Back to School in Beijing

So for the last few months I’ve been trying to keep a blog about all the stuff that was going on in my life while also keeping a written diary—I like the feel of hand written stuff. But what has ended up happening is that I haven’t been keeping up with my blog and as a result people have no idea what is going on with my life. So I think from now on I will try to write first in my blog and anything else that I feel more for personal viewing I will write in my diary; I think my diary will be a little sad, but I guess as with all things in life sacrifices must be made.

Today was the first day of classes after returning to school from a week long vacation. I started out the day getting all my errands out of the way. I managed to get a trip to the bank, grocery shopping (bottled water), laundry and getting my beloved palm fixed after I fried it because I forgot to get a 220v to 110 charger; the guy that I gave my palm to get fixed also happened to be the same guy that replaced the screen on the phone I borrowed from my sister—apparently he can fix almost anything electronic, I’ll wait and see when my palm pilot back.

Chinese class was a long two hours; the class itself is very interesting, but very challenging—it is even harder to remain focused if the time is lengthened by an hour. We are currently learning about how ancient Chinese scholars systematized the set of Hanzi or Chinese Characters. It is really fascinating how it is constructed: there are the characters called 象形 xiang xing, which are basically characters that are pictographs; the most interesting ones are the xiang sheng, which are the characters that are made up of one part meaning and one part sound that in turn dictates the pronunciation. The latter group makes up more than 90% of the characters in the set. With such an intelligent and systematized structure built into the characters, it is a wonder why Chinese teachers don’t take advantage of it more as a replacement for rote memorization. I saw somewhere that students in China study some 3000 hours for Chinese writing by the time they graduate middle school. Unless you can devote 3000 hours to studying Chinese there seems to be little reason to learning Chinese the way Chinese students learn it; but hey, if you have 3000 spare hours, I’d say go for it.

When I said that I had only one class today, I lied, I actually had two today but I forgot the other one; guess I am getting older faster than I thought. The other class I had today was my linguistics class. Cognitive Science is really a fascinating field of study; thinking about how we think! So today we talked about Prototype effects which serve as the limiting constraints to any future theory of categories. Okay this is going to be quite nerdy, so if you want feel free to skip this paragraph. Basically, from what I gather, scholars in cognitive science were debating whether or not Aristotle and all those other fun Greek philosophers were right in thinking that categories are objectively meaning that they exist apart from the world we live in; an example of this would be Plato’s theory of forms: objects have ideal forms whose essence exists outside the real and tangible world. To make a long story short, we were presented with this systemization of categories that leads one to believe that the objectivist theory may not hold true. The interesting example that was used was for the word bachelor; while there is a concrete definition for bachelor, if you start thinking about examples of what might constitute a bachelor you start to realize that certain things would be considered more true to the essence of the meaning for bachelor than others. When asked: “ Is the pope a bachelor?” I had to sit and think for a bit. In the end I decided that I would consider him a bachelor, but would not hold him to be the quintessential bachelor. The example showed that the category bachelor entailed cultural cues and understanding that determined a stereotype which affected how we judged whether or not something fit a particular category. Dr. Patent, our teacher, then made this interesting claim about how all languages are inherently cultural and that to truly master a language, that is, to be able to use words and understand their nuances, like bachelor, one would really have to come to a mastery understanding of the culture. I agree. Fascinating stuff.

In the evening we were taken to watch a Kung Fu show which turned out to be more of a Kung Fu dance—with the occasional loud grunt followed by someone bashing their head into a piece of iron to show that their body had been tempered like iron. The show was pretty bad but it made for some funny conversations on the bus ride back home.

On the ride home I started thinking about what I was going to do about my post grad plans. Actually I think about that whenever I give my brain a chance to rest from all the stuff that I force it to do in the span of a day. Right now I am in a strange place in that I am really excited about graduating and finally being able start doing stuff, but at the same time I have no concrete idea of what I want to do. I know what I don’t want to do and that is go to grad school or work a typical nine to five job; yea I am a bit eccentric and very picky about my life, but hey I only got one right? I’m half hoping something will conveniently pop up that sounds interesting; but since I’m a big believer in making your own opportunities, I am just waiting to get motivated enough to take the plunge and start looking into some cool opportunities for after graduation. Life is hard; it is especially hard, in my opinion, if you don’t give yourself time to think about what is going on in your life and what decisions you might want to make. I feel as if too many people in the world just go with the flow and end up doing the same thing their whole life because they never take the time to think about what they would like to do. I don’t want to be that kind of person, so I’m going to try to find time to do that. Wish me luck!