Chinese Logic

Yesterday was a very challenging day. Having slept a total of four hours, and not consecutive ones at that, I was pretty much a zombie. My most wakeful moment was struggling to fall asleep at 2AM after zombie me had the brilliant idea to drink a pot of coffee. But, I finally got back on a normal sleeping schedule. No more going to sleep at 7AM, at least till tomorrow.

I dreamed of a cool new string instrument. I was walking in a field with this girl named Mindy who I'd never seen before, and she was carrying what I knew in the dream was a tuba case, but what I knew immediately with equal certainty upon waking was a cello case. Apparently the dream me has no idea what a tuba looks like, though when I go back to sleep I'll probably write this comment in my dream blog in reverse, with equal disdain. To make things even clearer, Mindy said that she was carrying a violin. The dream me didn't see anything strange about that. When we got across the field and ended up in some city at some open mic, she took it out of the case and played a little to warm up. The 'violin' was a bit smaller than cello, and where the strings go over the bridge in the direction opposite to the neck, instead of going at a downward angle, they went up almost perpendicularly to the wood. Mindy played the strings at that end of the violin instead of in the usual place with a modified bow, and would add little flutter-like flourishes that I've never heard on a string instrument. Then of course, someone showed up and ruined everything, and you can guess easily who that was. He didn't wake me up, but he took over the dream with his own agenda at the open mic.

(We're in traffic. There's a newspaper salesman standing on the yellow line selling the Houston Chronicle. A cop flies right past him, siren blaring)
Mario: Psh, if that newspaper salesman was any good, he would have sold that cop a newspaper.

(studying chinese characters)
Mark: guess what you get when you put the radicals for 'tree' and 'several' together.
Mario (having had dibs on the book): machine?
Mark: hmm. Pretty obvious huh?
...
Mark (flipping forward a couple of chapters): okay, what about 'sun' plus 'thumbtack'
Mario: uhh. A ray of light?
Mark: think more obvious
Mario: solar flare?
Mark: no, 'hundred.'
Mario: ah, that makes sense.
...
Mark: ok, this one's really obvious. 'moon' plus 'knife.'
Mario: ...cheese?
Mark: 'canoe.' Come on dude, trust your intuition.

There were some other good ones, some making sense, some just strange. I kept waiting for the moment of epiphany where I would suddenly understand the Chinese way of thinking and 'horse' + 'woman' = 'mother' would make sense, but the more I read, the more I began to fear for my life if this epiphany did indeed happen.

Some others, for your enjoyment:
'big' + 'drop' = 'too much' (Makes sense, even to us logic-based Americans)
'woman' + 'house' = 'peace' (This is what I'm talking about when I say the Chinese go to far with their perverse sense of humor)
'too much' + 'too much' = 'wife' (This is apparently the same in every culture)