Okay, who wants a love note written in Greek?

I will even write IC ones if you want.

(An example:

Αγαπημένη μου Καϊότε,

Γυναίκα μου, με τρελαίνεις. Η καρδιά μου είναι δικιά σου, αλλά πού στον κόσμο είσαι; Μου λείπεις. Παρακαλώ, γυρίζεις στο κρεβάτι μου. Τα φαντάσματα μπορούν να πάνε επίσης, αν θέλεις.

Σε σκέφτομαι,

Επιμεθευς

Translated:

Dear Coyote,

Wife, you're driving me crazy. My heart is yours, but where in the world are you? I miss you. Please, return to my bed. The ghosts can come too, if you want.

Thinking of you,

Epimetheus

:D?)

I've been playing lately with the idea of writing a character who speaks English the way I speak Greek -- with a little understanding of structure and some rote dialogues, but not enough vocabulary to carry on a real conversation. I'm certain it's a she, and I'm pretty sure she's from a high fantasy type world, and I'm fairly sure she's a Ranger type. I'm not sure why she's in a country that speaks English Common a language she doesn't really know -- I was poking at it and thought "Well, maybe she's just exploring, you know, left home and is wandering the world," and then realized I was basically describing the people I've met in hostels, three of whom have been young women touring Europe before starting med school. Which, I don't know, might be a viable way to start off a story. But my roomie would wisely tell me to "make it harder," so . . .

I realize that this is proooobably my way of coping with the mild frustration of living in a country where I barely speak enough of the language to go shopping, but I don't think that negates it as an interesting idea.

(Also, really, I just want to try writing the dialogue. I mean, the way I speak Greek is not equivalent to the way furriners speaking English is often portrayed. I don't say "My name Adiva," I use the correct -- and memorized -- "I am called Adiva." But if I wanted to say something complicated -- like, say, the situation my friends were in when they found a dead turtle in the National Gardens and were trying to explain to some kids that it was dead -- I would probably start speaking like a bad Babelfish translation because I just lack the vocabulary. "No life! It doesn't reside! There is not life!" And I think the tension between moments of fluency and moments of being unable to say anything clear would be really interesting to explore.

The Name of the Rose, says Umberto Eco, came about because "I wanted to poison a monk." I want to frustrate a traveler. It's a start, right?)

New blog post: "milao, milate, milai" -- I speak, you speak, he/she speaks. On knowing Greek . . . even a little.

(This post was supposed to be a lot deeper, about being in a foreign country and being the one speaking a foreign language and how cool it is to understand more than one language, and it ended up mainly being about Americans don't know Greek lol. Oh well. Depth can come another time.)

So since my version of Wordpress apparently eschews plugins (seriously, I have no idea what's going), and I am therefore not yet able to cross-post automatically -- have a link!

Alphabeta: In which I sing a silly song.

(I really just want people to watch the YouTube video because it took me most of the afternoon to download and figure out how to use all the appropriate conversion software for a Linux-based OS. BUT. I not only succeeded, I actually did most of the converting and downloading in the terminal. I got to use the sudo command. I UNDERSTAND NOW.)

So let's see -- stuff from Seattle.

1. My sister and I got mistaken for twins at REI the other day. First time that's happened in years.

1a. And then Mom mistook me for her.

1b. And then one of Dad's friends mistook me for her, although to be fair, she hasn't seen either of us in years.

2. We ate at the Continental in the U District, which is a little Greek cafe that my parents have been going to for decades. Dmitri, the owner, taught me a little more Greek -- now I can say "please/you're welcome," "thank you," "hello/hi/goodbye," and "how are you?" Good start, right?

Also the Continental has amazing food. Win. And they gave us complimentary Greek custard, after we had already eaten their baklava.

3. So after getting that 3G USB modem and excitedly surfing the 'Net from the car and the train . . . we realized that we have a 5 gigs/30 days bandwidth limit. And that I had used two gigs by looking up icon material on Photobucket on the train. Ooops. Thus, we are still taking advantage of free wireless when possible.

4. Apparently the new Norbert Leo Butz musical premiering here, Catch Me If You Can, is awesome -- although its opening was delayed by a week because NLB's sister was fatally stabbed. Ouch. They're holding a benefit performance in her memory.

5. Literary consumption!

5a. At somebody's recommendation -- bookelfe's? agonistes's? -- I picked up A Midsummer Tempest, by Poul Anderson, before leaving Anchorage. I finished it last night.

It's . . . a very weird novel. The premise is kind of fun, and I have to admit that I am very impressed that Anderson wrote almost every scrap of dialogue in iambic pentameter. The dialogue alone, in general, made the book worth it. But . . . very weird book. (Jennifer deserves a hell of a lot better than Rupert, I'm sorry. And what the hell was up with Will Fairweather's phonetic accent?)

5b. So then I went from A Midsummer Tempest to another modern version of the past: The Lady's Not For Burning, by Christopher Fry. Anyone who knows about my deep and abiding love for Pamela Dean's Tam Lin should be nodding their heads now; The Lady's Not For Burning plays a small but important role in that book. I'm not quite done, but I'm liking it! It's pretty hilarious. It's kind of a jolt from A Midsummer Tempest, though, because Fry's dialogue doesn't appear to be in iambic pentameter most of the time, and is not quite such a good pastiche of classical dialogue. Which is not a bad thing! It's just very different.