Terrorism Has No Religion - Know your enemy (TV ad)

Owned In The Face

This is the term used to describe how well our class did on our first quiz. Apparently the teachers are displeased because we are behind, and we do not know as much vocabulary as we "should." I have a little bit of a problem with this, because our quiz covered things that were not in our study guides or lesson plans. It is difficult to study for things when you do not know what to study for. While we had assumed the quiz would be a quiz on vocabulary, it was much more like a quiz on everything we'd learned. There was a section where we had to listen and circle the characters we heard from a recording. Then there was the part where we just had to do a translation of something written. There was a section where we had to listen to a dialog and answer questions about the two speakers and their conversation. 

After school, I ran for about half an hour and the endorphins helped me feel better. 

What Homework?

Him, "Did you get the homework done?"

Me, "We didn't have any...?"

Him, "Lesson 3. It's on the Schedule."

Me, "I thought [the teacher] the whole class schedule is pushed back because we haven't received our laptops yet. Besides, we barely started lesson 3, much less get through it."

Him, "It's on the schedule, and I don't want to risk getting in trouble for not doing it."

After having almost exactly the same conversation with another classmate, I decided I should do the lesson 3 homework, even though it was already 9:30pm at this point.

Tuesdays Rock

For as much as I hate Monday, I love Tuesday. I believe the reason for this, is simply because it's no longer Monday.

We're approximately half-way through learning the alphabet, and as I understand it, the journal entry is due in the morning. So I stumble my way through altering some of the example dialog and creating something about myself. We are specifically instructed to only use the things we've been taught in class.

Imagine, for a moment, writing a paragraph about yourself in your own language, when you can only use half the alphabet. I think our teachers are confused.

We have on teacher that is particularly good at the calligraphy of the language. When he writes on the board, it is always beautiful and makes me wish I had time to become a master of the art.

Here is an example of what you can do with Arabic.

Day 2 of 320

Apparently we have a relatively standard pattern of homework, which we are given a schedule of. For the duration of the class, we are to have a second notebook which is to be used only for journal entries. There will be one journal entry due every week. We are told that our give assignment for this week is to write a paragraph about ourselves.

I found it amusing how everybody in the class thought it was redundant. We'd already written almost an entire page about ourselves during our "Smart Start" English class. I tried to explain to them, that the reason it's not redundant and it's only ONE paragraph due, is because we have to write it in Arabic. They laugh and (reasonably) suggest that it would be ridiculous to assign us a written paragraph in a foreign language, which we've studied for one day, and that we have only been taught the first 8 characters of a 32 character alphabet. 

When the outline is finally distributed to the class, I feel justified in raising my arms and saying, "I told you so." This was accompanied by several groans and much complaining from people who barely know how to greet others in this language, much less write in complete sentences.

I think it's exciting!

Wish I had a costume

Halloween is always kind of fun for me, I spend the week before halloween desperately trying to think of something fun and creative to dress up as, without spending too much money. Inevitably, the date always comes sooner than I could have imagined, and it's not worth the last minute effort to make a decision and rush to get the materials. So I usually just try to make myself feel better by laughing at all the costumes other people wear. There were some pretty good ones this year, and I found that some of the people here can come up with some pretty funny stuff.

My room mate, Lt. Jim Dangle, "Party's over! Gay cop says party's over!" 

I always enjoyed watching Reno 911, though I never saw more than a few episodes. Apparently the movie was funny, and I find myself inspired to go see it. 

RED

I went off and did some shopping! I suppose I'm the only one that can really get so excited over new blankets and a box of pop tarts...

But I also saw the movie RED, although it wasn't revolutionary in any way, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I think  Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman made a great team. I never would have imagined the two of them acting next to each other, because they have such different styles.

Seeing action movies like that always makes me want to go buy an underground bunker and put stacks of cash in a safety deposit box or train station locker. I think maybe I've watched the Bourne movies one too many times. Just because I'm paranoid, doesn't mean they aren't REALLY out to get me!

While I was at the mall, doing my shopping, there were a few things I saw that I thought were particularly cool. Here are a couple of the things I thought were abundantly awesome:

The others were all behind glass. As anybody who has tried to take pictures of things behind glass can tell you, it doesn't work (unless the lighting is just PERFECT, which mine was not).