Wolf's blog

QotD: Speak To Me In...

How many languages can you speak?  Which languages can you read or understand?

I speak and write American and Canadian English quite well, and I'm learning to do well in British English. Yes, they're all quite different.

I studied Spanish in school, but was never able to figure out why I couldn't communicate with the locals in my hometown in California. One summer at Rosicrucian University (a very, very long story) I happened to meet a Professor from South America, and when I heard him speak to his wife in Spanish I was astonished to realize I understood him perfectly. Apparently I'd been taught Continental Spanish, which is spoken in Spain and South America, while the locals spoke Mexican Spanish, a substantially different dialect.

A former roommate of mine spoke German fairly fluently, and he taught me to "get by" in German with a copy of the Pimsleur German course on tape, and constant conversation. I can still read a bit, and sometimes follow parts of stories on Deutsche Wella TV.

After having success with the Pimsleur German course, I decided to try the Pimsleur Japanese and French courses. That is, I decided to buy the courses. Using them, well...and now I feel guilty, since as I'm still housebound and nearly bedridden, I might as well be listening to them now.

My Japanese skills are moderate. I can read a bit, enough to make out signs and menus. I can catch bits of speech, if the participants have good enunciation and aren't speaking too quickly (which is to say, I can sometimes catch parts of news broadcasts, but not most conversation). I've carried on correspondence with pen pals in Japan, with a good Japanese/English dictionary by my side. The other day I surprised myself by writing a comment in Japanese on an artists' bulletin board system.

As for French, it's somewhere between my German and Japanese. I read French comics ("bandes dessinées"), and I hope to someday be able to carry on a real conversation in French, if only to improve my immigration score in Canada.

 

By the way, this is me.

I believe I've violated some sort of Blog Protocol by not making my first post here an introduction. In fact, to my great shame, my first post here wasn't even original -- it's a copy of the same post I made to my LiveJournal. I wasn't up to writing two entries that day.

In the spirit of reconciliation, then, I offer this entry as my introduction.

My name is Wolf Lochland Logan, and I live outside of Seattle, Washington in the US. I was born and raised on the central coast of California. My parents were Native American and Scottish, thus my first and second names. My username here (and most places) is Umuhk, which is the word for "wolf" in the language of my father's tribe.

I work for a high-tech research company in England on Artificial Intelligence systems. I'm partnered with a wonderful man named Keith, who works as a software engineer at Microsoft. We have two cats, Bear and Tiger, who seem to dislike being photographed. If we can manage to sneak some shots of them I'll post them here.

For greater insight (such as it is) into my thought processes (such as they are), I'll direct you to my aforementioned LiveJournal. I've been writing there infrequently, but certainly for a longer period of time than here.

Um, ouch.

I'm lying in bed at an odd angle, with my head propped up against the wall. I have a gash down the right side of the back of my neck, held together at the moment with an elaborate network of adhesives and polymers. My hair's been shaved partway up the back of my head, and what's still there is caked with blood and Betadine. Some of the hair on my face has been shaved as well.

I have a series of painful scabs circling my head from where the crown-o-thorns (ok, the cervical stabilisation halo) was temporarily fastened to my skull. There's a shaved patch on the back of my right leg, above the knee, where they apparently laid in a femoral IV line. I also have two sores, one on my upper lip, and one on my lower, where they were abraded by the ventilation tube down my throat.

Every motion of my head, and most motions of my shoulders, remind me that I really shouldn't be moving my head and shoulders that much just yet. I can stand and walk, with great care, as long as my head is perfectly balanced over my spine. The thick muscles in the back of my neck that usually stabilise my head are in shreds at the moment, so while I can lean back and hold my head up, I can't lean forward without a) losing the alignment of my head and neck and b) screaming in intense pain. I rely on my dexterous toes to pick things up from the floor (no, really, it's very handy to be able to grasp things with my toes).

Perhaps most inconveniently, my intestines have basically gone on holiday, what with the anesthesia and the massive amount of morphine I've consumed over the last couple days. It's quite a chore to wake them up again.

Don't have surgery, if you can avoid it. Sure, it's done aseptically these days, and much less invasively than before, but it still comes down to cutting you open and poking around inside with knives. This particular surgery was elective, so technically I could have said "no", but given that doing so would have been to live with slowly deteriorating use of my right hand, it wasn't much of a choice.

On the upside, if I can be so bold as to imagine one, the bone spur in my spine which was pinching the nerves in my right arm and hand is gone (for now). My grip strength in my right hand is back on par with my left, except for some minor muscular atrophy. And if I can get through the next few days with the help of a little Percocet, I'll be able to get around pretty well soon enough.

Right now I'm looking forward to being able to sit in a chair, roll over in my sleep without applying for a permit in triplicate first, and put on a shirt without assistance. All things in time.