This April on Quiet Laughter it's all about Curaçao. More specifically, the vocabulary of Curaçao.
You may or may not know that Curaçao has its own language. Papiamentu. It's not a dialect but a language in its own right, and if you're going to spend any amount of time in Curaçao and expect it to be a happy time, you best get that straight.
But no, my A-to-Z series this year isn't a crash-course on Papiamentu (you can actually find those online). Instead, I've picked some of the most unique, most representative expressions that people use here... Things like dushi (which we've talked about before) or the confusion with the two meanings of sushi. The posts will be short and sweet, mostly, and will come with photographs... You see, like most languages, Papiamentu has a distinctive place-sourced feel to it. At least to me it does. More than teaching you a new word, I'd like to open a window, maybe even--if both you and I get lucky--a door, even for just a moment, to the world where the soul of these words resides.
I'm looking forward to it. I hope you are, too.
Quiet Laughter. Musings and stories on blurred cultural boundaries.
Wednesday, March 25, 2015
Thursday, March 5, 2015
E-communications: A Reality Check
A friend asked me for some help with a project he's working on, a few suggestions for short stories that might be apt for sparking a child's imagination. I'm not an expert--not even remotely--on children's literature, and I told him that, but he wasn't interested in the traditional stories for kids, so I agreed to come up with some ideas. I compiled a list--dove into my favorites, reread a few (some as a refresher, some just for the sheer pleasure they bring), checked to see whether they were available online somewhere, etc.--and emailed it to him.
And waited.
I wasn't sure how helpful I'd be... Whether my suggestions were PG-13 appropriate, whether they were too long or too short, whether they'd serve for the purpose he intended them. So, yes, I was kind of anxious to hear what he thought. After two days, I went to my inbox and did a global search: could I have missed his response? Could it have gone into the Spam folder? Had I sent it to the right address?
Everything checked out fine. And no, there was no reply.
Before pulling out my violin and climbing up to the rooftop to bemoan my friend's ingratitude in hauntingly melancholic tones (no drama queen here; I'm the freakin' empress), in a moment of enlightened maturity I decided to ask. "Hey. Did you get my email?"
What email, came the response.
Turns out the only way this dude checks his inbox is if you tell him you sent him an email. So I resent it, told him I'd resent it, and he confirmed he'd received it. Yay.
But it got me thinking. Email is a central part of my life. Email, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, the blog, social media in general--they're how I stay in touch with the world. Not just with friends and family; my critique group, my publisher, my journalism contacts. Even my dushi Skypes me when he's at the office.
This friend of mine, except for Facebook, uses none of the above.
Perhaps it's my ex-pat status. Or the fact I live in a small island no one's heard of. A large part of the people I speak to every day are too far away for face-to-face contact. But--again, the dushi-with-Skype example above. And it's not just him; most of my island friends are either on Whatsapp or Facebook (or both), and that's what we use to communicate.
So tell me, then. Am I weird? How do you communicate with your world? Do e-communications play a large part in your life? Are they a good thing? Or are we, in Fahrenheit-451-dystopia style, trading real contact for cyber-versions of ourselves?
And waited.
I wasn't sure how helpful I'd be... Whether my suggestions were PG-13 appropriate, whether they were too long or too short, whether they'd serve for the purpose he intended them. So, yes, I was kind of anxious to hear what he thought. After two days, I went to my inbox and did a global search: could I have missed his response? Could it have gone into the Spam folder? Had I sent it to the right address?
Everything checked out fine. And no, there was no reply.
Before pulling out my violin and climbing up to the rooftop to bemoan my friend's ingratitude in hauntingly melancholic tones (no drama queen here; I'm the freakin' empress), in a moment of enlightened maturity I decided to ask. "Hey. Did you get my email?"
What email, came the response.
Turns out the only way this dude checks his inbox is if you tell him you sent him an email. So I resent it, told him I'd resent it, and he confirmed he'd received it. Yay.
But it got me thinking. Email is a central part of my life. Email, Facebook, Whatsapp, Skype, the blog, social media in general--they're how I stay in touch with the world. Not just with friends and family; my critique group, my publisher, my journalism contacts. Even my dushi Skypes me when he's at the office.
This friend of mine, except for Facebook, uses none of the above.
Perhaps it's my ex-pat status. Or the fact I live in a small island no one's heard of. A large part of the people I speak to every day are too far away for face-to-face contact. But--again, the dushi-with-Skype example above. And it's not just him; most of my island friends are either on Whatsapp or Facebook (or both), and that's what we use to communicate.
So tell me, then. Am I weird? How do you communicate with your world? Do e-communications play a large part in your life? Are they a good thing? Or are we, in Fahrenheit-451-dystopia style, trading real contact for cyber-versions of ourselves?
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki -- Haruki Murakami (The B-Quotes Series)
I read this one, my second Murakami, back in January. Outstanding, beautiful book. Murakami is so hard to compare, even to himself... I read Kafka on The Shore last year, and while there's certainly a red thread unique to the author in, presumably, all his works, the beauty of each stands alone and singular.
Enjoy.
Not everything was lost in the flow of time. [...] We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something--with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.
Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy.
"We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect."
p. 334
The beating of her heart kept time with the slap of the little boat against the pier.
It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. There was nothing odd about it at all. [...] He was in exactly the right place.
p. 272-273
Enjoy.
Not everything was lost in the flow of time. [...] We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something--with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.
[...] That if he intensely concentrated his feelings on one fixed point, like a lens focused on paper, bursting it into flames, his heart would suffer a fatal blow. More than anything he hoped for this. But months passed, and contrary to his expectations, his heart didn't stop. The heart apparently doesn't stop that easily.
p. 377
Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy.
"[...] You don't lack anything. Be confident and be bold. That's all you need. Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who's precious to you."
p. 342
"We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect."
p. 334
In reality, though, none of this ever happened. In reality something very different happened. And that fact was more significant now than anything else.
p. 330
The beating of her heart kept time with the slap of the little boat against the pier.
"Important to me, perhaps. But maybe not to her. I came here to find that out."
"It sounds kind of complicated."
"Maybe too complicated for me to explain in English."
Olga laughed. "Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language."
p. 270
It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. There was nothing odd about it at all. [...] He was in exactly the right place.
p. 272-273
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