Fan-Fiction and my Fondness for Fuller*

My Aunt wrote 330 pages of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea fan-fiction. Fortunately she's not a bad writer. Her story's actually engaging and entertaining. I just finished editing her torture chapters. Admiral Nelson is a brave soul, I tell ya. But yeah, editing brings me serious joy - all of my anal retentiveness with regard to grammar, use of idiomatic expressions, and the simple aesthetic flow of words has finally found a productive mode of expression. Maybe now I won't have to holler at signs that say things like: 2 taco's just one dollar. Augh...

Right, well, besides that, sharpening my ability to break down and rearrange sentences has got to be helpful somehow when I return to translating literary/classical Chinese. *sigh* I miss it so badly!!! Oh gracefully tedious Fuller drills, Oh Pulleyblank, Oh Matthews, why ever did I leave you in Portland?!

*Contrary to what the title of this post may suggest, my fondness for Fuller's literary Chinese translation exercises has not inspired me to produce any Fuller 'fan-fiction' (of course, his textbook isn't fiction, so I suppose that would be impossible).

Sad About Penguin Love

Tonight the entire family (Me, Dad, Sinead, Uncle Chris and Aunt Becky) went to see The March of the Penguins. Morgan Freeman narrated the difficulties of their Arctic journeying very sympathetically. I cried. I didn't cry at the dead baby penguins, though (well, not more than once; and there were like, five opportunities to cry at dead baby penguins). I can deal with sad moments, especially those involving explicable things like death. I cried the hardest when the penguin found its mate, and they appeared to have fallen in love. Something as happy and inexplicable as that is bound to make me feel sad. I came home and ate some tapioca, half a salmon patty, and four spinach nuggets. Now I'll probably be fat, and I still don't feel better! If only those penguins hadn't been so unfathomably tender with one another, I might be happy right now.

Leather Bags & Foreign Caffeine

This is the fantastically exciting new purse that my papa got me for China! It's so big that I can fit who knows how many wonderful Chinese goodies in it, and have room leftover for my camera, chinese-english dictionary, etc. Oh Joy!

By the way, I went out to Greek food with my Aunt Becky and our friend Bonnie today, and encountered the most scrumptious thing I've discovered since Vietnamese-style coffee: Greek coffee. Oh Lord - three espresso cups of pure goodness. A trip to the Mediterranean, anyone?