I should really stop packing at the last minute. Catherine and Ileana will attest to the fact that I'm not so great at it. But I did get my room pretty damn close to completion by myself, although I most certainly needed and got help at the end (thank you Catherine and Ils, again). Now that I have nobody to help me pack for France, you'd think I'm trouble, but I'm surprisingly good at speed-packing just one suitcase.

Anyway, I cam back from the bank and other errands about 20 minutes ago, after getting my traveller's checks and some toiletries with Peter and my mom. I got $1200 in checks, and hope to only spend around $400 while in Aix-en-Provence and then have $800 left for the last two weeks of the trip. I also got some sweetass tiny bottles of shampoo and soap. Those miniature bottles are so cool. I was considering not typing miniature because I'm tired. Cuz it's hot.

I plan on taking the following books with me to France: The Republic of Plato to read in preparation for SOSC, the Language Instinct because it's a book I should have read in its entirety by now, Savoir Dire for practicing my pronunciation in French outside of the course, and maybe some short french book like Zazie Dans le Métro. Yeah, that should be enough. And the Savoir Dire thing reminds me that I have to import like 10 CDs onto my computer in order to have the audio stuff with me in France, too.

I'm currently syncing all of my photos to my iPod (my major piece of electronic equipment for the entire trip). I was talking to Catherine on the phone and told her that I was sad that I don't really have any pictures of her to take with me, and that I'll only be able to look at FB pics in the lab at IS Aix-en-Provence. Then I realized that I could put all of my pictures of her on my iPod and have a ton of pictures of her wherever I go in Aix! :-)

God, I must pack now. Which means going through a lot of clothes an trying to pick only seven tshirts out of that along with like, two pairs of shorts. Or something. I don't know. I don't like packing. Gay.

I know how much it sucks for friends on myspace or LiveJournal or the like to NEVER update their journals, giving you absolutely nothing to read. So I'll be writing a few more entries before I leave for France, to satisfy anyone out there who is utterly bored. I can't guarantee that I'll be writing about stuff that is interesting to you, though...

There's been a lot of videos out on youtube.com showing Halo 3 Beta gameplay, and a lot of it looks really great. The videos on ign.com are far better quality than any youtube ones, as I just discovered last night. You can actually see cool details and the actual look of the graphics on those ign videos, which is sweet as hell, because Halo 3 is looking incredible, and I don't want to miss a thing. Next year, Catherine will probably remind me of my homework when I've been playing Halo 3 too long any particular day, which I'm grateful for. She doesn't have to do it, but she does because she cares, and it's nice (unless I really wanna play! haha) because it helps me limit myself and not fail school.

Still on Halo 3, I'm very excited for the gadgets that they're introducing, namely the EMP bomb, the trip-mine, the bubble shield and the portable grav lift. The grav lift is pretty sweet for launching moving vehicles over walls. You can also deploy it next to a wall, throw a bubble shield on it to get that little goody over the wall, and then have team members hop over the wall straight into the protective bubble shield, creating a nice little pocket of resistance. It's like a little portable base inside enemy territory, as I see it. I'm referring to the wall on Highground, by the way.

Valhalla looks pretty sweet, with the man-cannons and all, but it seems like they don't propel people very far. I'm sure their effects will be greatly multiplied with grav settings lowered. Now that will be something to see. Snowbound is cool, too, and I really like seeing all those cool force-field effects. The fields add a new facet to Halo gameplay which makes the player see his enemy (and possibly vice-versa), but makes him wait to engage. Makes for lots of Old West-style gun battles...

I would love to build a Mongoose replica that works. That would be really cool, but kind of useless, because there are tons of ATVs out there and we don't need any more in this world. But it looks so cool! Haha. Maybe Sergey and I will one day build a quartet of them so that Catherine, Ileana, he and I can cruise around Europe near our mansion in glorious Halo style. Bah we need to build that mansion.

