Snippets

• My friend taught me how to French braid recently, and I can do it on myself now! Very pleased about that. :) Learning how to do something new always makes my day, and I love the look of French braids.

• On Tuesday I obeyed the hair-cutting urge that surfaces periodically and cut me some bangs. The first cut of the scissors was very frightening, as were the results, but miraculously I sorted it out, and I quite like how they look now.

• Gaelic Storm (a truly awesome Irish band who played the music in the third-class party scene in Titanic) is playing in Chicago the night I return from spring break. I probably won't go, but I would so love to...

• My way cool senior buddy who resurrected and now heads the North Korean Human Rights Club is going to be in the Bay Area over spring break, so we're going to rendezvous in the city and I'll get to show her around my magnificent hometown! Yay!

• A sampling of the songs I have recently been infatuated with /am currently infatuated with (I get on kicks where I just want to listen to the same songs over and over for a couple weeks):
"Redemption Song" - Bob Marley
"Fidelity" - Regina Spektor
"From the Inside Out" and "All I Need Is You" - Hillsong
"Upward Over the Mountain" and "Resurrection Fern" - Iron & Wine

• I started copying some Celtic knotwork, and it's positively addicting. Now to try making some of my own...

• The next forty-eight hours look to be rather horrendous. French test, German papers, seventeenth-century German novel (aayyyiii...) to read, ushering for a concert, and North Korean film showing are the worst of it. I've just returned from securing a supply of espresso for myself.

"That would be the French."

For those of you who are unfamiliar with French numbers, I thought I would enlighten you as to their odd nature, at least, the odd nature of the upper two-digit numbers. (And no, I haven't just now learned my numbers, nearly halfway through the semester.) Some literal translations:

70. Soixante-dix. Sixty-ten.
75. Soixante-quinze. Sixty-fifteen.
80. Quatre-vingt. Four-twenty.
90. Quatre-vingt-dix. Four-twenty-ten.
97. Quatre-vingt-dix-sept. Four-twenty-seventeen. (Though seventeen, dix-sept, is literally ten-seven, so I guess you could say ninety-seven in French is four-twenty-ten-seven.)

Amusing, no? The funny part to me is that it's just some of their numbers that get the weird end of the stick. To say "four-twenty" for eighty is perfectly logical, but I just don't understand why they couldn't give eighty its own word -- huitante, or something like that -- when they were willing enough to do so for ten through sixty.

The Korean numbers are rather like that -- par exemple, eighty-eight is eight ten eight. But then there's the small nightmare of the Sino-Korean numbers versus the Korean numbers. Yes, they have two different words for every number, and you have to memorize which uses require which numbers. E.g., Korean numbers are good for age in years and when counting persons, but to say what grade in school you're in, it's the Sino-Korean number you want.

Now that you are gone in this way

When you were gone in such a way that only dreams could do what memories ought to, summer wind filled my sleep. I dreamed wide blue thrown-open skies, toes pushing off of cool tree bark, and dripping faces under those gracious madly loving heavens. And your laughter. You would wake up laughing and I liked it better than any I’d ever heard, because it seemed to come from a miraculously unconscious, essential joy. Your laughter blossomed across my skin in patterns of vines and flowers that I still wear, though their stain has deepened in color to a more solemn joy.

Sometimes I see you striding, jaunty, up-weighted, towards yesterday and the edges of where I can be. You tipped your face up to the sky like it was all you would ever need, and your hair falling back from your star-laughing brow is what I watch wade deeper into elsewhere. When I wake, my tapestry hands hold the thought of your swinging arms.

"C'mooon geese..."

"This is what February looks like. Salt stains and mud next to snow and dirty snow and puddles and nasty grass..." Also goose poo. There are a boatload of Canadian geese who've been hanging around campus all winter. I don't know if that's actually weird, but it seems confused to me. I know Chicago is warmer than some places, but aren't they supposed to go somewhere actually warm for the winter?

I'd really like to reread Madame Bovary. Oh, and I'm fairly sure I've given up on WRC. Whatever.

DPRK

That is, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea. I'm a member of the newly re-formed North Korean Human Rights Club on campus, and I borrowed a book about its prison camps recently from another member. It's based on interviews conducted with North Korean refugees who escaped from the camps, and details in some 260 pages the horrific practices which the former prisoners testified to having witnessed or experienced there. The pages have titles like "A Child Brutally Beaten for a Minor Offense" and "Prisoners Eating Salamanders, Frogs and Anything Else To Stay Alive." I was struck by these sentences in the introduction, as they confirm a notion I'd been forming for several months:

"...[W]e are convinced that the most abominable and horrifying crimes against humanity, worse than those of Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags, or anything else, have been perpetuated in North Korea for decades. Although the twentieth century has witnessed terrible bloodshed from ethnic cleansing and genocide, political oppression, and religious hostilities, none has surpassed, we believe, the crimes of North Korea in terms of length, systematic practice, terror, and secrecy. We are convinced that the worst crimes in the world today are being committed daily in North Korea. "

We're preparing a short presentation for an event next weekend, and I and several others are writing a brief...well, not speech, but you know, thing that you say aloud in front of a crowd, to summarize the state of affairs in North Korea and the most important background information. I'll post it when we finish it.