Ling & Rowling

This past week has been strange for me because I am currently in between assignments. I just finished up on crowds on Cars 2, and I'm waiting deployment in the 3D stereo rendering department. You would think that being between assignments would be the best thing ever. I certainly thought so. I had been on project after project since I started at Pixar, and even though some times were slower than others, I never had a moment where I felt like I could really work on my own personal projects and career development. And now, glorious free time, I was even able to go outside after lunch one day and read a book in the delightful weather we've been having while lying in the grass under a tree.

As the week went on, though, I went from relaxation to listlessness. It's like when you've been waking up early all week, and you think that it'll be great to finally sleep in on Saturday, except instead, you binge a little too hard on the zzz's and wake up in the afternoon with that horrible feeling of shame for having slept until the afternoon mixed with an even deeper feeling of shame for still being tired after said sleep. That's how I felt. On Friday evening I was exhausted, and I had no idea why because I had done very little all week outside of messing around a bit in Corel Painter and reading some photography websites.

My theory is that I need to start organizing deadlines for myself. One side effect of being someone who has not really been formally trained in any aspect of the movie pipeline but has experience in almost all of them is that I feel generally empowered enough to want to try a bunch of different things but not empowered enough to be able to harness any of them to innovate and create, which is really the goal, after all. And being someone who is easily distracted by the interwebs and such nonsense, the only real way to ensure that I'm learning what I want to learn is if I make myself a schedule of tangible goals with tangible deadlines.

So where am I going with this? Today I was watching Julie & Julia, courtesy of the free DVD library we have at work, and in addition to inspiring me to buy Julia Child's cookbook in an attempt to elevate my cooking a little bit from "put some shit in a pot with oil," it inspired me to jump start my week of not-lazing-about by embarking on a quest that I've been meaning to attack for the last few months now. You may not think of it as much of a quest when you hear it, but I have been playing Shadow of the Colossus, so you can trust me when I say this - I know what a quest is, and THIS IS A QUEST. I am attacking the pages of J.K. Rowling's great masterpiece, Harry Potter. Oh yes, Harry Potter, which I have read many times, but never IN CHINESE.

I was drawn to the idea because I love Harry Potter, and I always wanted to collect all the books in every language, since I am a hoarder and like having things on my shelf that come in collections. I was hoping every translation would have a different cover, and one day I would have read the series in every language that I even vaguely know or want to learn. And my shelf would look something like this:

Sadly, the Chinese book looks just like the English version, except that it's 95% characters that I don't know, and the words are super tiny so that I have to hold them up to my face to be able to see the strokes. Trying to read a book in Chinese when you have the Chinese literacy of a four year old can only really be described as masochistic. I've basically gone through one sentence, and already I'm breaking a sweat. Sweat induced by all the labor of flipping through the pages of the Chinese dictionary after every other word, because anyone who has ever used a Chinese dictionary knows that it is not as simple as knowing the alphabet in order.

The goal is to finish the book by the end of the year. I'm hoping it'll get exponentially easier and I'll be down to at least one in twenty words by the end. And then I'll finally know how to talk to people about Harry Potter, even if I still won't be able to read the whole menu at Chinese restaurants. Since, of course, that's what's really important anyway, right? ;P