Archive for December 2007
Losing Your Accent
Posted on December 2, 2007 by Ching under Sponsored Post.
I recently had the opportunity to interview for a new position in the company that currently employs me. I was relieved to finally get through the screening process. I was very grateful for the opportunity. I was both excited and apprehensive at the same time. I hadn’t interviewed for anything in more than three years and my interview skills are not exactly magnificent.
Then I wondered if my accent is still very pronounced. Sometimes accents pose a communication barrier. I know I have had to rely on Angie sometimes to translate me to other people because the words I’ve said form totally different words and phrases to my listener. Angie is used to me so she can understand me no matter how fast I speak. She also says it is a talent that she has developed. Even when she worked at K-Mart, cashiers would ask her to assist when they received questions from foreign individuals who could and were speaking English but were difficult to understand.
I prefer to convey my message without the aid of a translator or third party so I really wanted to work on losing my accent. There wasn’t enough time before the interview, though. Besides that there were a lot of other things I needed to work on. Trust me. My accent was the least of my worries.
Regardless, accent training is something that I would like to pursue down the road. After all, I’m now an American. I should sound like one. 🙂
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Congratulations, Mom!
Posted on December 2, 2007 by Ching under Family, Flickr, Life.
Mom took her oath and became a naturalized US citizen on November 30, Friday. Congrats, mom!
She is the last one. Mine took place about three years ago. I went ahead and did it because my green card (aka permanent resident or “alien” registration card — I’m not sure why they call it that, it sounds so negative) was about to expire. I didn’t want to expire on me so I couldn’t wait on mom and dad any longer. Dad and Jen were both naturalized last year. Their green cards actually expired on them.
Mom’s green card had a later expiration date because she lost her purse several years ago and had to renew everything. Therefore, her green card ended up with a later expiration date than mine and Jen’s. Our entire family is now naturalized. Woot! Woot!
I haven’t found a huge advantage to being naturalized other than we now have the right to vote and we won’t have to pay for a green card renewal every few years. In the long run, being a US citizen is more cost effective.
Some people wouldn’t dare consider pledging to another country. They would maintain their original citizenship or at the very least maintain dual citizenship. Even though we are all naturalized Americans now, we haven’t forsaken the Philippines. I love my home country and will forever call it my home (although in most of my online profiles — e.g. Facebook, MySpace, etc. — I refer to Wichita as my hometown). We are not unpatriotic to our country of origin. We are merely pragmatic.
I suppose we have assimilated more than we realize. Pragmatism is very American. I’m proud to be one, and I’m happy that my mom is now one too. Congrats!
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Anecdotes
Posted on December 1, 2007 by Ching under Web.
File this under web discovery.
I may be one of the few I know who love hearing and reading anecdotes. Whenever I say the word, people always seem to respond with a puzzled look. A whatta? It may just be that I’m not around the right people. Whatever the case maybe, I have found kindred spirits online. Anecdotage.com is a web site devoted to preserving and sharing anecdotes. Their mission is to be the world’s widest collection of celebrity anecdotes.
I discovered the web site while researching information on French cultural anthropologist Clotaire Rapaille
Then again, the web site could just be an extension of the public’s fascination with celebrities. This could simply be another way to obsess with celebrities. However, I choose to think that my initial assessment is true.
Here’s a good one.
“Hugh Massingberd, a former editor of the obituaries page of the Daily Telegraph, recalled the unwieldy challenges posed by a refusal to capitulate to the seductions of the posthumous parallax [a bending of life histories toward all that is light and wholesome, away from anything that might reflect unfavorably on the dead].
“‘One day, an injunction arrived from on high that we were to make a point of including the cause of death,’ he reminisced in The Spectator [in 2001]. ‘As it happened, a candidate for the morgue of the morrow, a priapic jazzer, had handed in his dinner pail after a penile implant had unfortunately exploded. We duly complied with the editorial diktat.'”
It has been reprinted here without permission but I am linking back to their web site (Anecdotage.com) so hopefully they won’t mind it. It is free word-of-mouth, buzz advertising after all. I hope you enjoy their web site as much as I do.
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