English Recordings

Today is June 21, 2010. It is morning, and it is the sixth day that I am writing in my diary. Just a note: this is from the previous day, June 20.
Yesterday I wrote about how bad I felt for the whole day. Well, today it was better a little bit, but I went to toilet very often, maybe 20 - 30 for the whole day. It was really annoying. Fortunately, I remembered that my mother gave me some tablets for this, so I started using it. I hope that I will sleep at night and not going to toilet every a half an hour.

Anyway, I got up at 2:30 in the afternoon and after that chatted with some people on Skype - with Japanese lady, Chizu, who wrote to me in order to ask me how I was doing. Last week, we had a conversation and I felt stressed a bit because a tutor of the conversation had fun from something...but never mind. That's why Chizu asked me how well I was. Then I recorded some Czech podcasts and put them in Rhinospike. I really like helping and supporting people with learning Czech. Unfortunately, not many people want to learn Czech. I always wonder why somebody wants to learn Czech. SO I must always ask them what reason they have. However I am really glad that they are people who like learning Czech. I wish they were more such people learning Czech.

Anyway, at 4:45 in the afternoon I had first food, although I heated only a soup in the microwave. I ate it very quickly because my conversation with Harry started at 5 p.m. I really like having conversations with him. Today he told me that he started learning Chinesse. He is really keen on learning languages. He is learning German, Spanish and now even Chinesse. I really admire him. He is only 17 and he is so much interested in languages. When I was as young as he is, I was not interested in languages at all. What a pity, because otherwise I would be able now speak in many languages. But on the other hand, nowdays with modern technology, such computers, mp3 players, intertet, everything is so much easier than it used to be. The conversation took something about 50 minutes.

Anyway, one hour later, my parents called me as every Sunday. It was terrible, because the Internet was down very often while calling. So sometimes we did not hear each other, sometimes it was frozen, sometimes it dropped. The most important is that I spoke with my parents and that we said to each other what we wanted. They are a bit older and even I am 28 years old, I am sometimes like a small kid for them, mainly for me mother. the conversation with my parents took around 1 hour.

Anyway, something about 8:30 I had my second food - pasta with ketchup. It reminds me, my british housemate always wonders that I eat pasta or spagheti with ketchup. I dont know, for me it is really normal. I have been eating it since my childhood. It is not strange for me at all. My friend from Brasil told me that she eats beans with rice, it sounds strange for me, but I dont say anything, because I know that everyone is used to eating something else, since we grow up in different culture.

Today, I was shaving (my baeard) because my face was really hairy and I have been told that I look a lot of older than I am when I am wearing beard.

What should I say about my evaluation today? Well, today it was not so good again, because I did not feel still well. I really were not in mood to do any stuff for my university today. I already feel bad because I havent done anything for university for quite long time. However, I listened to English podcasts, I watched American series, I practised writing in English and even in German. I wrote my first note in diary in German, although it was really short.

Tomorrow, I wont have any conversation on Lingq, although my tutor should come in to my room. I must think some topic to talk about. Talking with him is always enjoyable and he always gives me good advice. Tomorrow, I hope that I will do something for my research. WE WILL SEE!

I am going to bed to get some sleep, but before I am going to watch one or two episodes of "Friends".
Well, that’s everything for today. Goodbye, see you tomorrow!

My primary school was named Zhao Jia Chang, the ancient name of this area. It is located beyond the main street, just a stone’s throw away from my home. Surrounding the school were all residential areas. The people who live there have been to this primary school for generations. The school was small and old, and there were six old trees planted in the small playground. One of the trees was so huge that it took at least three kids linking their arms together，to completely encircle its trunk. Our classrooms were in large bungalows. In summer, the rooms were stuffy and warm because there were no ceiling fans, and in winter, I still remember, our teacher had to arrive at school early to light the furnace in each room. The conditions then were poor compared with those of today, but my school life was enjoyable and colorful. I used to find bats, frogs and other small animals in the far corners of the playground. Now due to the development of the city, this is no longer possible. Our teachers were patient, and praised us as soon as we made a little progress. The most impressive thing was the big, old, iron bell. The doorman knocked on it to signal the time when a class began and ended/, but if several pupils who were taking their PE class in the playground got a chance, they liked to knock on the bell as a practical joke.

