![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jan. 20th, 2004
If you didn't want to read that last entry, here's a summary:
We skied, and it was cool. I went with this massive group, like 18 people within a degree of separation or two of my paternal unit, and we stayed at this big casino/hotel ("dripping with samsara", I described it earlier) in Lake Tahoe, and we went skiing. And I sang karaoke, and that was enjoyable too. And now I'm back, and nobody got hurt, so that's a win :)
Also! Also! Yesterday, on the ski lifts, I ended up chatting with this young'un from Texas (visiting his cousin in Tahoe) who has... a singular "y'all". That's just interesting, from a linguistic perspective. Although I gather that this isn't all that uncommon? He addressed me, just singular little Alex, and intoned this sentence: "Where y'all from?" Esther, do you hear this in Houston? That's where he was from... Has anybody else heared or used this construction?
And on the plane trip back, I was sitting next to this woman, with whom I had a really interesting, if massively unproductive, conversation about Almost Everything. It turns out that she's into believing things... she believes in, for example, Accupuncture and the health advice of this woman whom she went out to Lake Tahoe to visit so she could hook her up to this machine that intuits the inner workings of her body using accupuncture points, The Atkins Diet, George W, the literal truth value of the Bible (and high crapfulness value of other world religions), that socialism is pretty much Straight Bad, that Muslims are, as a religion, generally out to whack all the Christians and Jews (and have been, for centuries -- her historical kung fu was not strong, and she was not aware of such events as the Reconquista in Spain or the Crusades, it would seem), TV evangelists, the idea that the Founding Fathers intended a Christian Country (attempts to paint Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as an agnostic and a deist were ignored), that Prayer In Schools would fix most educational-social problems (although attempts to describe just what Prayer In Schools is were hand-wavy and vague), that The Government is about to implant computer chips in everybody's hands... and she had an unsurprising tendency to sidestep or ignore any inconsistencies or information gaps in any of these beliefs...
*sighs* I'm a horrible bigot. She was actually really interesting. People are bizarre, because they're not like me. She seemed happy, at the very least... :-\
We skied, and it was cool. I went with this massive group, like 18 people within a degree of separation or two of my paternal unit, and we stayed at this big casino/hotel ("dripping with samsara", I described it earlier) in Lake Tahoe, and we went skiing. And I sang karaoke, and that was enjoyable too. And now I'm back, and nobody got hurt, so that's a win :)
Also! Also! Yesterday, on the ski lifts, I ended up chatting with this young'un from Texas (visiting his cousin in Tahoe) who has... a singular "y'all". That's just interesting, from a linguistic perspective. Although I gather that this isn't all that uncommon? He addressed me, just singular little Alex, and intoned this sentence: "Where y'all from?" Esther, do you hear this in Houston? That's where he was from... Has anybody else heared or used this construction?
And on the plane trip back, I was sitting next to this woman, with whom I had a really interesting, if massively unproductive, conversation about Almost Everything. It turns out that she's into believing things... she believes in, for example, Accupuncture and the health advice of this woman whom she went out to Lake Tahoe to visit so she could hook her up to this machine that intuits the inner workings of her body using accupuncture points, The Atkins Diet, George W, the literal truth value of the Bible (and high crapfulness value of other world religions), that socialism is pretty much Straight Bad, that Muslims are, as a religion, generally out to whack all the Christians and Jews (and have been, for centuries -- her historical kung fu was not strong, and she was not aware of such events as the Reconquista in Spain or the Crusades, it would seem), TV evangelists, the idea that the Founding Fathers intended a Christian Country (attempts to paint Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson as an agnostic and a deist were ignored), that Prayer In Schools would fix most educational-social problems (although attempts to describe just what Prayer In Schools is were hand-wavy and vague), that The Government is about to implant computer chips in everybody's hands... and she had an unsurprising tendency to sidestep or ignore any inconsistencies or information gaps in any of these beliefs...
*sighs* I'm a horrible bigot. She was actually really interesting. People are bizarre, because they're not like me. She seemed happy, at the very least... :-\
