Not by choice, of course. I rolled around in bed for an hour or so, and decided that I should do something productive if I was awake anyway. After some shopping in the refreshing morning weather (thank god for the 24 hour grocery store just five minutes away), I made breakfast and fell back asleep for another hour.

I’m awake now, but I’m still drowsy as fuck.

I’ve been trying to get an entry written since wednesday and a pack of ground beef browned since monday, but the week has been one exhausting day after another. I worked a 13-hour day on tuesday, and it feels like I haven’t recovered yet. It seems like every week I’m waiting for another weekend so I can recuperate and get my life together.

It’s not that I haven’t had time to write lately, it’s that every time I sit down and set myself on writing, I can’t follow through on any of my ideas. I blame the close proximity of my house to my job. For years, going to university and going to work on the bus would force me to sit passively, while someone would take me to my destination. I didn’t have to think about anything, so my mind would drift about random things, like my friends, my relationships, and my life. Back then, my entries were thorough and better developed.

It’s slowly getting easier to write again. I don’t have to force myself as much.

For most of my life, I felt like I was young for my age.

I remember the later years of elementary school. I would be the one wearing things like jogging pants on the civies¹ days. The other kids would be smoking under the bridge, starting playground fights over girls, contracting gonorrhea through sexual contact. Even in high school I was eating lunch on the bleachers with John while others were ODing on rat poison, winning worldwide math competitions, or being featured on cover articles of Macleans.

I had never really understood how people grow up. Most adults I know have been the way they are for their entire lives. Due to the fact that I can only figure out the changes I’ve made in six month cycles, I’ve mostly grown in small, undetectable increments.

It’s only in the last six months that things have changed. I’ve reached my (previously life-long) goal, not gradually, but rather suddenly and unexpectedly. Interestingly enough, this was due to three different factors, and I suspect that I wouldn’t have been able to reach this point without every single one of them.

Now I feel old for my age.

The Trinary Maturity Series

1. Introduction
2. The Job
3. The Girlfriend
4. The House
5. (In)Conclusion

1. Days where we didn’t have to wear uniforms, a short form of “civilian” [↑]

Louise once told me that she liked the way I say want because it apparently sounds like wunt. I can’t really hear it, of course, and I think it’s the only word that I can’t quite say the right way.

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve ever come across. People from around the world are asked to read the same paragraph in English. The paragraph has been designed to include most of the consonants, vowels, and clusters found in standard American English, so that one can really get a sense of all the variations in an accent.

I love the gentleness of Lebanese Arabic (perhaps I associate it with the charming, well-educated, velvet-voiced Lenanese gentleman at work). The interesting thing is that it sounds completely different from Palestinian Arabic. As a small example, the former has a more exaggerated “ee” sound, while the latter has a windier “r” sound.

I hate the painful sounding Cantonese accents. Somehow, each one is so uniquely bad that it’s passed humourously bad, and gone back to uniquely bad again. None of them can properly pronounce “pl”s, “th”s and “ll”s, and the consonants are harsh to the ear. There are also very subtle differences between these Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, and a Cantonese speaker from China. One can hear the slightly more delicate letter combinations from a person surrounded by Mandarin speakers on the mainland.

For me, the most interesting comparisons are between native English speakers. I let Shirley listen to the Glasgow version, and she couldn’t get over how hot it is. Of course, the most neutral accent to me is from Toronto, seeing as how I grew up there. I hear this accent the most, and always find it amusing when foreigners can pull off a fake accent (I’ve been told we sound very bland). Jackie had the most adorable New Jersey accent, and at one point Angie admitted that she had somewhat of a Southern drawl.

Perhaps my fascination with (and attraction of) things speech related stems from an early study of Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. One of the scenes in My Fair Lady that really stuck out in my mind was the ability of the protagonist (whom Shaw describes as an “energetic phonetic enthusiast”) to distinguish 130 vowel sounds from a simple, short recording of a voice going through A–E–I–O–U in one fluid motion with no consonants.

Usually I can recognize someone from a voice and accent, sometimes better than I can from a face.