Language Problems

My roommate, Nina, sometimes asks me for help with her English.  She was texting today, and she asked me if she could say "If you need any help, don't bother asking me."  I explained that she probably should say "If you need any help, just ask."  She does this frequently: say the opposite of what she means, which sometimes makes determining her actual meaning hard. 
I kind of wonder how she functions as her job.  She works at an English newspaper, so how does she get on?  I would be impossibly in trouble if I worked at a non-English newspaper. 
She told me last night she wanted to learn Chinese, which is admirable, but since she's here, I personally think an English class might be a good idea.  It's clear she has the vocab, but she needs to practice speaking, and well, there are classes (or coffee table nights) that cater exactly to that. 

Out With Friends

I went out last night with some of my friends.  We first went over to one of the local coffee shops for treats and conversation.
One of the things that's always a bit of a problem is volume.  Tori and Ashley are particularly loud.  (You know things are bad when I think people are loud.)  There were a few brief moments where this looked like it was going to be a problem, but it was mostly okay. 
I was surprised by Tori and Ashley.  Ashley usually does not like being told that she is wrong (she's picked fights with me over very little) but Tori basically schooled her in Islam last night and Ashley didn't react as badly as she usually does.  Ashley's in anthropology, and anthropology has a bad reputation for being racist, misogynistic, homophobic, etc., and even though Ashley doesn't go for the racism and homophobia, I have heard her say some pretty misogynistic things on occasion.  This time, she said some pretty awful things about Muslims, and I sometimes wonder how it is that we grew up in the same community.  We knew a lot of the same people, including a lot of Muslims (we live in an area where there is a high population of "Middle Easteners") and yet Ashley has a totally different (i.e. mostly negative) point of view about them.  But Ashley didn't do as she always does (repeat herself until you give up), so maybe that's a sign that she's changing? 
I talked mostly to Michael, Lisa's boyfriend.  He's a really nice guy, but I always feel like he's hitting on me.
This brings up one of the many problems I have.  Apparently, I am too nice to guys.  Josie says that I make people feel way too good about themselves and Dan has commented before that I am easy to talk to.  Josie believes that a lot of guys think that I'm interested in them because of the way I behave around them.  There are a lot of guys I'm interested in, but never, it seems, the ones who are interested in me.
The other problem is that I'm not sure how to strike a middle ground between being nice and being nasty.  I know how to tell someone off (some of my readers have seen me do it), but I (apparently) don't know how to be normal around people, not overly nice and not mean.
So, with Michael things are always a little weird, because well, Lisa's right there.  And I'm honestly not interested in him, and not just because of Lisa.  I met Michael before Lisa did, and I decided against him.  And I really don't want to make Lisa unhappy.  She's been very nice to me over our seven years of friendship, and it feels silly to throw that away, especially over a boy. 


Later, we walked over to a store to do a little shopping.  While walking there, some one was playing "Boom Boom Pow" and I danced in the parking lot to it.  (You can all blame Gary for getting me into that song.  Boy is a much better dancer than he looks.)
We went to look through cards, which is something that is super foreign to me these days.  In my family, we're not allowed to buy cards, because my Mom makes them.  So I haven't been in a card rack in almost a decade.  I mostly made terrible suggestions to Ashley, like saying she should get a Grandfather-themed Father's Day card for her Dad.

Lisa is a cute whore, and she got really excited when she saw cards that were from Hoops and Yoyo.  Am I totally out of the loop here?  I've never even heard of Hoops and Yoyo before, though their website has so much sound stuff on it.  Lisa was giggling and carrying on about how cute they were, especially this one slug character.  I honestly don't ever worry about buying Lisa a present.  If it's even a little bit cute, she'd probably love it.   

Black Gold

I watched this movie called Black Gold, which is about the coffee market. I actually dislike coffee, so watching all these people drink coffee made me want to throw up, but I thought that the ideas of the film (how free trade fails to provide adequate income for so many farmers, how unnecessary aide would be if there were fair prices, the ignorance of so many about what they consume) were all really good points.
I really liked learning about the film's main character, a man who represented a coffee growers union in Ethiopia who was trying to get a higher price for their coffee. I thought the movie did a good job of showing what was possible if certain forces worked. It was so hard to see the opposite of this, where they had to set up nutrition stations, which determine which children get food aid to prevent malnourishment. (They turned away children who were only kind of sickly because they wanted to try to help the desperately bad.) Also heartbreaking and sad was the tour of Pike's Place Starbucks (where two young baristas discussed Starbuck's success) and a barista championship (where a Canadian contestant came off as a total tool.)
I would have liked a little more information about chat, a narcotic that many coffee growers turn to because they are so desperate to feed their families, and about how food aid operates. The film also randomly flits back through time near the end of the movie, which was confusing. But, overall, it is a well-written film that does a good job of explaining how free trade works, who benefits, and what the alternatives are.