All Thoughts Being Equal

After attending a highly entertaining and informative debate between the candidates for President of the Associated Students of Western Washington University, I can say that I will gladly and enthusiastically vote in the elections next week. That might seem a little weird. But the thing is, last year I didn't have the first clue about any of the candidates running for either President or VP. Except the incumbents, maybe. But I felt that voting on an incumbent, knowing nothing about their goals for the coming year, their accomplishments in the previous year, or even their eligibility compared to a challenger, would be an irresponsible waste of my vote. So I didn't vote. This year will be different. The debate was lively and extremely well-moderated. Everything ran quite smoothly; if two soft chimes don't count, nobody went into overtime with long-winded exhortations. The moderators' questions were direct (literally), pointed, and very often loaded. It was great to...

or, Something from Nothing Last week, I attended a presentation by Dr. Kim Yong-Taek, my professor for Japanese 302 during winter quarter, called “Linguistic Descriptions of the Same Event in Japanese, Korean, Chinese and English.” A talk about how we do things with words! Okay, so it wasn’t about performatives per se , but it did make me think a lot about language in general, and continue to pester me with thoughts of linguistics study even though most of it makes my eyes glaze over.