Magpies in my yard
2025-09-28
Lately there's been magpies hanging around in my yard. They don't mind me despite my human-ness.
I feed them mixed nuts and sultanas when I hear them outside. Often I'll hear them chirping and whining and squealing! I think, what on earth?!
It turns out that it's a mother and a child, and as I discovered today, one fat bully who deliberately attacks the child! I hate him. Well, not really, and I even still try to feed him, but I hate him for being like that.
Please leave my beloved family alone.
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What's a mouse in another language?
2025-08-31
Being a linguistics major is just dandy, but I'm stuck at a crossroads of sorts when it comes to the mandatory language learning: I want to study Mandarin Chinese for personal reasons and I want to study Japanese for music reasons. For a long time I've been in this stasis where I've avoided even drilling characters with either language in mind.
I'm allowed to study both as long as I keep my spirits up, but I feel like I can't do any preparation until I know my situation, so I'm still in stasis. I want to hurry and study hard. I can't study hard when I feel so anxious about studying. It's a horrible cycle. I'm really not getting good experience with either language right now.
Japanese is hard when it's not the same three words used in my sparse online communications. I barely know a Chinese sentence aside from what I picked up before I dropped out of high school. I don't speak either language.
This is all fluff which has led to a stranger thought in my restless mind: what kind of name do I go by in a language that doesn't use the Latin alphabet?
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