Tao of Gabe: On Accents

Gabe the Sacriligious Beaver here with an insightful thought experiment. The question of the week is: Do you remember how I told you that sometimes I repeat stories?

This is one of those and it’s not something as light and breezy as drug-addiction, teenage pregnancy, or a closeted bulimic drunk-driving a stolen cop car to a driveby to prove his manhood to his homies who he only talks to because his parents didn’t love him.
I am, of course, talking about accents: the gateway speech disorders.

Allow me to tell you an autobiographical story, which I can only assume is true as I’ve yet to research it.

I was a young tot out in Michigan with my French-Canadian cousin Dave and my mother when I saw some Wisconsin-raised children talking in their silly midwestern way.

I tried to talk to them in their local tongue so as to seem ‘cool’ in their eyes (together now: it’s Wis-kaaahhn-sin). It wasn’t like marijuana, PCP, cocaine, methamphetamines, or glue: I didn’t like it at first, but after a while, I just couldn’t stop myself. I would never tell my parents because I knew they wouldn’t understand.

Soon, regional accents just weren’t enough. It got to the point where I’d rent foreign films just to imitate the sounds that came out. I thought I could quit at any time, but whenever I heard toh-MAH-toh, I just couldn’t stop myself.

One day I woke up in a Mexican cleaning-lady’s broom closet wearing a sombrero and poncho listening to her sancho storm in and hoping he wouldn’t find me. That was when I knew I had a problem: I had to go to the bathroom.

But enough of my boring life story. Not everyone moves on from accents to slurs, lisps, dialects, and phonemes. Some people end up doing the ‘hard stuff’ like learning Elven, Klingon, or even German.

In any case, what matters is that you learn from my mistakes and not get started on accents: the middle-volumed killer. When the kids in your playground (or coffeehouse, I’m not sure what the college-age crowd does these days) start making fun of how a Scotsman would sound in bed, just cover your ears.

It’s not that funny: Scotsmen don’t get women in bed. They get [editor: insert sheep joke here]. Man, that was a wooly joke! Ha ha!

Of course, when we say to stay away from accents, we don’t mean people who have natural accents. Even you have a natural accent, I know what I’m talking aboot, I’m Canadian.
The trick is to speak to people who are different in such a way as to not adopt their mannerisms. I suggest plugging your ears and chanting your cultural music loudly (“Barbie Girl” by Aqua) while they speak.

If you explain it as a cultural anomily, I’m sure they won’t take offense. At least Canadians won’t. We do it to Americans all the time.

Looove,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: Allegories are the new metaphors.”

September 29, 2005 at 3:41 am | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

What a Concept-ion!

Karl,
It’ll be on your computer by Friday.

Love,
Gabe.

September 26, 2005 at 3:24 pm | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

Re: Adding Humour to Lachlan

Hey Gabe,

Do you want to write a review of Conception Day 2005?

Were you there?

Circa. 400 words.

Can’t promise to publish it - but if you are as good as you say you are - then I prob. will!

Karl

September 25, 2005 at 12:13 am | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

ToG - From Hack to Hate

Gabe the Recursive Beaver here with the question of the week: who would win in a hacky-sack match to the death between Spiderman and Daredevil?

Think about that when you’re living your boring, boring life and doing you’re boring, boring schoolwork. We advise you to send your 100 word, referenced and footnoted answers to gabe@pixcapacitor.com.

Just don’t go nuts, which I hear is entirely possible in some university e-mail accounts. That’s especially true when they are much less user friendly than their predecessor (not that I have any particular universities in mind). Who wants their e-mail to pop up in another, annoyingly framed, window?

But you know how I hate to be topical. I mean, I held back so long and so hard on my New Orleans jokes during the Katrina job and I’ve yet to reply to any mass e-mails from any university presidents (again, I could be referring to anybody. I hear UNM’s president has weekly Firefox chats with the local Greek community. Of course, clarifying an administrative policy is so much less creepy than a president hitting on sorority girls).

