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January 6, 1999

Third time's a charm

No photograph of me today. This entry is dedicated to my wonderful friend, Rebekah. Beautiful isn't she? Christine and I went to Penn Station yesterday to go see her before she had to catch a train to Albany. She is going back up to Dr. Busino to get her tongue split. I believe this is her third time trying to get her tongue split. "Third time's a charm!" Christine and I decided to go see her primarily to see each other again (it's been a while since I've seen Ms. Davis) and to wish Rebekah a good sending off. Plus, we both weren't sure that we could see her when she will be back down in NYC: tomorrow. At 4:30pm. Eeps. In any case, we went over to see her and I snapped some pics of her with the new camera. I think they are great pictures. She looks very happy, healthy, and positive. She told me that if I come tomorrow, she'd let me to her first interview about her split tongue and that I can send it off to Shannon Larratt. That is so tempting. I will see if I can. It all depends on whether or not I can find a mini tape recorder and I don't have too much work. However, I doubt that. Yesterday, Robert told me that I would be working with him the next three days on an application for JPMorgan. The project would require me to fix the interface design and layout to match what was approved by the client. It's terrible. I've got to track down every <FONT> tag and change it. I discovered that the application's primary platform is Netscape Navigation 4.0. No IE. I have no idea why they didn't use style sheets. With CSS, the change they have requested me to do would take 15 minutes. Now, it's going to take me about 3 days. Amazing, huh? Well, Christine and I hung around Penn Station with Rebekah, wishing her the best of luck and hope that everything will be kosher with her. After we waved Rebekah goodbye, we walked up 9th avenue to this tiny African restaurant that I went to previously. I got take out from there a few weeks ago and it was heavenly, so I decided that since we were in the vicinity, this was the ideal place to eat some dinner and chat. As we sat and ate our excellent dinner (For an appetizer, Christine picked out a great black-eyed bean spicy balls served in deliciouly spicy tomato salsa. I had exquisite lamb chops with perfect mustard-onions and a deliciously tart vinagrette salad. I drank guava juice that was the best that I've had in a long time here in the US. Dessert was a bizarre yogurt drink. I love food.), we talked about her trip down to Nashville to see her new interest. They sound really good for each other, very compatible... but he's now living in Texas, working for Obscurities and being heavily involved with TSD. Long distance relationships are terrible. It's kind of nice that he's involved with TSD, so that he will travel around and Christine can see him more frequently. Keith gave him a "seal of approval" and did a cutting on him. Perhaps I can meet him someday, he sounds really nice. On journals-l, we are discussing "heightened conciousness". This is what I posted about an experience I had. I'm not sure if you would call it "heightened conciousness" but it was definitely a case of "heightened senses". Well, perceived heightened senses. The only experience I can note where I experienced anything that can be called "heightened conciousness" was when I took NoDoze or one of those "stay awake" over-the-counter medicines. What a bad idea. I've got an unnaturally fast heartbeat and past history of high blood pressure (B-A-D for a 23 year old like myself.. no wonder I didn't believe I would hit 30 when I was in high school) and it was awful what I experienced when I took it. I had chest pains and I was hyperventilating. I thought I could hear every sound in the building. People breathing two floors above me. I tried lying down... but then I started staring at the cracks on the ceiling and I felt that I could see the tiniest details of those cracks. When I closed my eyes, I thought I could see the cells in the back of my eyelids. It was a wholly unpleasant experience. I got a great email message today. From a Kristina Buhrman. She gives me a great explanation of the Japanese words that make up my nickname... "Ai" does mean "love" in Japanese. As a prefix (and with different kanji, that is, those Chinese looking character thingies) it can be "joint" or "together", and with still a different kanji, it's "indigo" (but that kanji isn't used much at all, not since the 1947 reform, at any rate, and I wouldn't stake anything on its frequency of use before that, and I know nothing about its use in conversational Japanese. Reading's more my stronger point...) "Koi" means both "carp" and "love", and that's an over-used pun if I ever saw one. It can also mean (with differing kanji, of course) "thick or strong" and some other things (that I forget). "Suki" is the word "like" (pronounced almost like "ski"), and "suki da" is a phrase I hear a lot on Japanese television shows aimed at girls (along with "daisuki da", etc). It can also mean love, in the romantic sense, in the same way (almost exactly) as the English use of "like" to mean "love" (and here, I remember middle school...). A student more experienced in the ways of Japanese language than I insists that "ai" is a somewhat torrid sort of love (brought up because someone wrote that character on the door of a girl living down the hall), but no one else seems to agree with it. The verb form is "ai suru". As a name, the closest things in Japanese that I can find in the dictionary (which doesn't bother to classify girls' and boys' names, how inconvenient...) are Iiko, which means... "old meal" and is either a given or a family name, I can't be sure; and Ikko, which has four possible ways to write it here, as "one lake", "one tiger", "one jar" or... another way of writing "one jar". "ikko" also can mean, in a sort of literary idiom, "the first beat of the war drum" (written the same way as "one drum", but pronounced differently, I believe). Huh. That was actually pretty interesting, to me at any rate. I'll just cc myself... Anyway, probably *way* more information that you needed, but hey, that's my job. Well, no it's not; it's more my major, even though I'm not even specializing in Japanese linguistics... even though I hope to some day. Maybe. There's a chance. That was cool.

© Copyright 1999, Eileene Coscolluela
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