Julian Velard & 之一

Once again I'm in my favorite coffee shop. Jee Eun just ordered black pepper beef noodles and I just made a CD of my favorite Julian Velard songs, which I gave to the waitress to play. For those of you who don't know Julian's music (which will only be non-immediate family and random visitors), you probably should. He's a personal friend and I've now taken it upon myself to promote his music in China. They probably won't like it, because they like bad 80's American pop, but hopefully they'll give it a shot.

A joke I just made regarding the standing of Jee Eun's legs in my life reminds to tell you about ACC students' favorite Chinese linguistic quirk. If you want to say "You're my best friend.", you say "你是我最好朋友.". If you want to say "You're one of my best friends.", you say "你是我最好朋友之一.". Notice that the difference between the two comes at the end of the sentence. Our favorite joke is, of course, saying things like "你是我最喜欢的老师...之一." ("You're my favorite teacher... one of"), pausing dramatically at the "...". The difference between the Chinese and the English is that the English is a correction of the previous sentence and the Chinese is one complete Chinese sentence, so whenever you want to say that somebody/something is one of your favorite/best whatever, you first have to build it up by giving it superlative status and then give the slight let down of "one of", even if that was your intended meaning from the start. What I just said to Jee Eun was "Your legs are my favorite pair of legs... one of." She of course saw it coming from two miles away and said "之一“ before I did. That's f***ing teamwork! (I should note that I am not dating Jee Eun.)

I'm pretty sure Chinese people don't find this funny or even interesting, but we all make this joke constantly. It elicits the ironic laughs and slight shudders of stupid, obvious jokes (that is, every joke that John Chatlos and I make).