Eighth, Final Meeting 11/29

Denily and I had our last meeting of the semester the other day. It has been awesome getting to know her just by meeting up and talking for an hour. We hadn’t met for a few weeks due to conflicts and Thanksgiving, of course, so we exchanged stories about the previous weeks. Denily went to Houston for Thanksgiving Break where she has a friend from Venezuela. Like many other people, she had the misfortune of Black Friday shopping. When I asked her why she went, she basically told me she went just for the experience. She didn’t buy anything and she wasn’t looking for anything, but she went to know what it’s like. I would never do that. Over break, I was convinced to go pseudo-shopping with my sister, and I was ready to be done after 20 minutes. I have never understood the pleasure of shopping for hours, but that’s fine with me. I’ll save my time and money!

Denily shared a funny story about towels on Black Friday. She said that she saw a bunch of people rushing for a huge pile of discounted towels. I didn’t think anyone had ever been excited about towels until Denily told me the story. She could not understand why people were grabbing lots of towels. Neither can I!

Denily is already getting excited about her travel over Christmas Break. She is going to Florida with her family for a few weeks and then will return to Venezuela for the remainder of the time. Right now, it looks like she will only be at TCU for one more semester. Her English is advanced enough that I think she could make it wherever she went, at least to communicate well enough. Denily has some pretty ambitious plans for after TCU as well; she wants to go to a university in Houston to get an MBA because her good friend is there, and she wants to be able to stay there instead of Fort Worth. Transferring schools will, of course, require her to take the TOEFL in order to be accepted to the MBA program in addition to the GRE. Without any business experience, I wonder how she will be able to handle this transition. I think she could do it, but I hope the business jargon does not confuse her when she gets to that point.

Denily finishes up her exams next Wednesday, so she’s excited to be done. She had her writing exam just yesterday (Wednesday), so she told me about it. She accidentally answered the question somewhat incorrectly by writing about her favorite vacation spot in Venezuela, whereas the question asked her favorite abroad vacation spot. She said she has become so comfortable with English that she sometimes overlooks things like this. There are some benefits to not knowing a language very well!

Anyway, we had a good last meeting together. It has been a good experience, and I am glad this class requires it. Thank you Dr. Williams!

Free Extra Post!

As part of my patronage toward all of you invisible readers, I have decided to give ONE FREE POST, right here, right now. Hurry, before time runs out! This is a limited time offer! I have already done my 6 required posts, but this one is free! Call now and we’ll throw in a toothbrush cleaner…but wait! There’s more: get a friend to read it and we’ll double your order! That’s right, two posts for the price of one! All of this is yours for the price of $0.00*. This value package is worth over $200, but now, it’s yours, FREE!

            Yeah, I decided I wanted to write another post on Mark Twain. Here are a few I want to talk about:

Literature: (pg. 141)

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Civilization: (pg. 41)

Can we afford Civilization?

            Get it yet? Thinking about it still? Processing…? Okay, now you’ve got it! Oh how these lines can be applied to our class, with a little bit of misinterpretation. At the beginning of the year, we talked about the word civilization and how it has often been used as a means of denigrating other people groups. So when Mark Twain asks, “can we afford Civilization?”, he could possibly have been thinking about this idea that we cannot say what is “civilized” or “uncivilized”. BOOM. As for literature, one thing I have loved about this class is that we don’t typically looks for too much meaning in the books we’ve read. Obviously, books should be interpreted, but I sometimes feel like English classes go too far by requiring the search for meaning. In my opinion, the purpose of books was not for the reader to discover something for him/herself, but for the author to transmit something to the audience. What if every sentence you said was analyzed and interpreted however your audience wanted to interpret it? Would you enjoy that? Absolutely not, I assume.

            Anyway, that was just a thought. I’ll leave you with another applicable piece of wit and wisdom from Twain: “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them” (103). Go Honors students.

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Tales of Juha 45-92

            As I began the second day of reading from Tales of Juha, I was surprised by how different the jokes were from the ones we read for Monday. The first section is still probably my favorite because I enjoy wit, but these stories and jokes were also humorous. Today, we had to read sections devoted to social satire, cunning and resourcefulness, and naïveté and stupidity.

