love and mustard

I've been up since early this morning, but the damn internet connection didn't come on until just now, around 2:30PM. I'm working at home, getting down to the last dregs of student journals. It's been a long slog as each journal takes almost 30 minutes to get through. Not long from now I'll be scarfing down some homemade chili dogs, then heading over to the office for yet more transcription (not to mention plugging my students' homework grades into the ol' Excel file).

I've gotten a lot done over break, but I still have a lot to do, especially with transcription. One thing I've noticed about online versions of "Friends" transcripts is that they contain an annoying number of misquotes along with the standard raft of punctuation and spelling errors. What's worse is that some of these transcripts appear to be of the UK version of "Friends," which is, bizarrely, slightly shorter than the standard, 24-minute US version. Entire patches of dialogue are missing from the transcripts as a result, and the net effect of all these problems-- misquotes, spelling errors, punctuation errors, and missing text-- is that I still have to review the transcript line by line, along with the video. When I compare the amount of time it takes to type the transcript from scratch versus the time it takes to rehabilitate an online transcript... the difference comes down to about an hour. That might sound like a lot of time, but it's really the difference between 4-5 hours and 5-6 hours. In other words: not that different. A long slog either way.

The student journals have proved quite interesting. While I don't want to name names and start exposing private thoughts, I do want to note two interesting themes in the students' writing: (1) many of the girls want a baby whether they get married or not, and (2) almost all of them have felt enormous pressure from their parents to succeed both academically and in their future working life. That second observation is, of course, unsurprising to anyone familiar with East Asian culture. I haven't quite pieced together what these two themes together might mean in terms of the evolution of Korean values and culture, but it's interesting to see such wide agreement, independently arrived at.

I have no idea why I titled this post "love and mustard." It just... seemed like the thing to do at the time.


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