Compliment

Today was a milestone for me-- I received my first ever compliment on my Chinese. Well, technically I've gotten compliments before. Whenever you go shopping in China, the shopkeepers will try to butter you up by complimenting your Chinese, but they're gonna compliment you no matter what. They are the Paula Abdul of spoken Chinese evaluation. No, today was big. I was in one-on-one session with Mr. Pan, the head teacher, when he told me:

"The first day you were a very poor speaker of Chinese, but today you are doing much better."

Ok so it was a bit of a backhanded compliment, and ok, I proceeded to blow the rest of the lesson, on account of getting nervous at ruining his compliment. Probably the worst thing was, I didn't even understand the compliment at first. He had to repeat it about four times. But, it was a compliment, and you can't take that away from me.

I decided yesterday that I was going to beat this language. It can be a brutal foe. Today class was a pounding swell of 1o ft. waves, and my teacher refused to toss me a lifejacket. I was starting to get pretty frustrated, so I decided to give some "creative" answers to her questions. She asked me what my strangest habit was, and I told her eating beef. She said that wasn't too strange, and I told her that in America it was considered to be terribly strange. She has never been to America, so she had to believe me! Then, I was looking through my backpack for a pencil and I found a little toy frog, to which you can open and close the mouth. I used the frog to talk for me, but after about 10 seconds of this, even I was too embarassed to go on.

Ok, so I was reading Lost Fan Fiction the other day. Uhhhh. Yeah. So, anyways, I got to the comments section on one of the forums, and a fan had posted something along the lines of "your post was so beautiful, I was crying for such a long time." I could not believe me eyes. Someone was actually crying about a fan fiction post, which, by the way, was just god-awful.

Speaking of play counts, I am currently in the middle of "Operation Dumbo Drop". It's an unfortunate title, because it does nothing to describe the nature of the operation, but what can I say--blame the beauracracy! Anyway, the point of operation dumbo drop is to listen to every last song in my iTunes library. As some of you may know, I have about 6,000 songs right now, and have only listened to about 2/3 of them. So, I programmed my iPod to autoupdate to a smart playlist which contains every unlistened song. Now, whenever I'm listending to the iGod (that's my nickname for it, because it's so great) I have no choice but to hear unheard songs. Right now, I have 8.5 days of music left to listen to. I'll keep all my reader's posted on my progress, because I'm sure you would like to know!