Monthly Archives: June 2005

I Was Up At Five

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.

Getting Easier To Write Again

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.

A-E-I-O-Accent

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.

It Was Raining This Morning

I stepped out­side, and the street­lights were on. To the west the clouds were clear­ing, while the sun was fight­ing the brood­ing sky in the east. Everything felt a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. As I walked to work, zipped up in my light wind­break­er, sweat­ing from the suf­fo­cat­ing mate­r­i­al, the rain slowed then stopped.