Sunday, September 28, 2008

A rose by any other name would still be drenched

It's 11:00 am Sunday, and the rain continues to fall outside. I'm crossing my fingers that we get a typhoon day off on Monday for super typhoon Jangmi (Korean for 'rose').

I'm going back to bed. Yeah, it's 11:00am, blah blah. Late last night I discovered MySpace's cool new music play list thingy, resulting in my staying up until 4:30 this morning.

I'm up now only because someone phoned me and woke me. Don't know who it was; I was half-asleep when I answered the phone. The guy sounded businesslike, but he was speaking Chinese and I wasn't comprehending. I kept hearing the word 工作 ('work') and in my disorientd fog I thought it might be someone from my job. I asked 不好意思,你是誰? ("Excuse me, who is this?"), at which he continued to ramble, sounding a bit like a telemarketer. I finally got it through my sleepy skull that this guy didn't realize that I wasn't comprehending him, so I told him 我是美國人.聽不懂 ("I'm an American. I don't understand.") I guess my mistake was saying it in Chinese, because he continued (his sales pitch?). I finally said, in English, "I'm sorry, I don't understand." He finally paused, said a couple of more sentences (no, not "Sorry for disturbing you" or acknowledging that he might have the wrong number), and then hung up. I still don't know what happened there.

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