(no subject)

[muckefuck]

Last night, I dreamt I was looking for a place to sleep on a college campus and kept getting disturbed. I started out on a grassy slope that had too many rocks, moved to an impossibly huge and architecturally extraordinary lecture hall, and finally retreated to the upper floor of another gorgeous building, this one a former residence being used for offices by the business school. I was quietly removing my shoes when I heard someone coming. No sooner had I hidden myself when the thought crossed my mind, I've hidden like this lots of time in my dreams and it never works. Sure enough, he spotted me, and the dream came to an end. As you might expect, I didn't get a great night's sleep.

I'm not sure what exactly inspired this dream, but it might have been my predicament last Friday. I didn't feel so much ill as just exhausted; all I wanted to do was shut my eyes. Usually, I can go to a forgotten basement corridor and sack out on one of the wooden benches, but this time there was a conversation going on there. I thought about taking one of the comfy chairs outside my department, but they're currently reconstructing the main entrance (it's supposed to be fnished by tomorrow; HA!), which makes for much dust and noise. Defeated, I staggered back to my desk, hung around long enough to hand the reins over to one of my employees, and then made for home. By then, of course, I wasn't able to sleep at all.

I've always wished that institutions would provide napping facilities for their employees. There are plenty of days when I know I'd be a lot more on the ball if I could just lie down for half an hour. One of my workers does just that--he can actually sleep in a noisy lounge--and he's the most productive by far. Research shows, in fact, that people perform better when they take an afternoon nap, but I can't think of anyplace in this country that's tried to translate that into workplace policy. There are people who live close enough to work that they can implement this themselves, but they're a definite minority.

Comments

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Some days I almost think I get more done because I'm pushing myself to accomplish things so I can get home and rest. Of course, that tends to promote sloppy work.

So hey, is that translation offer still open? And how's your Danish?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If sloppy work is better than no work (or your sloppy is better than the sloppy of whoever cleans up after you), then that's not a bad thing. One of the reasons I'm not angling to be self-employed is that I know that I'm more motivated by external deadlines than self-imposed ones.

Sure, the translation offer stands. My Danish is worse than my Low Saxon and better than my Old High German. I can't promise timeliness, however.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

Self-employed often still includes deadlines. Lots of 'em. But yeah, I work better when someone's actually checking up on me from time to time and giving me some kind of positive feedback.

There's no deadline or timeline involved in the Danish question, though it was a bit facetious. Last night we watched "The Kingdom II," Lars Von Trier's Danish soap opera. Both episodes end with little speeches from Lars. After the second one, he even appears to be singing a little song. But the DVDs we got don't translate those segments. Given where the last episode ends, we're clawing the walls wondering what he's saying. (Not that it's likely to be helpful. He also appeared at the end of the earlier episodes, saying things like "Well, that was pretty wacky. But we started slow so everyone could keep up, and now we'll be speeding up a bit from here.") Still, we're curious.

Problem is, since there are no subtitles of any kind, we don't even have a transcript of what he's saying. We've been scouring the Internet, assuming that somewhere, someone must have translated what he's saying. But so far, no luck.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Oh, spoken Danish. Ugh. I am not your guy. If you find a written transcript, I can--with time--puzzle it out. But I can't understand spoken Danish worth a fig. One of my linguistics professors used to say that pronouncing Danish is simple: You only need two sounds, the shwa and the glottal stop.

[rollick.livejournal.com]

We'd gotten the impression from hours upon hours of "The Kingdom" that Danish is basically English with a goofy accent. Then they pulled the subtitles out from under us and we were totally lost.

Ah well. I'm still convinced that there must be a translation, or at least a transcript, out there on the Internet somewhere. I mean, it's the Internet. That's what it's for.