In any case, I hate mass e-mails. I see them as the equivalent to the mass media, mass suicides, or mass breast-feeding (why is mass breast-feeding a funnier concept in humans?). Speaking of which, don’t write me, abusing humans is so much harder when they have personalities. It’s the reason I continually attack the Parking Department.

That reminds me: you know who I hate? People who say ‘you know who I hate’ then go on to describe an irrelevant characteristic or mannerism. That’s not a who, that’s a what! If you’re going to hate someone for something, hate them for something that’s their fault, like being short or having a terminal illness!

Those sentences should start ‘you know what I dislike.’ That way, when they say something you do, you know to change that. Otherwise, you’re just standing there feeling like a doofus wondering (1) if you do that, (2) if they’ve seen you do that, and (3) if they’ll remember that they’ve seen you to that.

Because if they find out that you do that, it’ll be the end of your relationship. I mean, how can you be friends with somebody you hate?

Unless, of course, they say, “I don’t mean you, I’m talking about people that do [insert razor-thin distinction here],” which never makes it better and leaves you both feeling stupid.

My usual response is, “do you know what the word patronize means?” This can fail miserably when the person actually doesn’t know what patronize means.

And patronize isn’t a self-defining word like esoteric. Esoteric is such an esoteric word [for the second half of that joke, please turn to your local dictionary or English major].

You know what I love?
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: If you’ve read this, you’ve wasted your time. And I’ve wasted my time for writing something that would be read by people who’d waste their time reading what I wasted my time writing!”

September 22, 2005 at 2:51 am | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments

Tao of Gabe: On Illusions

Tao of Gabe

Gabe the Noumenal Beaver here to give you a lesson in coping. See, this semester I lost all government help for my education so I moved in with a trio of loveable, if flawed, human beings.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Russian, an Irishman, and a blonde share a wooden flat with a beaver for four months. There were no survivors.

The problem with sharing an apartment with strangers is getting used to the differences in values that come between people of different origins. For instance, in the time I’ve lived here, there’s been nude midnight aerobics, incessant Irish whistling, sabotaged Russian Roulette, and enough hair in any given drain to make Bruce Willis look like Howard Stern.

The roommates claim that every one of those started when I got here but who can say? All I know is that someone here is disgusting, and he’s about three feet tall and shaped like an overly ripe mango.

The problem, and as a trained psychologist I can tell you what it is, is that none of my flatmates will do every single thing I say. Furthermore, none of them can compromise to each other’s needs. For instance, nobody seems to enjoy being on the receiving end of my psychological experiments.

(Here’s a fun one: set up your musical playlist to play the saddest, most suicide-inducing songs on low to moderate volume. Then fix it so that nobody can change the volume or settings and leave for the weekend. Repeat as necessary until everyone in your flat is depressed but you. There’s another experiment involving alarm clocks and early morning power surges, but some of the more anti-social readers–that is, Parking Aides– might actually try this so I won’t expand on it.)

The secret to enjoying living with strangers is communication and compromise. Or so I hear from people who now live alone.

In the end, all roommate relationships diverge into two spheres: friendship and tolerance. If you are lucky enough to enjoy your flatmates and have enough in common with them to become their friends, you’ll love your life and enjoy coming home.

If, however, you only tolerate your flatmates or they only tolerate you, then you will hate coming home and they will hate having you come home. The solution will inevitably be either avoidance in that you’ll spend all of your time away and come home only to sleep, dominance in that you’ll spend all of your time at home and invite friends over so as to make it seem more pleasurable, stubborness in which you refuse to change your lifestyle because of your situation, or subvertiveness which is a Passive-Aggressive art and my personal pick. In essence, subvertiveness is lessening the amount of work you do, maximizing theirs, concealing the discrepancy, and deriving enjoyment from this.

It’s what we in the writing end of the media do to our editors.

Love, I mean tolerance,
Gabe D. Beaver

“Remember Kids: Nobody loves you and some of us actually hate you.”

September 15, 2005 at 12:02 am | In Gabe the Beaver's solo career | | No Comments