbon-arc movie projector (I'd only seen a partial one up close before). On the wall hung a collage of pictures of the asbestos fire curtains that typically closed off the stage in old theatres before the start of a show, with their hand painted scenes of exotic places that might be dozens of feet tall and even wider across. There were architectural and interior artifacts from theatres now lost to the wrecking ball or languishing in decay.

I talked to the two staff members who were working there too. I had a great conversation with one of them who, it turned out, was an anthropologist by schooling! She and I talked about history in general and Chicago in particular and why we feel its important to preserve knowledge and memory of these places. I told her about my photo project, and she suggested I might want to become a member or do some volunteer work with them; it might be a good way to see some interiors. One of the volunteers is a Chicago policeman who does some work in the Uptown Theatre. Considering how badly I've been itching to get in there, it's pure serendipity to have a contact like that turn up. I'm definitely going to look into doing more with them. I have some contact info in a note on my phone to follow up with them.

After that, I made my way to Grayslake to meet up with nova_wolf and moiracoon, and thence to the Warsaw Inn to meet posicat and have the best cheese blintzes evar. (Blintzen?) Oh, was that a good dinner. At the end of the night, I was feeling pretty worn out and Posi kindly let me sleep in his couch before driving home for work this morning.

Looks like camping is on this weekend, though it'll be just Posi and I. Other interested folks turned out not to be able to make it. And that's ok. Maybe it'll be a nice, quiet weekend with some walking around some pretty scenery, some stargazing, and a trip to a ham radio swapmeet on Saturday. That sounds really good.