Grad School, Year 2

So starts another year of school at University of Illinois. Here are my classes this semester:

Computational Linguistics
Pragmatics
Elementary Japanese 1

Now, I don't know about you, but this is exactly what I want in a grad school semester. The first is a programming class with a linguistics bent(morphology learning is this semester's topic). The second is a philosophical/theoretical linguistics course. The third is a language course. And guess what, they all count toward my major! Amazing. Really. This is what I came to grad school for :-)

Rachel will be heading to Cincinnati on Sept 1st. She is very excited about where she'll be living and starting at a new school, but she is very sad about leaving all of her friends in Maryland.

I'm enjoying living with JT and Chris, my new roommates and good friends from the past year at U of I. We have pretty similar interests, so it's very cool to live with them.

There is a new guy who joined Navs this year(a freshman) who has a blackbelt in Ryu-Kyu Kempo, which is a style I'm interested in studying. It's what the founder of Shotokan studied before he created Shotokan, supposedly. Ryu-Kyu Kempo has a big emphasis on using ki(chi) to win battles and natural range of motion techniques. We will have our first session together tomorrow.

World Renown For Romance

My favorite album, which has yet been out of print as long as I've known about it, has just been re-released by the indie label it was originally released under :-)

It's called World Renown For Romance by Denison Marrs.

Needless to say, I've bought the album already. You should too. I'll be friends with you. All your worries will disappear. Really. ^_^

An interesting happening at my undergrad school UMD recently. It's safe to say this would never happen at U of Illinois :-P UMD is right outside of Washington, DC, in one of the highest crime counties(Prince George's Count) in the country(especially in terms of car thefts, more than the entire state of Virginia, supposedly).