when they involve your special interest, or am I weirder than most people here:
(Shortly after picking up my HFA friend, who is my partner in Weird, and driving to our next destination)
"Hey, so I have a question I wanted to ask you, but I need to tell you about what happened to me tonight first.
"On my way home from work, I stopped off at my usual Thai restaurant to pick up dinner. While I was paying, another employee walked up the girl behind the register, said something in Thai, and laughed. The way her head was turned and she was waiting for the other girl to laugh, I got the impression that she was making fun of me. This happens to me a lot at Asian restaurants, and I usually ignore it, but this time I decided I was going to figure out what she'd said, so I wouldn't replay it in my head later and wonder. I listened as she repeated her sentence with slightly different wording, then walked away once she got an awkward chuckle out of the other girl, and I paid and left.
"I knew practically nothing of Thai, but knowing that it's a tonal language, and having studied a little Mandarin, I recognized what I thought was the most emphasized word in the sentence. It was two syllables starting with a high tone, but was so much higher and slower than the rest of the sentence that is was easy to pick out as the most important word. It also started with a very distinctive, unaspirated T that I thought would be easy to identify. So I played it over and over in my head until I got home.
"I headed to Wiki for a crash course in Thai phonology while I was eating, and found my T using the IPA symbols and some online recordings, then found some possibilities for the vowels. I confirmed the high tone with recordings, then turned my attention to the writing system so I could plug into a dictionary. I realized that with its ridiculously complicated system of tone and vowel marks, there was no way I'd get anywhere close to the word without being late to pick you up. Copy and paste wouldn't work either, so I had to make due with the most popular systems for transliterating to a roman alphabet.
"So once I finally got it into the dictionary, I waded through all of the variations and compared their Thai spellings back to Wiki, and every variation I tried led me back to one word, meaning 'fat'."
"Ok..?", she said, having listened patiently up to this point.
"So, I was going to ask you this anyway, but did you notice that I got a new coat? This is the first day I've worn it out in public."
"Yeah?"
"Does it make me look fat?"
*pause, then 2 solid minutes of laughter while I tried not to crash the car*
27 Dec 2008, 3:30 am
