Laksa, Corporate scheduling, & cetera.

There are two phenomenal vegetarian restaurants in midtown, both owned by the same person who, judging by location and cuisine, is probably Korean: Hangawi and Franchia. My mom and I are starting the healthy habit of meeting up bimonthly for a bonding chat, and we met at Franchia for lunch about a week ago. The menu there is actually vegan, and but for the lack of eggs you would barely notice it. I had a Malaysian-inspired "fish" soup called laksa, which is a strong, spicy "fish" broth (here, spices and possibly a mushroom base) served with one or two basic vegetables like potatoes and sprouts. (Think: super tangy, hot Manhattan clam chowder.) It was one of the most delicious things I've ever had; it is also, unfortunately, one of the most difficult dishes to find in vegetarian format. So... if anyone wants to grab a fake fish lunch in midtown...

Hangawi is the kind of fancy place where you take your shoes off and order a prix fixe lunch, so I'll discuss that one when I have more money.

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My life has recently been running on a corporate schedule, and I don't like it. The end of OUP's financial year is coming up at the end of this month, and every day has been nonstop. I've started getting afraid I might develop a UTI because I just sit at my desk holding in my pee until I reach a good point to stop working, which is kind of like a runner's "goal-oriented" mentality, except not healthy. I still like the job, but I come home and my head is still buzzing -- and I resent that. I don't have a work phone and I don't check my work email at home, so I don't like that work is now invading my thoughtspace without my permission. I need to try harder to turn this off.

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I sat in on a First Language Acquisition class yesterday and learned some cool stuff about tense!

• Children develop a sense of tense more quickly in cultures whose languages are very clear with the use of tense-markers, like Spanish. English is not one of these languages.
• Children will develop it even more quickly if their parents use content-heavy sentences that involve lots of different parts of speech and tense, like: "Let's clean up the toys," "Did we ever find that toy?" Children whose parents use phrases like "Clean up the toys" and "Where's that toy?" develop it more slowly.
• There are certain errors involving tense that are made by both native English-speaking 2 year-olds and adult learners of English, suggesting that there is a complex relationship in learning that doesn't have to do with maturation.

But I'm probably taking Intro to Syntax next semester, so expect some sentence diagrams instead of real-life fun facts...