And I am definitely not the cruncher. I’m the crunched. Ow ow ow.

The test is roughly 24 hours from now, and I don’t seem to be making much headway in the “identifying vowel sounds correctly” field. I do exercises but I don’t seem to be improving, and learning the vowels is only step 2 of a 3 part process.

The 3rd part is learning all that mouth placement bullshit. I am hoping I will invent some way to make it all systematically united in my head. If I can do that, I will have no problem remembering, because then each entry will relate to the big picture in a way I can understand and therefore I can remember it no problem.

But first these goddamned vowels. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. I get most of them right. And some of the ones I get wrong are debatable.

But some aren’t. And I look at them and know that the transcriber is right. and I can’t imagine how I got it wrong. But I did. I am still finding it very hard to match a vowel sound from what I am trying to transcribe with one of the example vowel sounds from my notes. It all seems too ambiguous to me, and I suspect that is ironically because of my keen ear for language.

Well, and my very precise mind. The vowel I am trying to transcribe doesn’t sound like one of the ones in my chart to me. There are so many subtle differences!

I gave finding a website with tons of exercises a try, and they are definitely out there, but all the ones I tried used the actual IPA, which is not the one we are learning in class. So they are useless to me. I mean sure, I would love to learn the one that seems to be the actual internationally recognized one, but at this point, I really have to prioritize.

I can learn the actual IPA some other time.

So it’s back to transcribing sentences from my head and then checking them with the transcriber and seeing where I got it wrong.

I am thinking that I will create my own version of the vowel chart that uses my best approximation of the actual sound instead of a word. So “oo” instead of “boot”. I think I can make it work, and it would be very “me” to solve a problem by inventing a system.

How very INTJ! It’s how we do things.

I am slowly letting go of the idea that I will master this shit before the test. If I had been sufficiently serious about that, I would have studied from the end of the last class until the beginning of the next one, nonstop. Or at least until I truly had mastered it.

Again, this course is forcing me to learn like a normal person. I assume people without my particular mental gifts stress out before every test and spend a lot of hours trying to cram the knowledge into their heads in a way that will stick, and have to try a ton of different angles and approaches before they get there.

Me, I am so fucking spoiled. I’ve never had to do that. If that is what “studying” means, I have next to no experience with it. The closest I have come to that is burnintg the midnight oil to get an assignment done, and even then, there was no stress. I was supremely confidant in my ability to do it and do a good enough job of it.

It just took some extra work.

So I am in a unique place (well, except for the last time… ) for me. I have to learn it, I don’t know if I can, but I know I have to keep at it till I get it.

I am fairly sure that I can pass with what I know now, but it would be damned close. At some point, I may have to accept that I know the phonetic alphabet as well as I am going to and turn to the mouth position stuff in order to maximize my chance for actual decent marks.

Better to get my transcriptions (and translations) 3/4 right and the mouth position stuff 3/4 right than get 100 on phonetics and 0 on the rest. Right? So I will drill oh the phonetics tonight but after that, when I get up tomorrow, it’s all bilabial affricative nasal stops, or whatever.

And no matter what happens tomorrow with the test, the sun will still rise Wednesday morning, I will still be whole and hale and extremely bright and talented, and life will go on more or less the same. Worst case scenario is that I fail the course, and while that has never happened to me before, it would not, in face, kill me.

Might take a while to get over it though. I’m so sensitive!

We got out ethics exams back today. My team got 80 percent, which is pretty decent. The section I did by myself got a 7.5 out of 10, or 75 percent, which is a little below my desired 82 percent but still within acceptable parameters.

Almost got into it big time with the prof when she said that most of the exams talked about cultural relativism without even defining it. Funny, I thought the fact that you were asking me a question about it implied that you thought I knew what it was. Hence the question itself proves I know what it is. I really didn’t think I had to explain it to the person teaching it to me.

What can I say, I write to my audience. Imagine how insulted you would be if someone sent you an email that explained things the sender knows you both know. It would be atrocious.

And yet she, and other profs, expect me to somehow know when that has to be done. It’s unfair. I know what the damned thing means or I wouldn’t be able to answer the question!

I think I know how people on the Autism Spectrum feel when they are expected to understand facial expressions.

I’m not a mindreader goddamn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.