I don't know how serious Ileana and Sergey ever are when we talk about the mansion, but I'd like to think that such a thing will happen one day. I don't like the thought of having to live in an apartment in an overpopulated city, sharing a building with tens of other strangers. Of course, I live in a dorm now, but that's completely different to me, because everyone in the dorm does what I do: they go to school at UChicago. In an apartment, though, everyone has an even more different daily agenda, which makes things a little boring. I like being in cahoots with people, doing cool stuff together (like building shit w/Sergey, or doing something like Scav.). That's what makes me feel connected to a greater community. I don't particularly need that to be happy with certain individuals, but it helps to have that with a larger community because it makes me feel like I'm a part of something with everyone.

Anyway, I'm satisified with things the way they are now (and during the school year as well), building shit with Sergey and being retarded in front of Catherine and Ileana, making fun of Ileana but not meaning it, having fun with all four of us together, and of course loving Catherine (with all my heart). :-)

Damn, I must away for now, and write more later. I shall continue in a few hours, after I've read more about Hiro Protagonist.

Well, if you're reading this, then you probably know that I'm about to leave for France (no not tonight...Friday!). My flight is around 6 PM from O' Hare; my parents will of course be taking me, along with my brother, to say goodbye and all. I still haven't asked her, but I'm planning on getting Catherine to come to the airport, too. I don't know if the idea has crossed her mind, but I myself only had the genius notion recently, and realized that it is completely doable (I haven't even had a chance to ask her yet). I'd like it very much, and I know she would, too. Today, after seeing her in Chicago, I realized how terribly I'm going to miss her, and also had yet another strong reminder of how much I love her. It's not that I forget that I love her, but you know how you can realize over and over how much you love someone without ever forgetting in the first place that you love them? I don't know how to explain it. Now Ileana's gonna read my entry and go, "Catherine!! Catherineeee!!! Stefan said he forgot he loved youuuu!" Hahaha. Gaga.

I plan on losing a little weight in France. Don't laugh, Ils. K, fine, tell Catherine and have a hearty laugh together. I actually enjoy that, despite all appearances. Anyway, I'll be walking 3 km per day to school and 3 km back, so I'll be getting some exercize in starting the first day. From there, my energy levels will certainly steadily get better and better as I overall transition into a more active state. I suppose spraining my ankle really threw me off. Being in France will certainly do wonders for my eating habits, seeing as how I won't have the opportunity to buy nasty American junk, and I'll be at the mercy of a 50-year-old widow for breakfast and dinner. I am to eat lunch on my own, and I hear that there are open-air markets in Aix, which will make for a nice break eating fresh fruit and bread, or something of the sort. I won't be delving into the sweet and fattening world of pastries, because they'll surely be to expensive, and I feel sluggish after eating them in the afternoon heat (I remember the cheesy pastries that I'd buy in the shop next to Tao Li Yuan while in Shanghai, and I know they never made me feel like Superman).

I hope that there's a way for me to rent a bike in Aix, so that I might treat myself to excursions to neighboring cities/villages/what-have-you. I was of course engrossed by the thought of renting a scooter, but that's no way to lose weight. As things stand, my foot is still too structurally unsound for me to be running on it, so I must find a way to do aerobic exersize with low impact. Ergo, bikes, and not scooters. I have seen on a small map (not a very detailed one) that Avignon and Marseille are very close to Aix, so I'll probably bike there. I must go about it with a bit of planning, though, so no excursions until the first weekend after class.

I must still write an email to my future hostess in Aix-en-Provence in order to introduce myself and tell her when I'll be coming to Aix. I have put that off for too long. I have to do it tonight. In fact, I should have done it last night with some help from Catherine, to kind of kickstart my learning-French-mode. I'm kind of rusty, which is one of the reasons why I'm a little anxious to be in France. I am at the same time afraid of making mistakes while talking to French people, yet also excited that things will be progressing smoothly after a week or so of study.

