general malaise

That's the only thing wrong with me. General malaise. Unfortunately, there's nothing I can do about it, except keep going forward. That usually (always) helps. It gets better.

I had an absolutely fascinating morning at work today, and if you think I'm being serious about that, it's only because sarcasm does not become me. I sorted through file folder after file folder filled with papers that had been paper-clipped and stapled and why-on-earth-would-anyone-do-this-taped together. Which I then had to sort out properly to make them 'archive appropriate'. Worse, the papers today weren't even interesting. To quote Tom Lehrer, they were 'full of words and meaning, and signifying nothing.' Mostly boring emails. Who prints out emails and then files them? That's what computers are for! They store things, things like emails. Sigh.

At least I didn't work in the freezing cold today. The office was empty, so I got to work in there with the warm sunlight coming through the window in front of me and the door to freeze-world shut securely behind me.

After my first class today, I had a library adventure with my friend Geoff, who needed to find books on diglossia for a linguistics paper. Actually, we didn't find any books on diglossia in the end, but we did find some on pidgins and creoles. Due to a mis-transcription of a call number, which may or may not have been my fault, we completely missed the first book we were looking for by just a few shelves, but we found it eventually. (We also took a moment to fangirl/fanboy over a really cool pidgin called Tok Pisin from Papua New Guinea. It's really cool. Tell your friends.) The other book we were looking for turned out to be on a different floor, a fact which I didn't realize until we had thoroughly explored Floor 2. So what if I can't remember that 'g' comes before 'h'? We found it eventually, didn't we?
[NB: There are currently insane freshman girls shrieking outside and running up and down the hall. If only a man-on-the-floor would appear and scare them all back to their rooms.]
I had my first real test in Arabic today, although my ustezza (professor) called it a quiz. I think I did pretty well, even if I couldn't remember how to spell 'seven' correctly. Yup, just checked google translate. Definitely got that one wrong. Arabic class actually kind of freaks me out sometimes. I don't know if it's just the fact that it's not my first 'second' language, or it's that I've taken a bunch of linguistics classes since I started learning Japanese, but Arabic seems to be coming to me a lot easier. It seems more like a puzzle that I can sort of figure out on my own without too much help. I kind of want to do a huge morphological analysis of everything I've learned so far, but I don't think I'll waste time I don't really have to waste on something like that. I'll waste it on Skype and Facebook and NaNoWriMo instead.
New song for you: Shut Your Eyes by Snow Patrol. They don't seem to have an official video for the song, so this is a fan-made one. I haven't actually watched it all the way through, so that's a disclaimer for you right there: