Slainte Mhath

So this was the first year I ever went to Mosaic, and it was an experience and a half. There were 19 different cultural pavilions to visit, but there was no way to visit them all in just three short days. Chris and I managed to go see 12 though, and they were all awesome in their own way. We bought our passports, and originally there were only a few places I wanted to check out, but having that passport (which also doubled as a buspass to each pavilion) stamped at each location was kind of addictive, I just wanted to see everything there was. I admit that after the end of each day, though, I was pretty tired from all of the travelling around!

• the Carribean pavilion was our eighth stop, and had the hugest line that we waited in, and was also the most disappointing stop for me. It was very overcrowded and I thought it had more good hype than it was worth. The steel drums were pretty sweet though.


• The Chinese pavilion was our seventh stop, and was one of my favourites. It had a beautiful bonzai tree garden (I had no idea there were so many different types) and I got my name written in Chinese (they took the sounds of my name and reinterpreted them into their writing system. It turns out I'm 'flower-root' which is pretty sweet). They also had a Chinese Yo-yo demonstration, which was pretty amazing. I almost tried it out, but then I got all weirded out because we had to be on stage and then there were only little kids trying so then I was all like "Yeah, NO!"
  
  
  

• Ethiopia was our ninth stop, it was really close to the Caribbean pavilion and in my opinion much better. They had belly-dancers performing and we ate some tasty sambosas.

• the German pavilion was stop number ten, and was the only stop where we saw any rain (and even then it was only for about a minute). We stepped inside and I instantly had a flashback memory of Disneyland in California, where my family stopped at a German-themed restaurant (odd, I know). It was all big wooden tables and traditional clothing, and was quite lovely. Chris ordered a bratwurst but I was still happily sated from the sambosa.

• the Irish pavilion was our very first (official, but actually second) stop, and I must say that it was very hard to top it. They had a traditional celtic-folk band on stage, and we also saw some irish dancing. There were lots of interesting kiosks for food and displays (including a money display, which was totally super awesome).


• Laos was the third place we visited, and my favourite part of that was the display of common phrases (Laotion-->English) and I got to see Chris' inner linguist. We spent a little bit of time analyzing the words and phrases and making hypotheses, which is more fun that I'm willing to admit here! haha

• The Greek pavilion was stop number four, and it was interesting. Chris bought some chamomile flowers for tea and some olive oil soap, and I was tempted by a pretty perfume bottle but ended up saying nay


• our fifth stop was the Kyiv Ukrainian pavilion, where Chris got his precious shishliki. There were lots of cool things to see, including a sheep carved out of butter

• the Indian pavilion was where we bought our passports, and admittedly we didn't actually go fully inside. There wasn't enough time before the bus was supposed to arrive and we decided there were other places we'd rather go.


• the Filipinas pavilion was our sixth stop, and inside they were doing some traditional dancing onstage. We browsed the jewelry and watched some dancing but ultimately didn't stay very long .
  

• the Scottish pavilion was our eleventh stop, and it was pretty sweet. The front was all decked out like a castle, and there was bagpipe music everywhere (a weakness of mine). I ended up buying a pewter flask with a beautiful knot design (below). The only trouble was at the entrance, where we had to check Chris' backpack. No other pavilion had this policy and it was unfortunate that we had to leave it at the front because it had lots of Chris' important stuff inside it.


• our twelfth and final stop was at Chile, and it was one of my favourites because they had awesome enchiladas. I'm a sucker for food.

There were seven pavilions we didn't have enough time to get to:

1. Aboriginal Peoples


2. Miorita Romanian


3. Italian


4. Balaton Hungarian


5. Poltava Ukrainian


6. Latin American


7. Austrian Edelweiss

My one regret all weekend was the bus, or rather, how much I complained about the bus. It was loud, crowded, and always late, but really I could've just manned up about it :) live and learn.

I'll go crawling back to the city I love, because it's already taken everything

I'm so excited! I have three official destination plans for this summer already, where the last few summers I've just stayed in the city for work/school.


Next weekend: Regina Beach (S.K.) with my boyfriend/a few friends

Late May: Toronto (ON) with my sister for a wedding

Late July: Quadra Island (B.C.) for a family reunion


It's so sweet, now put the train in gear.

IF I SPOKEN TO MY PARENTS HOW KIDS TALK NOW DAYS I`D BEEN KNOCKED OUT

Believe it or not, this is an actual group on Facebook. Please tell me I don't have to tell you everything that's wrong with that group name :) I really try hard to not to be judgemental, but this stuff blows me away sometimes. When I took Linguistics 100, I was told that linguists are only supposed to "describe" language, not "prescribe" it, but with that comes some huge problems, the biggest one being how lexically ambiguous English can be.

