Oooo.

[camwyn]

One of the local adult school programs has a beginner's Mandarin course for $95, with a $15 textbook. Wednesday nights, 7 to 9, half an hour's drive away. Let's see. . .

Mondays would be Capstone until 7:40, with a possibility of karate if I could get to the place by 8 PM from Kean. I'll have to do a dry run on that to determine whether the attempt would be worthwhile or not.
Tuesdays are definitely Kean nights, that's been settled already.
Wednesdays with the language class, which would rule out any karate that night 'cos 7 to 9 vs. 8 to 9. . . and let's face it, I'd rather have the language than the extra karate practice.
Thursday would be 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM karate, but I have to register for that on Friday. . .

Yeeeap. Gonna be a busy Friday as I register and go to various banks, but what the hell. I can hack it. And my weeknights will be busy too, but you know what? At least I'll be going out and meeting people and getting stuff done. And my parents won't be on my case about not having a social life, because the grad school stuff is Important To My Future etc., and the other stuff is classes I'm interested in with people who share similar interests. At least, that's how they're likely to view it, and frankly as long as I don't hear any more about how I'm too isolated or whatever crap they come up with next, I'm fine. I wouldn't be taking the classes to get away from them, I'd be doing it because it's stuff I wanna learn. The fact that it gets me the hell away from my family is something of a bonus. (I love the family but one can only take so much.)

Besides, I have this slumbering feeling in the back of my mind that the Chinese stuff I've been obsessing with is going to be useful - real-world useful - sooner than I think. I'm no precog, but I don't like to ignore a feeling like that.

Comments

Don't buy into the myth...

[mtr1966.livejournal.com]

...of China being a potential market of 1.3 billion people. It's total and complete hogwash. If you want more details, let me know. I'll dig up the dirt and lay it out here for you.

Oh, don't worry.

[camwyn]

That idea had never crossed my mind, unless you want to count the times when my brain coughed up Monty Python music just to be annoying. ("There's nine hundred million of them in the world today / We'd better learn to like them, that's what I say", specifically, from the song 'I Like Chinese'.) No, this is a suspicion of usefulness on the order of the time I found myself thinking 'hmmm, I think I should get a puppet so that I'll have something I can use to communicate with distressed kids' and wound up shepherding Kosovar Albanians through Newark Airport to get 'em to their new homes. Guaranteed, my co-worker from Shanghai will have laryngitis or something the day we really need a Mandarin speaker, because the world likes to throw cruel jokes in our direction. We've got Spanish speakers aplenty at this Chapter, and a couple of folks with Eastern European languages, but that's really the extent of it. Plus I go on disaster jobs once a year or so and one never knows what part of the country one might get sent to, or people one might deal with.

[dormouse-in-tea.livejournal.com]

Whoooo!!!!

Go Jess! Hope you enjoy it muchly. ^_^

I have bluegrass banjo lessons starting a week after Labor Day, which I'm greatly looking forward to, but do not expect to be a social venue.

Last term there was one person in the class. :P