I'm so happy today

There are too many highlights.

I went to painting class in a bad mood. Last week, I didn't understand, there were too many people, I was afraid of getting paint all over myself, it was just generally awkward. I thought, if this week doesn't go well, maybe I'll quit. It should be noted that Smiths aren't quitters.

But then it turned out that a bunch of people agreed with me, and our class was about half its size. All the more special attention!

And I listened, and I understood. Though I had to keep myself from rolling my eyes when our laoshi was giving us vocabulary words (not at him, at myself, and the inevitability of my immediately forgetting every new word he'd teach us), I got the general idea.

When it came time to paint, I didn't feel totally lost. I asked him for advice, I told him the style I liked, it was great. We were painting the tree part to cherry blossoms. I like it when the paint got... grainy. I don't know the word for it in English. Well, that's a first. The word in Chinese is "man," if I remember right. On my fourth sheet of paper, he came over and said, "you're a very serious student!" "I'm so nervous!" "You shouldn't be nervous, you're a hard studier! (this grammar doesn't really translate well) "Not really, just wasteful." (referring to me going through four sheets). Wow, that translation didn't work out very gracefully.

Anyway, that was great. When we first painted last week, that was the first time I had since whenever I last did in Elementary school. When we went to the bathroom to wash out our brushes I was immediately taken back to the little bathroom in Ms. Reid's (me and my brother's art teacher in Elementary school) room. That woman was a trip. When she wasn't on another pregnancy leave, she was screaming at us that we were giving her a headache. She had thick glasses and somewhat of a mullet. She told my mom that she named one of her boys after Patrick. I'm not sure why she left an impression on me, and more curious than that is I have no memory whatsoever of her ever making any art herself.

On the way back from painting I was so happy that the weather was still good and that the sun hadn't set yet that I was struck with the urge to sing, but have yet to learn any Chinese songs aside from 'hao pengyou,' so I stuck to whistling. Usually when I whistle I kind of let the whistle decide where it's going, but today it was Suzuki time. I whistled to myself, and was surprised that the old man who watches the gate started whistling too, as did a teacher who was walking behind me. What a wonderfully Asian afternoon. If you haven't thrown up yet, I'm so glad.

This week my listen and write quiz grades haven't been very good, which is odd, since I've studied more than usual. At 9:00 I finally finished everything up and FINALLY opened my real journal and started writing. I realized while I was putting my thoughts down that that journal is the first private journal that I've attempted to keep since the one I began in first grade. I'm excited to see where that goes. I think I'll put it in my pocket tomorrow so I can follow the format of "write the things I don't want to forget, but would immediately, were it not for this journal in my pocket" journal writing.

Tan Qing and I got to talking about whatever - it started with Burt's Bees, then it turned to fruits, then on to my love for Florida, and then universities. It was a totally normal, engaging, and fun conversation.

You know what's interesting? In China, the universities with the best reputations are public schools. The implication is that if your parents have to pay for you to go to school, you did something wrong.

Huh. You know, that's something I can get behind. What is the fundamental difference in our system where we assume that if something's provided by the government, it probably isn't that great - it's the generic brand, you know? The second I typed that sentence the answer came to me, and it's a word that begins with a C.

Anyway, I think that's too neat.

Other things that I'm trying not to forget...

Ah, here we go. So, one of the things that I love most about Chinese is it seems more like an art form to me than a language. First, there are the tones, and then, there's the written language. Though it isn't iconic, it certainly is moreso than English. For instance, the character for peaceful is 安 - which depicts a woman under a roof. Yeah, maybe that's sexist, or something, but I'll be damned if it isn't interesting.

I think one of the big lessons in painting today was that traditional Chinese painting is really made up of the same styles as Chinese calligraphy. To write Chinese characters there are only a few types of strokes, that in turn make up radicals, which then are combined together to make the characters themselves. Strokes don't carry meaning, but radicals do. Paintings use both strokes and radicals. While our laoshi was drawing the branches, he let some overlap with eachother. "Do you see the 'nu'?" (nu is 女, which is the word for woman). He kept pointing out the women all over his painting, and that was too cool to me. It reminds me a lot of violin, where Eve would say, "get your 'twinkle' fingers ready for this part," referring to the very first finger pattern we'd learned. Though the icon of the character for woman didn't carry meaning in the painting, it was there, and so for the artist perhaps there was some memory associated with it, or some other part of his/her reality tied to it. When I use twinkle fingers I'm connected to every other time I've used it.

Something else worth noting about Chinese language is that today in mainland China, they use what are called "simplified" characters, as opposed to traditional. Though some of the simplified characters are actually older than the traditional, this change happened during the 70s, with a campagin for literacy. But here's what complicates this - because you get the meaning of a character from the positioning of the radicals, if you simplify the radicals, you in turn lose some meaning. It'd be like if we wrote English in IPA, everyone would be able to pronounce it more easily (this is debatable with speakers of nonstandard dialects), but in turn we'd lose the fossils of where our language came from. What's more is that Chinese poetry has a really cool property, the name of which I've never known, but it's similar to rhyme. Basically, though perhaps the sound of characters isn't the same at the end of a line, you can have characters that share radicals, so they're all the same hue, if my metaphor makes any sense. But with simplified characters, some of that is lost.

I don't think it's a huge deal, going back to simplified characters. Japan uses traditional characters and let me tell you, it isn't necessarily that peaceful of a hobby, writing 800-stroke characters over and over and over again. I'm making excuses.

I think I'm going to Sichuan for Spring Break.