Suboptimist
I’m not quite a pessimist. I’m more of a suboptimist.

We’re not kidding when we say that Facebook has turned into I-just-found-out-my-friend-is-married-book. Those of us who have grown up in Utah experience the shock more often, I would assume, as Utah is the land of the young happy couples. Not that I am necessarily against it, but it is always really weird to see an old female friend’s profile, but not recognize the last name. Oh, and this isn’t just a Mormon thing. Maybe the high Mormon population influences it, but young marriage here runs across the religious divide. Maybe it unites us.

Anyway, anyone who knows me is probably aware that I have been fixin’ to purchase a motorcycle in the near future. I’ve always wanted one, and upon turning 21 in June, there really isn’t anything anybody can do to stop me from doing it. A motorcycle may be just what I need to firmly establish my new-found boldness. I have found that there are various kinds of motorcycles available to choose from. Here are some possibilities:

· Harley Davidson Sportster. Don’t get me wrong, this is a nifty-looking piece of machinery, and despite my new-found boldness, this bike doesn’t fit my personality at all. I can’t see myself cruising down the boulevard in leather fringe, a mustache and a leather du-rag while listening to Steve Miller. Moving on…

· Kawasaki Ninja. Again, it’s a nice piece of equipment, but the crotch-rocket thing fits me worse than the chopper does. While I’ve met some mean sons-of-bitches who ride choppers, most I’ve met have been likeable, kind human beings. I have never met a guy who rides a bullet-bike that hasn’t been a prick. I also hate the way people ride them. You know, the body armor on the torso, but wearing shorts and a backwards baseball cap. Man, I hate that.

· Honda Gold Wing. I can see how riding a bike that has everything you need (CD player, cup-holder, luggage rack) can be attractive, but I’m not a retiree with a trophy wife. Next.

· 1978 BMW R100. This is the bike for me, assuming you strip off all that added crap like the windshield. Actually, what I want is the R90, which has the power to take me on the highway and looks to lure countless women to ride in the sidecar I intend to purchase with it. I’ll probably put a dog in the sidecar too. The R90 is a classic bike with a classic look, though one question remains…could I handle 900cc-1000cc? I don’t know.

I swear the office is 50-degrees today.

So, now that Emily has been accepted to vet school, Dan got the position of editor of his school’s newspaper, and Noah is engaged, the rest of the active membership of The Central Node needs to get cracking at achieving something awesome.

I saw 300 this weekend. The film was enjoyable enough. The photography was brilliant, and the battle scenes were other-worldly. However, I found myself partly laughing and partly crying at the backward depictions of the Spartans and the Persians. The Spartans were anything but enlightened lovers of freedom, and the Persians were not barbaric hordes. The Persians under Cyrus the Great, after all, made the first declaration of human rights in the world’s history (see the Charter of Cyrus). Nevertheless, I had fun watching it.

This evening I watched Steven Spielberg’s Munich. The movie, which was rather controversial in the US, spends little time talking about the Munich massacres of 1972, and more time discussing Operation Wrath of God and its aftermath. David Edelstein summed up the film perfectly:

The Israeli government and many conservative and pro-Israeli commentators have lambasted the film for naiveté, for implying that governments should never retaliate. But an expression of uncertainty and disgust is not the same as one of outright denunciation. What Munich does say — and what I find irrefutable — is that this shortsighted tit-for-tat can produce a kind of insanity, both individual and collective.

At the end of the film, I felt conflicted. Part of me felt more embittered, given my own anti-Zionist tendencies, while the other was compelled to empathize with Israel. The ability to make a viewer feel so conflicted a trait of an excellent filmmaker. I’ll leave you with my favorite line from the film, which happened after the teams first successful assassination:

“That old Pesach story. The angels are rejoicing because the Egyptians have just drowned in the Red Sea… and God said to the angels, ‘Why are you rejoicing? I just killed a multitude of my children.’…”

Yeah, it’s been a while, but it’s also been a crazy while. In fact, it’s been so long that I had forgotten that I had changed the layout to a WP theme. If there is anything you would like to see as per the layout of the blog, let me know.  In fact, I may take some time over the upcoming break to re-engineer something of my own again.

