Fri Sep 16, 2005 12:29 EST (UTC -5)
I know I said that I would never again mention Nacole, who seemingly snubbed my offer of a date by instead going out with another guy. Out of angst and sadness, I cut off communication with her in almost every way. But on Saturday I broke the embargo and shot her a not mean e-mail asking why she did what she did and basically placing the blame on myself, because I know she didn't mean it.
Still, she didn't say anything to me. In other words, she was treating me like I was treating her. I wanted to tell her something else (like, "Did you get my e-mail?") but I didn't know exactly what to say.
The other day she posted on her LiveJournal (which I was still occasionally reading) an acknowledgement of the situation, affirming the rumor that she "broke a heart" by going out with that other guy. She also said that they had broken up. I was relieved to hear those things. I tried several times to post a comment discreetly, but I didn't know how to say it without it being taken as some snide sarcastic remark.
Today I decided to break the ice by means of AIM. "Hey," I said. "I thought you didn't want to talk to me," she replied. She had found out! But who told her? Nevertheless, I apologized, and she apologized, so we quickly moved along to discuss other things.
But questions were still weighing heavily on my mind. I asked her why she didn't think I was asking her out, and she said that she just didn't realize it because of her self-consciousness and that she just couldn't imagine that guys liked her like that.
I asked when she found out that I didn't want to talk to her. She said that Michelle, a mutual friend and a reader of this site, read it on this site and told her. Amazingly, she was afraid to say anything to me (which is why she didn't talk to me), and she was left speechless by my e-mail (which is why she didn't e-mail me back, although she did try to just like I tried to post a comment on her LiveJournal).
In the wake of this awkward standoff, she affirmed that we are still friends, and that's a good thing because I'd hate to lose a friend like that. So I guess things are back to normal between us. And all I had to do, as she put it, was say "Hi."
In China, the "Grammar Police" is becoming a reality. Here's a translation (a bad one, because it's by me) of an article posted today on the Esperanto portal Ĝangalo:
China Tries to Limit Dialects with "Language Patrols" and Laws
The Chinese government has adopted standards and laws to encourage the use of the Mandarin language and limit the dialects, mainly in Shanghai, where the local dialect is widely used. "Language Patrols" will go through the streets of the city correcting the speakers so that they use Mandarin correctly.
Other laws determine that from now on, state officials from the region of Shanghai will have to speak in "perfect Mandarin language" which will be rated by language tests. It will be required that in businesses, clients should be greeted with the Mandarin greeting word "ni hao," instead of the Shanghainese form "nunhau." After the greeting, always in Mandarin, the client and the worker can converse in Shanghainese.
Shanghainese is spoken by 87 million people in Shanghai and the surrounding areas. Mandarin is the standard language in China, used by more than 800 million people throughout the country; it must be taught in all of the country's schools, including in the regions where it is barely spoken on the street.
The dialect is proudly used by the residents of Shanghai, as a way of differentiating themselves from their historic "rivals," the people of Beijing, who speak the Mandarin language. Shanghainese is the most preferred and used dialect for negotiating in the city, one of the main trading cities in China and the country's financial center. Despite that it is not understandable at all to a speaker of Mandarin, Shanghainese is officially considered a dialect, not a language, within China because the written form is equal to normal Mandarin.
The Chinese government prohibits the use of Shanghainese in radio, television, and propaganda, and in schools, as also occurs to all other dialects, which doesn't avoid, however, that on some occasions, people interviewed by the media use it to voice their opinions and ideas. Because of that, the majority of the TV shows in China have subtitles in Mandarin. In 2004, China prohibited the broadcast of the cartoon "Tom and Jerry" in Shanghai, the one and only attraction that could be watched in the dialect.
If you read other blogs, you've heard about this, but I'm posting it anyway. It's Google Blog Search (in beta, of course) and it searches blogs' RSS and/or Atom feeds. You can sort the results by relevance or date, and (the coolest thing of all) you can subscribe to the search results in RSS or Atom format -- effectively enabling you to keep tabs on certain topics and stuff. I'm sure there's some other site where you can do it, but since Google's doing it, it's cool.
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Yeah, I've learned that no matter what a person says about anything, give it a few days and everyone will know.
casey — Fri Sep 16, 2005 18:09 EST
China is a control freak. The China prime minister or whatever the position is, is coming to Canada for a visit, and Vancouver is one of the stops. Outside the airport, there are a whole bunch of "falun gong" (banned in China) supporters having a demonstration.
Todd — Fri Sep 16, 2005 18:56 EST