Honestly, a few years ago I was a huge stickler for spelling and grammar (grammar is what attracted me to linguistics in the first place), but I'm pleased to say that I've mellowed regarding that subject. However, when a database like this Facebook group falls into my lap, I can't help but analyse it.

I took some excerpts from comments people left on the group's wall, indicating how the English language can be completely misinterpreted if it's used incorrectly or without enough context (I haven't edited or omitted anything). English is so ambiguous sometimes that you have to be super specific, or else some random person (in this case, me :D ) will take what you're saying the wrong way.

• "I was married with my 5 children. The F word was never spoke in our house untill my 3 oldest children started going out and running around. I can't stand that word and all of my children and grand-children know it. The people in the world today has no respect for their self." You were married to your five children?
• "My parents would duck tape me and put me in the closet if I WAS BAD. Nowadays thats child abuse." You have tape made out of ducks? Plus, I'm pretty sure that was child abuse back then too.
• "It's kinda like the difference between 1st and 2nd degree murder? I don't much like either, but I will grant you that there is a whole heck of a lot of people who deserve it." Okay there isn't much to misinterpret in this one, but I am kind of afraid for my life.
• "TALK BACK TO MY DAD? loooool i'd rather jump off a bridge because he is RIPPED and he would pound the hell out of my ass :p" Umm...
• "I got the belt across my butts if I talkd bak,." You personally have multiple butts?
• "GET A BEET DOWN!" Are you swallowing beets?
• "What's worse is when you got it at school for fighting on the playground and then the school contacted your parents and you got grounded and licks when you got home" Your parents licked you as punishment?

On a side note, what horrifying traumas must have happened to a person (actually, almost two million Facebook users) to have them relate so fervently to such a blatant pro-child-abuse forum?

Trying is the first step to failure

I'm not actually feeling emo, it has just been a long week :)

I've been rewriting my paper, and I have done the majority of it (I think) but I think I'm getting too tired for this because I just wrote a list of stuff I still need to do, and it included absolute gems such as:

• redo table of contents = duh


• fill in abstract = duh


• add footnote re: data = duh


• amend conclusion = duh


• learn how to make footnotes = FAIL AT LIFE :(

I so can't wait for this to be done. I enjoy the challenge but I'm not impressed with my performance at this. I feel like all I'm doing is complaining and I need to snap the heck out of it. I feel like I'm a liar when I tell people I'm getting my honours, this is so not ideal.

Sorry, I guess I am a little emo.

HAPPY PICTURE!

what UP?

I love lamp

Here are two more of Chris' lovely sayings:

Causifying: "We tend to Englishify things"
Adjectiving a verb: "He walkingly went there" - This is my personal favourite so far

What's that? *gasp* Just the wind!

Thinking about it, I'm afraid a quite a few things. I never really thought of myself as fearless, and I never thought I was a scaredy-cat either, but my list keeps growing :) methinks it's time to conquer some or all of these:

• Spiders
• The dark (I wasn't always afraid of the dark, this one is relatively new. And it's only sometimes.)
• Developing Alzheimer's Disease
• Heights
• Possibly not amounting to anything important in the world
• Birds (Just pet birds, and I'm not sure why, they just freak me out.)
• Becoming blind someday (I'm not afraid of going deaf though, I'm pretty sure I could handle that without too much trouble.)
• Dying (Okay, I can't really conquer this one.)
• If Mirror Megan started moving around independently of Real Megan
• SPIDERS!

Sorry about all of the lists lately, I'm going to have to get more creative.

My Five Biggest Pet Peeves of Written English Language Use

In no particular order:

1. Using "your" instead of "you're"
2. Misuse of there/they're/their
3. Using apostrophe S ('s) on plurals (e.g. taco's should be tacos, DVD's should be DVDs, 1950's should be 1950s)
4. Writing "should of" instead of "should have" (it's based on hearing "should've" and then misinterpreting the phonemes for the words)
5. Writing a comma where there should not be a comma (e.g. "Writing a comma, where there should not be a comma.")

Bonus pet peeve: When people give you a list of there item's, and then they list bonus item's when they could of just extended the list. Seriously, your not stupid, so why list a bonus, when you don't need to.

LOUD NOISES

My boyfriend makes the most interesting linguistic choices. I think I will start chronicling them as they come along before I forget them. I'm really quite lucky, the stuff he says is often delightful:

Verbing: "She likes to lawnmow"
Backforming: "So it's not badminton, it's goodminton!"
Pluralizing non-count nouns: "We can use lots of different rices."

