Well, had my first night of sign language class tonight. It was fun, albeit challenging. Like when I started taking French here way back when, the teacher never spoke during the class, just pantomimed a lot. I felt like I'd somehow signed up to take Beginning Mime. (Actually, beginning French had a lot of mime too. Hmmmm...) We debated during the break whether or not he could actually hear, but since his bio in the catalog said he first learned ASL here, I assume he can.

You definitely got where he was going with things most of the time, albeit I got confused once as to whether or not he was talking about riding a motorcycle or mowing the lawn. He was pretty funny, too. Got into discussing hobbies (boy, it was interesting trying to pantomime jewelry making) and did the traditional finger spelling. One girl in the class had a name that was ahem, unusual- for the sake of Google, I shall not mention it, but it was related to moss- and the teacher asked where that came from. It was amusing to watch her act out, "My parents were hippies." She indicated long hair, then flapped her arms like wings, and spelled out parents. Heh.

I'm not sure if this is a good way to learn or not. On the one hand, the non-speaking certainly helped you to get into the kind of mindset of the thing. It was quite odd to realize how totally VERBAL I am about everything and how I almost always have some kind of running commentary going through my head. Tonight it was like, "Oh, heh, that's funny, hm, heh, okay, I guess he's hungry, flipping through the pages of a book, fingers, oh, I guess he's cooking." I noticed how I kinda "translated" the nonverbal into things he was actually "saying". Hm.

As usual, I was rather stage-frighty about trying to do what rudimentary ASL I knew in public. Some things I picked up, others I was kinda fuzzy on. I was trying to follow along with people's finger spelling and probably got 60-70% of it okay. I am worried about picking up what people are saying fast enough. People also make the signs in different ways, so that's a bit confusing.

I'm not sure how the class is going to work with regards to stuff like learning vocabulary or whatever. I kinda got a few words tonight, but it wasn't all that formal. I guess that's why there's seven more weeks to figure that out.

I love my new weblog. Posting links about Brad Pitt's waxen gropeable ass and Japanese poop is fun!

I love chicagowench. Should I ever end up spawning, I want to act like her doing it ;)

And now for the bad news portion of the entry, which I have been dreading mentioning, but it must be done: Dave got canned yesterday. It was pretty much a big surprise, but the three month review was up and they canned people for not being big enough pushers. I find it funny that from what I hear, most people do not "make goal" on a daily basis there (not since the war started anyway), and yet the people who don't make goal all the time but are in the top sales get canned anyway. Then again, after hearing last week that apparently NO ONE got their well-plugged benefits and scholarships unless they volunteered to work six days a week from the start (they said it was a 40 hour requirement, and everyone is scheduled for 36 hours), I was getting the bad vibes about the joint. I asked Dave how many got this stuff at the company, and I think the answer was maybe three, tops.

Naturally, he's pissed, I'm pissed, and it's rather feeling like he's under a curse of late. He was job hunting already, but still. It sure seems like any time we're making plans, they get blown to bits and something ALWAYS comes up. Grr. Argh. And it's like, "oh, joy, back to me paying for everything again for months on end while his applications get ignored." I was enjoying him being employed, even if I wasn't all that thrilled with the job.

My mom was surprisingly very sweet about the whole thing, go figure.

I did some tarot readings for him with my new cards, and got VERY good results for him jobwise. My new deck has a yes/no answer feature, and came up "yes" for him getting another job in two months. (Dave had me ask "is it a good job" and the answer was no though. Big surprise there, I guess.) I did a more in-depth reading and it came out all sweetness and light and good directions and solutions for him on that. On the other hand, that last reading said some very specifically BAD things about me, which I obviously didn't like. Basically said I was a selfish bitch (yeah, like we didn't know that) even worse than usual and that we were going to fight a lot. Big surprise there too given how I've been lately. Sigh.

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