7.11.2007

Seven Random Things About Jay

Awhile back Pengovsky tagged us for a meme. Allow me to elaborate:

1. I like 80's New Wave. If you knew me, you would find that hilarious.

2. I'm a comic book geek. Seriously, I've been reading them since I was six years old. I haven't been able to purchase funny books for five and a half months, and now I face another eleven months of withdrawal symptoms.

3. I'm trying to learn French and I suck at learning French.

4. I was a punk. Mohawk, leather jacket with spikes and studs, bad hygiene - I was a walking cliche.

5. I'm bad with money.

6. I eat condiments straight from the jar. It's awesome.

7. I still get scared when I get a writing gig.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thumbs up for No. 6 :D

Jay said...

The best thing: take a giant spoonful of peanut butter and toss some chocolate chips on it.

Chase it with a glass of milk.

Unknown said...

You can't ever go wrong with 80's music...It was the best!! ;)

I feel you pain w/ the French learning. That was 6 painful years of my life...and over the last decade I've managed to block out everything I learned. :D

Speaking of languages...Jay & Lisa I don't know if you guys remember back in April I think, we were talking about Slovene and language books for learning Slovene.
Anyways somebody mentioned the U of LJ bookstore, and I went on it and tried to order a book online...entered all my info and was thinking soon it would ask me for payment details but it never happened so I thought well they will see the USA address and not send it surely. Fast forward to today and sure enough I have a package from the University bookstore...although it took 2 months to arrive in the mail.

Now I just have to figure out what form of payment they accept. I'm amazed though they would send it without receiving payment first. They are obviously much more trusting than any University bookstore in the USA would ever be!

That's not a shock, anybody who has ever had dealings with a US University Bookstore knows they're a bunch of bloodsuckers! Especially when you buy $100 books and when you sell them back to the bookstore they are in pristine condition but all they give you is $5. Yet they will sell it used again for like $70.

Jay said...

Michael: that's great you found a textbook!

And I'm surprised too! They just sent it to you? Strange. Was there even mention of payment?

Our bookstore in my Canadian university have a reputation for being over-priced, unreliable and terribly slow in ordering books for classes. They do give a decent return when you sell your books back, but that doesn't balance the inherent problems.

Luckily, UoL sells cheap books or the prof just gets students to photocopy chapters of readings. My home university can learn something from Ljubljana.

Unknown said...

Yeah, they just sent it to me but it did have a bill with it calculated in dollars. Of course the bill doesn't state which type of payment they prefer/or accept. The package also contained a UofL addressed envelope, so I'm assuming I mail it back w/ this... unfortunately if I remember correctly in Slovenia they address mail anywhere on the front of the envelope and write the return address on the back side. Unfortunately the envelope they sent has their address in the top left corner, where US postal service require the return address, so I won't be able to use that.

Also they included their IBAN number on the bill which confuses me somewhat. Since that seems to imply a bank wire, yet then what's the envelope for and if I did wire the money how would they know I was the one wiring the money for that order. At any rate I wrote an email to the UofL bookstore to figure out what is the easiest/preferred way to send them payment.

US universities are also way overpriced, and slow in ordering books for classes too, unfortunately we don't get a decent return rate for selling your books back. Luckily there are online stores that you can use now to sell books...unfortunately by the time I was aware of them I had completed University already.

Unknown said...

Hmm, The more I look at the textbook I realize it's pretty much all Slovene except for the 3 word instructions for each exercise (which are in english, german, italian). lol Not sure what the point of that was since nothing else is translated and the exercises are pretty self-explanatory. :) Oh well I'll just have to translate with my dictionary...although I think most of it I can figure out from my rudimentary knowledge of Slovene thus far. At least it came w/ a CD so I can learn to pronounce words better. And I know it's at least written by native speakers unlike my other books.

I'm kind of curious though why they don't make language books for Slovene like other languages where you have the translations included...I'm guessing since the number of non-native people trying to learn the language is so small they just write one book for all languages to be used in a class environment.

Jay said...

I think you're right. The number of Slovene speakers and the number of non-Slovenians learning or speaking the language is small. Which makes it special, I think.