Some people I have encountered over the past month have been very surprised when I told them that I don't plan on taking my computer with me. To them I say, trust me, you don't want me taking a computer to France. I'd waste the trip. I have come to realize that the computer is a wonderful tool, but that it pollutes every day with an unnecessary excess of sensory input, which I know I can do without, but don't want to as long as the machine is around. And my power cord if defunct anyway, so I'd have one battery charge to spread out very carefully over two months. Now that would be quite the show of self-restraint. Hey, cool, LJ supports HTML. Whee.

Oh, spring quarter grades are up. I got an A in bio. Yay for Jake being awesome and having a fairly easy class. I mean, I suppose the class wasn't a total piece of cake, and I am proud of myself for the first problem set and all the other stuff, too (though to a lesser extent because I did the first prob. set most thoroughly and then typeset it in TeX). However, the material really wasn't that hard to grasp, unless you're inherently better at a different type of analysis (i.e. not of the real world...). Whatever. I got another undeserved B in Chinese. I did do both midterms and the final, as well as a few quizzes and all the projects, but my slacking off was still severe. I didn't do any of the homeworks, nor did I complete some translations and whatnot. I also skipped a TON of classes. I'm ashamed of all that, but I'll be repaid in full when I have to bust my ass next year in CHIN 30100. I got a C- in LING 20300. I deserved that grade. To tell the truth, if I hadn't turned in those make-up homeworks, I would have deserved a solid D or lower. But, and I'm proud of this, I turned in 4 out of 5 missing homework assignments at the end of the quarter, and I think I even did them well. That last effort, I feel, was worthy of the boost I got that got me to a C-. I'm about to check what I got for LING 23910 (I got all the homeworks in, some late, but all of them, I led a discussion section, and I got my final paper written pretty damn well, so the grade should be good). Yep, I just checked and I got an A! That's really good news, because in order to write an Honors Thesis for my LING major, I need an overall 3.5 GPA in all my LING courses. So far I've had mediocre grades, but this makes me really happy.

I'm really excited for doing LING 20600 and 20700 Autumn quarter of next year. 20600 (Phonetics) will be taught by my boss from the phonology lab, Alan Yu, and that should make stuff really fun. Also, 20700 (Pragmatics) will be a very new topic in linguistics for me, and will be taught by Chris Kennedy, who is a really nice, considerate guy and an interesting professor to listen to. I'll have to do SOSC, but that's OK.

I still have a lot more to write about, but it'll have to be done in the next entry, because I must go watch a movie with my parents now. It's about Werner Herzog, and it's funny as hell.

I'm sitting in class right now, and I just want to go to bed. I must take a nap before bio today, or else I'll just sleep straight through class. I can't really handle 1h20 classes to well, because I'm usually already tired during them and just want to sleep. I thought that this would make me less sleepy, writing in my journal, but I was wrong. Bye.

It will have nothing to do with her, though.

I has a seat....(I guess that kind of has to do with her). :-D Lolli lolli lolli!

I just finished reading the beginning portion of the LING 20300 assignment for tomorrow, and I'm certain that the portion of the exercise that actually tells me what I am to do will say something like, "Create a linguistic survey and implement it to test the palatalization of stops in Cairene Arabic in YOUR area!" And of course, the homework assignments are back to being due TWO FUCKING DAYS AFTER THEY'RE ASSIGNED. I fucking hate our TA. Maybe it's the professor who is choosing the due dates. In that case, I fucking hate him just a little bit. Becuase he's extremely intelligent and awesome. Our TA...not so much. Dumb ho. Too much hate....sorry.

Anyway, I'm gonna watch The Great Race with Sergey and Ileana now. Bye.

I have a lot of homework. But you all saw that coming, I expect.

The mailing list to which I'll be posting journal entries this summer from France has been created, and is up and running. I'm excited, but that feeling is dampened every time I see that I have no subscribers yet. They will come.

