I haven’t worked on The Ball and the Cross for a week or so, but today I typed in the requisite seven pages (up from six to compensate for the lost time). I’m in the middle of the ninth chapter now. 145 pages left (out of 254).

Speaking of things pushed to the back burner, someday I’ll revise that essay on materialism and post it here. Everything has been put on hold since my mission call arrived, and I still feel like I ought to be spending the majority of my time studying Thai and learning the customs of Thailand (like not touching anyone’s head). I’m going to get a Thai Book of Mormon soon; that should help with the language. Right now I look at a page of Thai and think, “Will I really be able to understand that in a few months?” It seems impossible at the moment. Luckily I have experience behind me to prove to my subconscious that new languages are indeed conquerable. Once I get the pronunciation and script down, I’ll be home free. That seems to be the main hurdle for me when learning a language — once I master the pronunciation, the rest is a piece of cake. (Side note: that’s an interesting idiom, “a piece of cake.” Someday I must look into the history of it. Another one that strikes me as somewhat funny is “doesn’t hold a candle to it.” And while I’m on the subject of language, I wonder why exactly the British put their periods outside the quotation marks while we Americans put ours inside. Is there a real reason for it? Hmm, interesting…)

Last night I watched Anna and the King (the one with Jodie Foster), since it’s one of the few movies on Thailand that I could find. (Though I hear it was actually filmed in Malaysia. Close enough.) It was a surprisingly clean movie in that there was no profanity or bedroom scenes. Some parts can be rather violent (and realistic), though, so it’s certainly not a kid movie. At any rate, I found to my pleasure that I understood some of the Thai (just the “hello” greeting and the polite particles). So now the language feels like it’s beginning to open itself to me.

I’ve got a hankering to play chess. I had to look up “hankering” to make sure it means what I thought it meant. Too bad there wasn’t an etymology for it in my dictionary. I’ll have to look it up in the huge Webster’s Third Unabridged that I got oh so many years ago. But I digress. (The problem is that James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness has started appealing to me a lot, so I now find aesthetic satisfaction in flitting along from topic to topic like a butterfly from flower to flower; it may make sense to me, but it probably feels odd to anyone else reading it.) I’ve never been tremendously good at chess (nor can I use “tremendous” in that way without feeling slightly guilty, since the word actually means “fitted to excite trembling or arouse dread, awe, or terror,” which has absolutely nothing to do with being “tremendously good” at anything). But I’d like to be. And yet I haven’t time for it. Yesterday I made some icons for the BYU-UUG site. I need to find a good Thai dictionary. Mary Haas’ sounds like the best.

That last sentence reminds me of an internal debate I’ve been having lately. Namely, should singular nouns which end with an ‘s’ tack on an extra ‘s’ after a possessive apostrophe or not? It seems to be a matter of taste (both ways are correct; which do I prefer?). I’ve been leaving off the ‘s’ for a while now, but I can’t help but wonder if it’s more ambiguous that way. (For example, hepatitis’ could be read as the possessive singular or as the possessive plural of hepatiti. And yes, I do know that one would never use hepatitis in that way. This is theoretical, right?) Adding the extra ‘s’ makes the form unambiguously singular and I think looks more aesthetic. So Mary Haas’s dictionary sounds like the best. Yes, I like that more. And yes, if you think I’m a wee bit too conscious of language, you’re right.

Wow, it’s only 6:56 in the morning and I’ve already written all of the above. I’m quite taken with The Garden, a CD by Michael McLean and Bryce Neubert. (For those familiar with McLean’s other work, The Garden is utterly unlike anything he’s done before.) It’s orchestral and grand, rather like movie music. (There’s probably a term for it, of which I am unaware at the moment.) I love music like that!

MPlayer rocks. It played almost all of the files I tested without a hitch. (The only ones it didn’t play were Sorenson-encoded Quicktimes, which is quite understandable.) I tried it with the Anna and the King DVD and it worked reasonably well. But it did have a slight synchronization problem (between the video and the audio). I haven’t looked into it yet, but it’s probably resolvable with a command-line switch or something.

Went to stake institute for the first time. (I’m going for the summer since I’m not taking any religion classes at BYU this term.) I really liked it. And I found that I can even get religion credit at BYU for it. I can’t wait till next week…