qing wen (ramblings on questions)
"Qing wen" is a polite way to begin questions in Chinese, basically meaning, "May I please ask a question?" I want to become better at asking questions. I am remarkably bad at it, and I think that it is time to begin consciously working on it. My younger brother Ib asks questions about everything. He is a constant source of why and what if and how come and so forth. So I'm trying... Riding Greyhound across the US gave me some fun opportunities to ask questions. One of the people who I sat next to on the way from Indy to Dallas had worked as a Navy cryptologist. "You probably don't even know what a cryptologist is," he grunted. We had a great conversation. I kept trying to think of more questions to ask him every time his stories seemed to be winding down (after all, the man knew Spanish and Russian, I think; he wanted to own a restaurant, and was on his way to hopefully get a job with a trucking company, and it was more interesting than