            On Monday, Dr. Williams asked us if any of the jokes were particularly based on Arab culture, and while there were a few things that referenced Arab culture, most of the humor was fully universal. The readings for today, however, especially the social satire section, seemed supremely situated for study of some society’s social standards. One of my favorites from this section was the one about Juha and his son walking on the road with the donkey, and each time someone passes, they make a comment about how strange it is that they don’t ride the donkey, or that they do ride the donkey, or that one rides the donkey while the other doesn’t (48-49). It all ends with Juha saying, “Let me tell you something, son. You can never please everyone.” This short story made me think of how peer pressure causes people to do things differently than they would in the absence of that pressure. In this way, I could really relate to how Arabs are sensitive to fit to social norms, even if they might do something different when given the freedom.

            I really enjoyed the cunning and resourcefulness section, probably because it is basically wit played out in real terms. I loved the story on page 67-68 about the pots. When Juha returns an extra pot to the neighbor who loaned him the pot in the first place, the neighbor doesn’t mind, and accepts it without complaint. When Juha switches the tables so that his neighbor has no pot, the neighbor suddenly is annoyed. Juha answers him by saying, “The one who reaps the profit has to bear the loss too!” I really enjoyed this one because it has a practical message about investment, but is also humorous because of Juha’s ingenuity.

            Finally, the section of naivete and stupidity was unique because Juha finally is the fool of the joke relatively consistently. In almost every story before this, he has been the one who came out on top in every situation, but this section showed that Juha is not impermeable to being a fool. My favorite of this section was on pages 74-75. We’ve already read several jokes about women giving birth after being married for only three months, but in this one, his wife explains away the birth after 3 months by adding the number of months she had been pregnant, the number of months her husband had been with her during that time, and the number of months the baby has been developing, which adds up to nine! Juha confesses to not counting straight, which I thought was funny. His confession to being wrong puts a whole new light on Juha. He is clever sometimes but dumb at others.

            These stories and jokes were great! Next up, we have jokes where Juha is the butt of the joke. I wonder how this will differ from the stupidity section.

Tales of Juha 1-41

            We have new competition for my favorite book this year! Tales of Juha was great so far. I didn’t know what to expect, but as I read the introductory pages that explained the humor of Juha, I had a feeling it would be something I would enjoy. The first set of jokes was titled “Wit and Wisdom”. I love witticisms and cunning remarks, and so these Juha jokes were great!

            The thing that made these jokes so entertaining was that I was constantly on the edge of my seat waiting for the punch line. Sometimes, I could predict something like what Juha would say, but the entertainment value was not reduced. Since some of the jokes were too long to type up, I’ll stick to the smaller jokes for the most part. One of the jokes I laughed at was on page 25:

A punctilious person asked Juha what was the best position to take in a funeral procession. Was it ahead of the coffin or behind it?

            “As long as you’re not in the coffin,” Juha said, “you can walk wherever you like.”

The sense of sarcasm in this joke made it funny to me. Sarcasm was definitely a theme of Juha stories, but the presence of the donkey was certainly the most common word. I’m not completely sure what a donkey represents in Arabic culture, but it seemed to be present in almost half of the stories. I suspect the donkey represents stubbornness or annoyance, similarly to how we think of donkeys in the U.S.

            I also really enjoyed the jokes when it appeared that a secondary character had fooled Juha (and made him look like an idiot), promptly followed by a quick retort by Juha that makes him a hero. An example of this occurs in the very first story, on pages 11-12. After describing a crazy situation about boiling wheat before planting the seeds, the judge questions the strangeness of his description, but Juha immediately changes the context and uses the argument to win the trial for his “client”.

            Most of these jokes were entertaining and enjoyable, although some of them were difficult to understand based on cultural differences. Overall, I think Tales of Juha will be one of my favorite books this semester.

