sayajay.net

I’m currently taking a Thai class, and we’re starting to learned how to write out the alphabet. I’ve just learned how to write the coolest word:

"DO - DO"

Technically speaking, it’s not actually a real Thai word; but if you phonetically pronounce these characters, you’ll say something like “Dodo” (like the extinct bird). Anyone ever see Ice Age? Maybe that’s what make the words so funny. Anyway, one of our homework assignments was to write out Thai sentences given the words and the grammar that we have learned thus far. So, I came up with the following sentence:

Khun mii cay khong phom

"you have my heart"

How sweet, huh? Post Valentine’s day feelings are still about me I guess. Unfortunately, when I showed my “Ajarn” ( Professor), she said that a Thai person would most likely not take the sentence metaphorically, but literally: “You’ve just ripped out the beating organ out of the center of my chest cavity.” Interesting eh? Fascinating sometimes how rhetorical devices don’t seem to translate well between languages. Case in point… Ajarn also told me that there are Thai translations of Shakespeare plays. I wonder how they would translate the rhetoric of Shakespeare into Thai, given this interesting fact I just discovered.

Ever feel torn in so many directions? I’m starting to feel a touch like that. At work, they had a “Student Appreciation Day” once and they handed out fancy award certificates to students. Here was my award:

It was a good laugh at the time, but it’s so astoundingly true sometimes. Well, it’s nice to know my skills are in demand… I guess. I came in during the weekend to finish up some work they left me. On Friday, I was shown the databases inside of the TEAMS program. Man, is it ever a mess!! I’ve never seen a database with so many extraneous fields and useless data. Not very intuitive either. Looks like it’ll be time for a new “cleanup” project… I hope I’m up to it, since I never really liked FileMaker (the program they use).

You know, it would make things so much easier if every department at my workplace used a common DB solution. I mean, I once heard a department was keeping student data with a bunch of “intricately named” MS word documents. What the heck does that mean? Who knows – but I hear that that particular department kept the data in word documents to make mail merges easier. Jeez, talk about lazy. Bleh, I guess this is my (biggest) rant for today, after a day of dealing with yet another messed up DB...

Feelings of solitude still persist. I think that loneliness is an inevitable part of (my) existence. Perhaps that’s why I write: somewhere, somehow, there’s someone who feels exactly the same way I do. I guess that helps assuage the incessant singleness of being… for now, at least.

I’m expecting lots of things to happen this week...