Wow when I started this post there were at least five things I wanted to write down, but I've forgotten some clearly. Fear not, I will be back.

Honey Honey, how they thrill me!

I love musicals, they are just so wonderful and fun and addictive. I really enjoy live musicals, but musicals-turned-movies are amazing too. I dare you not to like at least one movie in this list of my favourites (in no particular order):

• Mamma Mia
• RENT
• Jesus Christ Superstar
• Grease
• Almost every animated/computer animated Disney movie (waaay too many to list, plus if I listed them would you finish reading the list? I think not. Suffice to say (again) that Disney is awesome)
• Annie
• Hamlet 2
• The Prince of Egypt (with an amazing multi-lingual song if you search the special features)
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas
• Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
• Hairspray
• The Wedding Singer (this movie would never beat up your landlord)
• Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!

At the beginning of 2010, my workplace initiated this wonderful idea, Fitness at Work. This initiative has several different components, like "fitness breaks" where we use our two fifteen-minute breaks each day to be active (e.g. taking a 1.5 km indoor walk, strength-training sessions, stair climbing, etc) and monthly challenges. I love taking part in the fitness breaks, they break up my day beautifully and I honestly can't imagine going to work now without taking the time each day to destress like this. I was also really enjoying February's challenge, stair climbing, until people started lying about their totals.

The way the challenge worked was this: each day you would count how many flights of stairs you climbed (twelve stairs=one flight) and at the end of the week you would send your daily totals to the person in charge, who in turn would send out an email to the floor the next day stating who had the highest total for that week. There was a 50/50 raffle held at the beginning of the month, where half the money went to the ticket holder selected and the other half would go to the person who had climbed the most flights at the end of February.

In week one I climbed 590ish flights, and the email sent out stated that the highest number of flights climbed was 630ish. I thought "Fine, that just means I have to work a little harder."

In week two I had climbed 1160ish flights, but the person in first had climbed 1300ish. And I thought "Fine, that just means I have to work a little harder."

In week three I had climbed 1900ish flights, but the person in first had climbed 2300ish. And I thought "Wow, I have no chance in winning this." and I resigned myself to losing. This in itself was fine, because in the end, even if I had won the money, I would have gained something even more important than that (not to go all campy and everything ha).

At the end of week four I had climbed 2700ish flights. Here's the part that makes me mad though: the person with the highest number of flights climbed had a total of 4200ish flights. What the, where did that come from?! As IF you doubled your stair count in the last week! Honestly, I really feel like the person who won the money was lying. If it took this person three weeks to climb 2300 flights, do you really expect me to believe that he climbed 1900+ flights in one week? Please.

Let me tell you, I averaged almost 99 flights of stairs a day (with lowest day 10, highest day 201), and that was extremely difficult to fit into my schedule. It's not like my life is super busy or particularely complicated, but I'm at work from 8:15-after 5:00 most days, and to incorporate that many stairs into my day is a real challenge. A large portion of my stair climbing total came from the fitness breaks, where the regular participants (myself included) had decided to include more stair climbing in support of the challenge. This person who won with 4200 flights has never, to this date, come on a fitness break, or come on one of the lunchtime stair-climb/walks, and I'm expected to just take it at face value that he found the time to average 150 flights per day? Not happening. Even if he went to the gym either before or after work every day I would find it a little hard to believe. Actually that's not completely true, I would have found this to be a completely believable total if not for the discrepancy between the first three weeks and the last. In the last week he would have had to have climbed 271+ flights per day, which is an absolutely amazing amount of stairs to be climbing, given a full work day.

What really gets me is that he would have won anyway without that tremendous lie.

But let's say that he isn't lying, and that he really did do just a tremendous amount of stairs in a small amount of time. I can accept that maybe I'm being a bit of a sore loser. I really do believe that his total was stretched, but I also believe that what I gained from this challenge far outways the fact that I didn't win the pot of money.
1. my calves got beefy and sexy.
2. my cardio has increased slightly.
3. it takes me longer to work up a sweat.
4. I now have the stamina to sprint up at least 12 flights of stairs without feeling completely killed, which is a farcry from the 6 flights I could manage at the beginning of the month before I would have to stop to dry-heave for 30 seconds.
5. I learned that I still have the ability to push myself for the better, which was something that, until now, I really thought I had lost.

In conclusion, yes I am still kind of mad, but I think the change in myself as a result of this challenge is stronger than that. I'm amazed that it took a silly competition for me to step up and take better control of my physical well-being, but I think that that's the case for a lot of people. That makes me feel like I'm more connected to the world around me, but at the same time it makes me want to rise above these conditions that I feel tied to. Does that make sense?