why am i not sleeping?

i'm feeling a little bit like a zombie at the moment. the last few nights i've been sleeping more irregularly than usual, if that makes sense, to where i wake up in the morning and feel as though i've just had a nap and i'm picking up where i left off. the weather has been muggy and gloomy since sunday morning.

before all that though, i had a very good weekend. i met amanda and i-shuan to go to the national palace museum saturday night, which i just happened to know would be free after 5pm. the museum is huge, requiring more than a single trip to really have a chance to see what's there. i spent a long time looking at bronze and jade on the third floor with two highlights being the jadeite cabbage and a jadeite piece of pork. most striking about the cabbage is that the single piece of jade fades from a deep green to white with the green being used as the tips of the cabbage leaves. it hadn't occurred to me how impressive this is until i actually saw it. the jadeite pork was impressive in that you could see a shiny layer of fat on top of the rest of the meat. i just wonder at the skill and sensitivity it takes to do things like that.

sunday was a gloomy day, but i had arranged a full schedule for myself. i met my japanese classmate, who we call 章三 (zhangsan) in class, to study for our test on monday. instead, we had some real life chinese usage. first we went to find lunch in an alley near my apartment. we found a noodle house and ordered a wanton soup i think. although his chinese sounds a lot better than mine, he told me he's basically pointing at food and asking how much it costs. for my part, i spoke to the shop owner and asked her in chinese if she could speak english. no luck.

after lunch, we had some language exchange in the basement of the library at ntu. he taught me a tiny bit of japanese and listed the hiragana chart for me as well as helped me with my chinese tones. the tones are the area where i need to most work in. having a deep voice and being more comfortable speaking flatly and softly presents me with some difficulty in pronouncing the high first tone (i feel as though my voice will break), and pronouncing the low third tone (i feel as though i'm growling). especially difficult is when there are consecutive third tones. fortunately, i seem to be able to make the right sounds...

in return, we had some english pronunciation practice, which reminded me of the days when i had speech classes in elementary school for not being able to correctly pronounce "s"s. my teacher would have to explain to me verbally how the tongue should move when pronouncing one thing or another. i found myself doing the same thing when trying to explain "th" which is found neither in japanese or chinese.

i ran late on my meeting with him because i was supposed to check out the school clubs that day too. i left the library at 3pm and found that a third of the tables setup were already empty. i did walk past the ntu jazz club which still had a drumset out with a guy sort of playing on it. i walked up to the table and did my best to look interested. i met one of the leaders of the club and he gave me some flyers. as i was about to walk away, he asked me if i played any instruments. i told him i play drums, so maybe i'll get a chance to play some while i'm here. i found out that the meeting for new members is 9/23 but i neglected to find out what building (the flyer is in chinese) or if there would be a fee. i think i was able to match the writing to a building on my map of ntu, but i'll ask a student tomorrow just to be sure.

my classmates had more success with finding clubs as they were out when the people were still setup. i found out there's a tai qi club, a kung fu club, a glbt (maybe just glb) club, a chinese music club, a hiking club, roller hockey club, juggling club... on and on and on.

monday i had my test and i got it back today. i did pretty well, missing only one thing for grammar and having a little deduction on the speech part for some tone mistakes. i had further success monday night in ordering food. i had gone for a swim and was really hungry. i went to the same alley i was in on sunday and walked around some more until i walked past a shop that smelled delicious. i went in and tried to read the menu but didn't recognize anything. after the shop owner found out i couldn't speak chinese, he pointed at the first item and gave me a thumbs up. i gave him the thumbs up back and ordered whatever it was that he pointed at. it turned out to be bbq pork with cabbage and bitter melon. a decent meal that tasted as good as it smelled from outside.

today i've been sort of brain dead from all the lack of sleep. i took a series of long naps this afternoon, both in the library and back at home. in between i managed to start and finish "the true story of ah q" and read a few selections of sherlock holmes. "ah q" is a book i picked up on friday with english on the left pages and chinese on the right pages. to my great joy, i could read a little bit of the chinese and even recognized some choice curse words.

i've also picked up a chinese dictionary which i've been having some fun with trying to look up words i don't know how to say. it's fairly easy to find things when you know how to pronounce them, but when you don't, you have to figure out what the radical of the character is, and then you have to figure out how many strokes are in the character. with any luck, you can find it in the index and then find it in the main definition section.

well once again, i'm awake way past when i should have been in bed. oh, one more note. i picked up some postcards from the national palace museum gift shop. it's a set of 24 where each card depicts a section of a famous scroll painting. i imagined sending them out and all of the recipients having some meeting to assemble all the cards to see what the scroll looks like and then comparing what i wrote to each of them to see if i had said exactly the same thing. i have the habit of buying postcards in gift shops and never sending them out, but i intend to break that habit this time around.