cheek to jowl

1. As I write, my poor neighbour is getting told off by his girlfriend for not going to class. She's not doing a very good job. I kind of want to bring him a pecan pie, partly because I have a spare but also because she's being pretty mean. I don't know him at all, but because of the construction of the apartment we know a surprising amount about him (or his roommate; they're sort of a unit).

• he plays poker.
• he plays guitar, but not as well as the guy who visits occasionally, which seems to leave him dispirited.
• he likes reasonably good music; I have heard the Beatles and Gorillaz from on high, occasionally.
• his mom thinks his fridge is a disgrace.
• he bikes a lot, and apparently cares deeply for the bicycle as he brings it up the stairs to store it at night.
• a previous (October) girlfriend was a crazy stalker. This may be the same girl over again, because the incessant phone ringing has started again, as well as the dial tone when he takes the phone off the hook and leaves it on the floor (yes, our floor/ceiling barrier sucks that much).
• based on above, I'd say he has crappy taste in girlfriends.

I wish there were a way of expressing sympathy without coming off as a creepy stalker, but there's no way I can tune this stuff out constantly, though headphones usually help (the argument has now crashed down the stairs and is taking place six inches in front of my front door, which is less easy to shut out with headphones, or at least earbuds). Ganbatte, Dude Upstairs.

2. Because the weather is seasonably cold, for a change (not that I really approve, but it does mean a more traditional, "it's cold, eh" sort of weather small talk instead of "global warming, eh"), I have learned something very interesting: iPod earbuds become stiff, almost brittle at -20. I'm wondering if the warranty is invalid in Canada or something.

3. Class was, as usual, interesting but challenging. Latin is slowly creaking along; it occurred to me that it's strange for eighteen lines of prose taking three hours to translate to seem reasonable. Or maybe not; this the first sentence of what we've done so far (not my translation, which makes little sense, but a public domain, professional translation):

If there is any natural ability in me, O judges,--and I know how slight that is; or if I have any practice as a speaker,--and in that line I do not deny that I have some experience; or if I have any method in my oratory, drawn from my study of the liberal sciences, and from that careful training to which I admit that at no part of my life have I ever been disinclined; certainly, of all those qualities, this Aulus Licinius is entitled to be among the first to claim the benefit from me as his peculiar right.

Yeah.
Anyway, my honours seminar is coming along. We had to pick a field of interest and a working title, and a few other things, for our mock master's thesis proposal, and my assignment (which had to be copied and distributed to all of my classmates) was surprisingly well-recieved. I'm basically writing about doing an ethnography (a formal description of a tribe, people, or community) of Craftster.org, because it says a lot of interesting things about reciprocity and community and identity and so on. Research into online communities is, I gather, pretty popular at the moment. I probably won't ever write this thesis, as I don't plan to do a sociocultural anth thesis at all, but it's still fun, and good practice for the thesis I will write eventually.

4. Rome marches along; knitting progresses slowly. I really need to recharge my camera batteries to put up pictures of these things, now that I have a blog again. Here's an old picture instead: