I'd like to share with you a song called "The Spiritually Immature Mansion," by Caribou. I listened to this track quite a lot on my drive back from Arizona. It repeats gracefully. It's a great example of what can be achieved when you don't go overboard on the drums. It would be too easy to go all-out and wreck the subtlety of this break, but Dan Snaith (aka Caribou) exercises the proper restraint. Enjoy.
It's been over a month since I've written here. Where have I been? What have I been up to? Well, I'm in Tempe, AZ working opening a new location. It's been fraught with setbacks and peril, loud alarms, smoke-filled floors, and elevators without power. Coordinating vendors and making sure deliveries get through; the old rack'n'stack; server configuration and client training. It's been fun and exhausting and thankfully this phase of the build-out is almost complete and I can head back to San Francisco for some much-needed R&R.
Yeah, right. It's even more hectic there. But that's for another blog post. This blog post is about my Japanese study (べんきょう). Due to my hectic schedule, I've been out of town for the first few classes of the new semester. This was certainly disheartening, at least until recently. In the slow moments at work, when I'm blocked or on a terribly boring/useless conference call, I've been stealing moments to play FFXI. A little history...
My character is named Baudelaire, and he's an old Elvaan. His main job is as a Samurai. I've taken the Samurai job to the highest level and gotten some of the best gear in the game for him. Then I moved on to Thief and did the same, though my Thief gear isn't nearly as good as my Samurai gear. Now I'm working on leveling Ninja.
Ninja is a tank job. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of a "tank job," their main purpose is to keep the focus of the enemy on them while the rest of the group of people you're with kills them. There are two main tank jobs in FFXI, the Ninja and the Paladin. The Paladin tanks by taking whatever damage the enemy can dish out and using magic to heal himself. The Ninja tanks by avoiding attacks by the enemy and using ninja tools to cast enfeebling spells.
Tank jobs are necessary for a group of people to get things done (like gaining experience points, or taking down higher-level monsters). This means my Ninja is never without a party invitation. Well, recently I was invited to party by some Japanese gamers whose characters are Tarutaru. They liked my tanking and broken Japanese so much that they gave me a nickname: じっじ which is a shortened form of one of my vocab words - りょうじん which effectively turns "old man" into "grandpa." It's just too adorable to be called "Jiiji" by a bunch of tiny Taru's.
So for the past few nights while I've worked late into the night trying to get my outsource partners to do their jobs, I've been hanging out with these Japanese Taru's and practicing my Japanese while they practice their English. Just last night they described my Japanese skills as すごい, which I had to look up in my handy-dandy Japanese-English dictionary (じしょ):
sugoi すごい ghastly, gruesome, awful, weird, wonderful, amazing
I love that this word exists and I'm glad that it describes my broken language skills.
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