For a while now, I have owned a copy of Clive Holes’ Modern Arabic: Structures, Functions and Varieties, but have never read it very thoroughly. For some reason, my Arabic sociolinguistics teacher had us buy it, since Holes in known in the realm of Arabic sociolinguistics, but she never had us read from it. It’s a shame, because the book is a wealth of information. It clarified a discussion I had with one of my clients (I decided to call the people I tutor clients) about the importance of case ending in Classical, specifically Qur’anic Arabic. Frankly, I couldn’t give her a clear answer, but Hole’s explanation makes the most sense. To understand it, it’s important to know that the Qur’an isn’t so much of a ‘read’ text, but a recited text (Qur’an, itself, means recitation). In fact, it wasn’t compiled into a codex until long after Muhammad’s death, and was generally only recited from memory. I quote an excerpt.

Recitation is a species of oral performance, and, like any other type, Muhammad’s would have been marked by the use of sentence stress, intonation, and possibly para-linguistic gestures in order to make his meaning clear. In other words, Koranic ‘i`ra:b [case markings] may well have been an appropriate stylistic feature, but was by no means an indispensable syntactic one, required for the unambiguous communication of meaning.

I find Holes’s explanation important from more than a pedagogical point of view. It has also been of concern to linguists whether ‘i`ra:b was spoken at the time the Qur’an was recorded. Perhaps, as Holes claims, it wasn’t the case. In fact, I haven’t seen evidence that it was so. Some claim that the occurrence of tanwi:n [indefinite case markings] in modern Bedouin dialects is evidence of the common use of ‘i`ra:b in common speech in early Arabic. However, Holes argues, the occurrence of such markings only occurs in formulaic utterances like poems, proverbs, etc. On the other hand, as far as I am aware, even in formulaic utterances tanwi:n occurs only in Bedouin dialects, not urban dialects. Perhaps that is meaningful. I will stew over that for a while.

In other Arabic news, I was going to post part of a translation of some stories from 1001 Nights and talk about some of the sentences I found interesting, as well as discuss the cultural importance of the text, which I think those of you with an anthropological streak may enjoy. I really don’t think the translation is very polished yet, so maybe I will post that next time.

Traditionally, I post a list of my top-ten albums of the preceding year. This year, I have decided not to do so. The reason for my decision is two-fold: it has become harder to find good music and I don’t really have time to look for it anyway. As such, I haven’t listened to much of anything worth mentioning. Nor, for that matter, have I seen many good movies, played many good games, or read many good books recently. Looking back at this, I was lead to think about my hobbies and hobbies in general.

I divide my hobbies into two categories, level one and level two, and they are divided by what the priority they fall into when I am not pursuing my regular vocations, i.e school, and other primary interests and pursuits. Note, I don’t include ‘interests’ in these categories. That would be for another discussion.

Level 1

· Reading.

· Music.

· Games.

· Writing.

Level 2

· Philately.

So level two is small, but I like collecting stamps, but I don’t do it whenever I have free time. You will also notice missing from the list is exercising. While it may be a hobby, I didn’t include this. Once upon a time, I would just run every day. That became too difficult, so now I just exercise because it feels normal. It’s just part of the daily routine, I guess.

I recall having something more to say about this, like something profound, but I can’t remember. Sorry about trailing off into nothingness. I am also amazed at how quickly I changed the subject.

I have a lot of things I could write about, but I feel I have lost my ability to do so. I am in a rut, as it were. I don’t know, I don’t feel like doing much of anything lately.

I do have a few things to mention. In continuation of my recent work in the field of sensitivity, I have come to find myself pondering my relationship with the students I tutor in Classical Arabic. This goes beyond the question of whether they are a students or clients, venturing into how I should go about treating them if they are, indeed, my students.

Most of my students, coming from Arabic 2, don’t have a very good teacher to begin with, making my job nearly impossible. I can’t be a supplemental instructor, nor do I want to be. Ideally, students would come to me for an hour or two to work through questions they still have about things they have already learned. The reality is that I find myself attempting to teach what the real teacher doesn’t. I am not a trained teacher, so I can’t do this very well.

This relates to my recent thoughts on sensitivity thus: is putting my fist through the wall and storming out in anger to show my disapproval of my most boneheaded client/students a sensitive method of teaching?

Oh, notice the layout change. Yes, it’s a WP theme. I intend to experiment with new themes to see how you like them, and when we settle on one, I will modify it, assuming the license allows me to. The header image is mine, but the rest is canned.  I also want to put my Node links first, but I can’t do that.  The categories want to go in alphabetical order.