I am really enjoying reading the Language Myths text I have to read for LING 23910. It has some interesting topics, and provides information (along with some statistics) that is good for telling people how wrong they are when they cite one of those ever-popular and oh-so-wrong myths about language. Now I won't have to sit in silence when hear people spewing misconceptions. Not that I don't ever spew some misconceptions myself. :-)

I am saddened to know that the house doesn't have cable at the moment. Maybe the RHs do, but the lounge certainly doesn't, which means that tonight's episode of Mythbusters which I happened to read about this morning must be watched either in TANSTAAFL (in the undesirable presence of Ian) or James and Sylvia's apartment (I don't want to take over their whole den for my own sake...). Or not at all. We shall see. I'll be more than content to just do homework. Doing homework means learning, and learning means knowing more (in most cases), and knowing more means possibly deriving enhanced enjoyment from life.

I've recently taken an interest in Russian and so have learned cyrillic. This is a major step in the right direction, of course, because in this way I can learn some words on my own without needing to have Sergey around to do it (he has homework, too...). Also, the similarities to Polish make it fairly easy for me to pronounce things right on my own without asking for help. I have a bad accent, of course, I can get the gist of things for now and make minor corrections later.

I think I have to explain why I'm not learning the Russian sound system perfectly from the start, since that goes against my die-hard attitude toward learning how to pronounce languages using the IPA (I have almost forced some people to learn the set of IPA symbols for whatever language they are trying to learn, because I feel it is essential to learning how to speak well). My first excuse is that Polish is so similar to Russian that I'm pretty damn close at this point and I can work out very minor problems in the spare moments I have to ask Sergey to help me. Another excuse is that I have realized that sometimes it is easier to learn the pronunciation just by looking at the orthography while hearing a native speaker pronounce what is written. I feel that, combined with the first excuse, this makes for a strong argument in the case of Russian, and I've had a reasonable amount of success so far using this method. Also, I'd like to see what it's like to learn some of a language using this method (reading a dictionary, correcting my pronunciation against Sergey's, reading random things, etc.). This is similar to the way I started learning Chinese, but the difference is that I started learning Chinese with the help of a workbook, textbook, character workbook, and recordings. I learned the sound system (using the Chinese system of learning it, not IPA) by hearing directed instruction from recordings and teachers. I want my acquisition of the Russian sound system to be more naturalistic, to an extent. If I continued, this would soon delve into dizzying depths of bullshit; I've run out of things to say about this.

OK, on to reading some interesting stuff. :-)

It is way too late at night/early in the morning for me to be up, but I decided to stay up all night so that I could get some homework done. So far, that has not really worked out, and I am instead using up my energy for this blog entry. Oh, well.

I watched a funny 10-minute clip from the David Letterman Show. It was an interview with Peter O'Toole, and it was damn funny. Peter O'Toole is indeed one of the wittiest screen personalities I have ever seen, and he manages, as do other funny people of the old school, to create humor without needing to resort to crude language and the like. Mind you he has some crude themes, but they are conveyed in a tasteful manner.

I searched for and watched this clip because I have to analyze the speech of a 75-or-so-year-old for a linguistics assignment for my LING 20300 class. By the way, my stupid-ass TA agreed, after my request, to extend the deadline for our most recent assignment to Monday, and then goes ahead and makes it due at EIGHT FUCKING A.M. ON MONDAY. What. A. Cunt. I seriously question her thinking at times.

Anyway, I think it's time to either continue with my Chinese character drills, or with analyzing Peter O'Toole's speaking. We'll see what I choose, won't we?

New blogs to come tomorrow for your consumption. These are old and from my myspace.com account. I think some of them are slightly humorous, and I hope you do, too.

I will soon post my blogs from myspace and possibly delete my myspace account. We'll see how soon that'll happen. For now, I'm busy gloating about the fact that Ileana no longer knows my password. Yay.

hey eat ma balliez!