Apathy

Well, the State of the Union address was almost a week ago now, and I pretty much don't care anymore, so I'm not going to summarize my thoughts about it. If you are interested, you can read it here, at the White House website.

In other news... well there isn't really any other news. I've just been grinding away at school. I think this is the first semester where I've ever actually found my International Affairs classes to be interesting. Sure, I still feel like an idiot in them, but at least I'm an interested idiot.

I'm surprised that my favorite linguistics class this semester is the Sound Structures one. We are learning about all the different sounds that the human vocal tract is capable of uttering, and how to express those sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet. We also have to do transcription labs on the computer where we hear recordings of something and have to transcribe them in IPA. It's interesting how much our spoken language differs from our written language sometimes and how the written form affects our perception of the spoken. Even in the transcription labs, I'll hear a sound in a word and think that I am hearing a "p" for example because that's how the word is spelled, but if I listen really carefully and look at the spectogram and stuff, it is actually more like a "b." Pretty interesting stuff. Now I find myself walking around listening to how I'm articulating my own words or how other people are articulating their words and sometimes walking down the sidewalk talking to myself repeating a word to try to figure out how it is articulated. Yeah, I'm pretty wierd like that.

I think my study of words class might get interesting once we start to actually get into word components, but so far we have just been talking about things like the history of English, how dictionaries are made, how to use dictionaries, and stuff.