mokudekiru

This week has gone by extremely fast, and the weekend even faster. Granted, Monday there were no classes, so really the week started from Tuesday, but it was still remarkably fast to the point where I am starting to doubt my ability to judge the passing of time. I made several enlightening discoveries this week that were of, at, or relating to school… so I think I’ll share.

Tuesday’s discovery:
It’s completely and totally necessary to eat lunch. I sort of forgot about the whole eating lunch thing, until I realized that I had class from 12-5 with no break. Oops. By 5pm I was not in a good mood, but I had chinese food leftovers to eat and my mood quickly improved. Lesson: keep food with you at all times, especially on Tuesdays.

Wednesday’s discovery:
Actually, I don’t think I discovered anything particularly amazing on Wednesday, except that there is a nice small time block after my physics discussion section in which I can do fantastic things like go buy batteries for my calculator, etc. Thrilling.

Thursday’s discoveries:

1) As great as the song “She Don’t Use Jelly” is, actually applying that concept to a sandwich is less than ideal. I had my bagel in my dorm room, and actually remembered to pack myself food (after Tuesday’s failure). I spread peanut butter on, at which point I discovered that I didn’t have any jelly. This was a thoroughly depressing moment. But there was nothing to be done, so I just brought my PB&J-hold-the-J sandwich and went on my way. Later on though, I ended up having really yummy chinese food, which certainly helped. Twice this week, really bad or nonexistent meals have been followed by chinese food. I approve of this trend.

2) Conveying knowledge is the hardest thing in the world. I always had some idea of this, but now that I actually am attempting to do this as a JOB, it seems much more essential that I discover how to do this. Also, despite the fact that I haven’t even known this material for very long, it’s a difficult thing to know what other people don’t understand yet (not that it’s even very easy to know exactly what it is you don’t understand when you’re taking a class yourself). Gaaah.

3) I am completely and totally inferior to Sean’s antbuster skills. I spent like 40 minutes on this, only to have my cake stolen by ants a mere one level before Sean’s *awesome* record.

[click on picture to play]

Sean dares you to make it past level 76. I promise the music to this game is really great too.

Friday’s discoveries:

1) So I had a quiz in Japanese, which involved translating some things into english. Normally I dislike translating into english because it’s so difficult. This stems from the fact that English and Japanese are so different, and the year I spent there, no one was asking me for a direct translation. Anyway, on this quiz we didn’t have to translate entire sentences, but just some words and phrases. I studied the appropriate material, but then on the quiz one of the words we were supposed to translate was せっかく (sekkaku). Now, if you asked me to name a word that exists in Japanese and simply doesn’t at all in english, I probably would have picked that word. I can only really attempt to explain the meaning by example. One of the sentences I said during my speech about my new years resolution to be better about replying to emails, could be translated to:

“I don’t want to inconvenience the friends who [sekkaku] wrote emails to ME”

I.e., my friends went all the way out of their way and did this really great thing by writing email to me, I should at the very least try not to inconvenience them.”

Example 2 (from our textbook): The sentence was something like “Then this person loses the sekkaku enjoyment of eating a meal with their family.”

So in short, I have no idea what it means. It seems to be a particularly Japanese sentiment, at times related to obligation… but really, there is no translation.

So after class I pointed this out to my sensei, asking what translation was expected, and that even though I am confident I know what sekkaku is, I am entirely unable to translate it. A few hours later an email came saying that everyone gets credit for that problem, because it’s too hard to explain.

I just thought that the fact that we don’t have to translate something because it’s IMPOSSIBLE is really fantastic.

Now it’s time for sleep, and I’m not going to attempt to describe the weekend anyway. Tata.