Seventh Meeting 11/8

Denily and I met for our 7^th time this week (and this time, when I say ‘this week’, that means I am actually writing it relatively shortly after our meeting! Amazing, huh?) in the usual place outside of 1873 at the usual time. ‘Twas a blustery day outside, but thankfully it was warm enough that we didn’t have to go inside.

Naturally, since we met on National Public Transportation Day, we talked about public transportation! The only problem is that I just lied, and it was not actually National Public Transportation Day. In fact, I doubt such a holiday exists, but if you believed that (you non-existent reader, since I know you don’t read this), then you might need to go check your bedroom; I hear gullible is written on the ceiling. But seriously, Denily mentioned how she had experimented with public transportation the previous week and told me that she made it all the way to the airport and back, with the DART as part of the trip. She was trying to make sure she knew how to do it for whenever she flies. This discussion led us into discussion about public transportation in Caracas. Denily said that she almost never takes public transportation back home because it is too dangerous. She says that it is too crowded, and people might try to rob you while you’re on the bus. What was most interesting about her description of public transportation was that she claimed that the danger is a new phenomenon. She said she used to be able to ride without these fears. It just goes to show you what trouble a guy like Hugo Chavez can do in 12 years (I’ve mentioned before she is not very fond of Chavez). She believes her country is very corrupt, and it certainly seems that way based on how she describes everything, and I definitely agree that Chavez isn’t exactly my ideal for a president.

Speaking of presidents, we talked about the election as well. Before coming to TCU for the IEP program, Denily worked in a news station for about 5 years. When she watched our elections, she was very impressed by how we counted votes and how you could see individual counties and states and know the exact number of votes cast for any candidate. She says in Venezuela, they don’t get all of those details. I think they only get to see the final result…and with corruption, who knows how exact those numbers are?

We of course talked about what each other did during the week, and one thing Denily mentioned was her experience with LEAPS. She and 3 other IEP students went to Mission Arlington, where they helped with various projects. What was interesting was that she said she had never done anything community oriented like that while in Venezuela. America seems to be obsessed with community service. There’s nothing wrong with it, obviously, but I often wonder why we care so much about doing community service. Most of the time, we say we do it because we enjoy helping other people and seeing them improve, but isn’t there some ulterior motive? In high school, everyone feels an obligation to be part of some community service so they can put it on their college application. In college, there is still that pressure, especially for those planning on graduate school. Even if we are doing community service because we enjoy the fact that we get to help people and they appreciate us, isn’t that an ulterior motive as well? What if we did community service that wasn’t fun, where the recipient of our goodwill didn’t appreciate us and even became frustrated with us? Would we still do it? I don’t think we would. I think we should have better reasons for doing community service than our personal pleasure, the recipient’s thankfulness, and a pad for our resumes. Just something to think about.

So yeah, after a good meeting, we said goodbye and plan on meeting next week as well. Hope you have a good week, invisible reader! You are awesome, even if you don’t exist!

Sixth Meeting 11/1

           Denily and I met for our 6^th time today. I know many people in our class change things up each week in terms of the meeting place, but Denily and I haven’t met anywhere but the same place, so I’m sorry for the monotony.

            I mentioned a few weeks ago that Denily and all the international students are having to read Life of Pi this half of the semester. I also mentioned that neither Denily or I liked the book very much; however, Denily has now reached the point where the story is actually pretty interesting (it only took about 200 pages before action happened). I hope that she enjoys the rest of it more than she did the first part!

            This week we talked a lot about climate and weather and things like that. For instance, I asked if she had ever been snow skiing. As it turns out, Denily has never even seen snow! Since mountains surround her, I assumed she had experienced snow before, but she has not…so we talked about snow skiing. I shared my only snow-skiing experiences in my life from about 6 or so years ago. We went to Salt Lake City, where we were taught to ski and immediately let loose on all the greens and blues you could ask for. Of course, some of the adults were less capable at skiing than the newly taught 12 year old that I was; when I was going down a very easy green slope, some lady who apparently didn’t know how to slow down or turn ran into me from behind and knocked me down. Thankfully, my landing didn’t hurt…since it was snow.

