まめちしき

This is one of those wretched little desks I was talking about. My hand for scale;



Who looks at this and says, "Yes, this will facilitate the learning process." No other classroom I've been in has these, maybe it's related to the fact that Japanese II is in a math building, though I can't think why small, rough desk space would be an advantage for math.

Damn, I still need to take a math class, and an assessment test first or I'm going to have to take two math classes. Math has always been just a brick wall for me. I was listening to The Nick and Artie Show the other day and they were, on the spot, with a guy from a Vegas casino calculating a number people were betting on based on the average of the numbers on the jerseys of people who scored in the Super Bowl. I was very quickly out of my depth. I may never be a professional gambler. Lange always likes to joke about how many bets gamblers will take--he often says there are guys in Vegas betting on a Wiffle Ball game in Missouri or something.

I got a 71% on my Japanese test, which is better than I thought I would do, though certainly not great. I do wonder if any of it is due to my just natural dizziness, though. I lost a point for writing "Nihon" (Japan) when I was supposed to write "Nihongo" (the Japanese language). That's the sort of thing I do when writing in English--I see in my blog just a couple days ago I wrote, "I just watching The Face of Evil again and . . ." I don't actually talk like a LOLCat, my writing just can't seem to keep up with my brain. I mean, you should see how many typos don't make it in.

I went to the Japanese market yesterday with the thought of buying a children's book to help me learn. I thought back to how reading The Chronicles of Narnia over and over as a kid helped me learn better English. If only I could find the Japanese C.S. Lewis.

I ended up buying a Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei manga, which was probably a bad idea. It does have hiragana next to all the kanji dialogue, and I was able to understand a lot of the words, but Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei has a lot of Japanese pop culture references and wordplay. I lost the thread of what was going on at around page 2. Well, it's a really pretty book, anyway.



I love how foreign books are designed with a fundamentally different aesthetic mentality. The cover is actually removable--it's a little dust cover, for a manga. It has a nice coarse texture.

Here a couple pictures of birds in flight I've taken recently;