I've had my first run-in with a native outside of "the office." I went to a coffee shop downtown last night, just to get out of my suffocatingly small hotel room for an hour or two. Plus, I hadn't eaten dinner at the time, and I had read online that this place does a mean sandwich - although I'm not really sure how you could mess that sort of thing up. Then again, I don't cook, so how would I know? But I digress.
I'm sitting at a table by the window, overlooking the beautiful-if-somewhat-sparse city centre, when a man come us to me. He says hello, and introduces himself as a student at the local university who is completing research for an essay about vocal inflection and intonation, and how it changes/effects an individual's mood. He asks me if it would be alright for him to record my answers to a few questions. What the heck, I'll do it.
He proceeds to ask me some very formal sounding questions about my thanksgiving weekend. I'm hoping for his sake that the content of my answers is not important, because I sounded about as stupid as I might have sounded if I were in the middle of a final interview with a Target District manager. An interview for which I was not whole-heartily prepared. I believe I even had to stop mid-sentence once, pretend I hadn't just said that sentence and start answering his question again.
In my defense, he asked questions about the holiday and family tension. But you see, I did not spend the holiday with family, instead I spent it with friends in the cities. The most tense moment of the whole day was deciding who should reprimand the dog for eating the turkey we had left out. He asked what my favorite part of the day was. My response was "the meal." Two words.
I must have been the worst test subject imaginable. Yet still, I'm intrigued by his research, and want to know just what was his interpretation of my voice, and how I reacted to his questioning. But just as with the number of licks it takes to get to the tootsie roll center of a tootsie pop, the world may never know.
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2 comments:
See... welcome to the crazy yet fun eccentricity of their college community... lots of fun.
Take a walk down by the towers dorms at UWEC, you'll see the river and get a good workout climbing that hill... there's a hiking trail that runs along through the area too. UWEC has some good student theatre during the year, take in a show if you can.
I've driven both up and down that hill, and can't imagine what its like when covered with snow and ice. As for walking it, my laziness makes that somewhat less than likely.
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