Mandarin Picking Quotes

She looked closer at the object she’d mistaken for a bookmark—a length of metallic silver tinged with hints of bright mandarin. She picked it up, holding it aloft as it glinted in the gas lamps’ glare. Aasim cursed, his voice going hoarse. “Is that what I think it is?” Fatma nodded. It was a metallic feather, as long as her forearm. Along its surface, faint lines of fiery script moved and writhed about as if alive. “Holy tongue,” Aasim breathed. “Holy tongue,” she confirmed. “But that means it belongs to . . .” “An angel, ” Fatma finished for him. Her frown deepened. Now what in the many worlds, she wondered, would a djinn be doing with one of these?

Now, according to Business Week, 94 percent of U.S. corporations ask for electronic resumes. They use software to sift through them, picking out a selection of "finalists" for human managers to consider. What does the software look for? That's what we have to figure out. Some pick out certain words-MBA, Harvard, Excel, fluent Mandarin. Others look for more sophisticated combinations. Plenty of consultants are on call to sell us inside tips. The point is that when we want to be found, whether we're looking for money or love, we must make ourselves intelligible to machines. We need good page rank. We must fit ourselves to algorithms.

Andrea is coming to pick me up in about thirty minutes to head to her folks' house for Thanksgiving. I've got buttery yeast rolls from Aimee's mom's old family recipe, my cranberry sauce with port and dried cherries, and a batch of spicy molasses cookies sandwiched with vanilla mascarpone frosting. I also have the makings for dried shisito peppers, which I will make there. Andrea's mom, Jasmin, is making turkey and ham, and braised broccoli and an apple pie, Andrea is doing a potato and celery root mash and a hilarious Jell-O mold that contains orange sherbet and canned mandarin oranges and mini marshmallows, and her dad, Gene, is making his mother's candied yams and sausage corn bread stuffing. Benji is cooking and serving most of the day at the group home where he grew up, and will come join us for dessert, bringing his chocolate pecan pie with bourbon whipped cream.

Mandarin, and technical English for a while. Therapies administered included but were not limited to: turning things off, then on again; picking them up a couple of inches and then dropping them; turning off nonessential appliances in this and other rooms; removing lids and wiggling circuit boards; extracting small contaminants, such as insects and their egg cases, with nonconducting chopsticks; cable-wiggling; incense-burning; putting folded-up pieces of paper beneath table legs; drinking tea and sulking; invoking unseen powers; sending runners to other rooms, buildings, or precincts with exquisitely calligraphed notes and waiting for them to come back carrying spare parts in dusty, yellowed cardboard boxes; and a similarly diverse suite of troubleshooting techniques in the realm of software.

THE HIPPOCAMPUS: TRACKING THREATS AND MAKING MEMORIES The hippocampus is a seahorse-shaped structure in the center of the limbic system. In my live workshops, the analogy I pick for the hippocampus is that of the military historian. Its most vital job is to compare incoming information with the memory of past threats. If there’s a match, it sounds the alarm by activating the amygdala, which in turn switches on the whole fight-flight-freeze (FFF) system. 3.6. The hippocampus: tracking threats and recording memories. By deciding which signals to pass to the amygdala and which to ignore, the hippocampus regulates our emotions. Some people have an active hippocampus that effectively regulates emotion. Others do not; these unfortunates have a hair-trigger response to their own emotions. They become angry, fearful, or anxious at the slightest stimulus. Their behavior is dictated by their emotions. The hippocampus is also the seat of learning. Novel experiences produce the growth of new synaptic connections in the hippocampus. Go take a class in Mandarin Chinese, learn pickleball, date a new love interest, experiment with recipes from a Hungarian cookbook—your hippocampus will start to grow new connections. But the most essential function of the hippocampus is to catalog the bad stuff of the past, and if anything coming our way in the present resembles that bad stuff, it makes a match and turns on the FFF response.

Its attraction was that we could pick up Chinese TV stations that broadcast soap operas and glamorous commercials for luscious products. Though we could not understand Mandarin, just watching them provided a window onto an entirely different way of life.

At length, when I considered it, I realized that the best of my actions were small things. Picking flowers and cooking food for my mother when she had been unwell, spending an afternoon with the children, sending money to my sister or kissing Henry’s tiny head as he slept in the nursery before I left. I thought of every detail and afterwards I felt better. Hellfire and brimstone have never appealed to me and I admit I become easily confused thinking of right and wrong. But I do understand kindness.