Later, as I was getting on a lift with three other people, another incident happened. The four of us had advanced to the line where the ski lift picks you up, and all of the sudden, a little bit of time before the chair was to arrive, another lady scoots forward to join us in our chair, pushing herself in between me and another person. I was, of course, on the edge of the concrete platform (about 1.5 feet above the ground), and so I fell off the platform. They had to stop the lift for a second, and I can remember seeing some of my family in the chair ahead of me looking back and wondering why the lift stopped, only to find me on the ground. The best part of the whole experience was that once I had been added on to the same chair with the three four other people, the lady who knocked me off the platform didn’t even apologize. Either way, these were funny stories I had from skiing that I shared with Denily.

Tailing off of that subject, Denily and I talked about mountains. As a resident of Chattanooga, the best city ever basically, I love mountains. We are surrounded by them, and while they are not huge mountains like you would find in Colorado, they make for an awesome addition to an already awesome city. I can go out in the woods for hours and know how to get from place to place by following streams of water. Denily, of course, has some significant mountains surrounding Caracas, her city. She has climbed them several times, but recently, they added a cable car that takes you to the top of the surrounding mountains. She feels that this is cheating and really takes the joy out of climbing the peaks. I completely agree.

While Denily has been to some relatively high elevations, she has not been high enough to experience altitude sickness. I told her about the trip I made to Peru about two years ago and how tired you feel when you run around at high altitude. Naturally, I had to explain the concept of the hematocrit and erithropoetin to show her the adaptations of the human body to higher altitudes…but since I know we all know about that, I won’t worry about explaining it on here…

So yeah, 6 meetings, fun and done! Until I write up the 7^th one in the next few days, I hope you are doing well, dear reader (if you even exist). I know you don’t really exist, or if you do exist, you didn’t make it this far in this terribly long blog post. But either way, thank you invisible reader.

Fifth Meeting 10/25

Denily and I met for our fifth time this week at our usual spot outside of 1873. We talked about a wide variety of topics, as usual, so I’ll just jump right into what we discussed!

For whatever reason, we always tend to talk a lot about language and things related to it. This week, I learned a few important things about Spanish that could save me from some embarrassment…speaking of embarrassment, we actually talked about the Spanish word for being embarrassed! Sometimes, as a non-Spanish speaker, I assume that certain English words can be changed into Spanish by a simple change in the ending or pronunciation. For example, the English word ‘family’ becomes ‘familia’ in Spanish. Unfortunately, this device doesn’t always apply; I had forgotten what the Spanish word for ‘embarrassed’ was (it is avergonzado), and asked Denily to remind me. When I asked though, she had a funny story to tell: there was a girl who she knew who was learning Spanish, and in trying to say she was embarrassed, she accidentally said, “estoy embarasado”….which does not mean, “I am embarrassed”. On the contrary, she quickly became embarrassed! Denily’s friend had accidentally said, “I am pregnant”.

Needless to say, I was glad I didn’t unintentionally claim to be pregnant. Denily also taught me another way to avoid embarrassment. Somehow, the word “Miss” came up, like the same “miss” as Driving Miss Daisy. Apparently, in Venezuela, if you call someone a Miss, it basically means you are hitting on them, or telling them they are beautiful. She said it’s based on the importance of the Miss Venezuela competition in her culture. So make sure you don’t call anyone “Miss _____” when you’re in Venezuela unless you mean it!

Since I am learning Spanish right now, we both exchanged what difficulties we have with each other’s language. Denily says that the hardest thing for her is actually pronunciation and perfecting her accent. I can definitely understand the pronunciation difficulty-we have no consistent rules on pronunciation, unlike Spanish. For me, the hardest thing about Spanish is the prepositions. I forget which preposition goes where, or whether one actually needs to be there. Even though Spanish doesn’t have as many prepositions as English, the smaller number cover the same number of uses, meaning one preposition is used in possibly hundreds of ways (that may be exaggeration).

            So yeah, language was the big topic of the day. We will meet again next week and talk again!