Okay... So Im writing a book. Here's this specific character details:Looks For a Good Time, Positive, Out Going and Crazy. Not into relationships, to most people's surprise. Extremely supportive of people's decisions . Not a huge prissy gossiper, tends to be a more southern hospitality kind of person. Doesn't take much too seriously. Okay at giving advice, but doesn't like to give it often.
So Im looking for some phrases to get down her normal dialouge... for ex. "It's Whatever" or "That's Cool" "Whatever you say, hun" . Like some basic kind of phrases she would say. They don't need to be like the ones above, just some phrases on how you would picture a character like this. PS: if it makes any sort of difference or sparks some ideas, she has Latino roots. THE PERSON WITH THE MOST (GOOD) PHRASES GETS THE BEST ANSWER!

hi how are you

HOWL

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver-joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

There is a natural park named Xi Gu Park near my home. It is located in Hongqiao district. Tianjin, my hometown, is famous for 72 Gu and xi Gu is one place of them. As Gu means a place with several small rivers and lakes, Xi Gu Park is a wonderful place for children to play in their free time. In my childhood, I loved tons of trees grown on the river sides and I always found fun hunting grasshoppers, listening to birds chirping on tree tops and catching fish on the riverside. Unluckily, the beautiful scenery has gone with the wind. After my university study life, I came to the park for tracking down memory lane. This short trip really did give me a surprise. Rows of trees were demolished for placing large amusement equipment. Without trees and grass, sand was blown away, which made me feel like being in a desert. Walking around this park, I didn't hear any birds chirping and find any small insects either except flies and mosquitoes. What's worse, all rivers so stank, which almost predicted the end of Xi Gu Park. Small green plants covered the surface of rivers, like a grassy lawn but a strong smell filled the air. So sad! No fish swimming in rivers! No birds flying in sky! A load of plastic wastes were thrown away all around! I really miss what the park was like before.

-10, -9, -8, -7, -6, -5, -4, -3, -2, -1,
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19,
20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29,
30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39,
40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49,
50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59,
60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69,
70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79,
80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89,
90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99,
100

13, 30
14, 40
15, 50
16, 60
17, 70
18, 80
19, 90

$13　$30
$14　$40
$15　$50
$16　$60
$17　$70
$18　$80
$19　$90
$100

1313 B.C.
1330 B.C.
3013 B.C.
3030 B.C.

-2 - (-3) = 1
-2 + (-3) = -5

2 × 4 + 5 = 13
2 × (4 + 5) = 18

~~Susan Sarandon Finds Her Grandmother,
And In Doing So, Finds Herself(Part-2)~~~~~~~
2010.6.20

Sarandon assumed it was just too painful for her grandmother to reach out and try to find those children that were stripped from her. She also lied about her age when she got married, which made things tougher for her to be found but also, Sarandon thinks, was probably a way for her to move on from the atrocities of her past and try to reinvent herself in a way.

Reinvention is something that is key for an actor, and Sarandon admitted that in learning about her grandmother through this show's arc, she has found similarities between them. "Some of the tenacity and curiosity that Anita had, I feel I've inherited. And certainly there is some physical resemblance," she said.
But what was best for her throughout this whole experience was that it "gave my mother a little bit more peace of mind to have a sense of what happened...We had vague notions of early beginnings on that side of the family, but it was nice to finally have some sense of closure."

Therefore, Sarandon would recommend this process to anyone looking to track down a long-lost family member or even a friend. "I think it's important, especially for our kids, to have a sense of where they came from. And it's funny because we're dealing with so many immigration issues in the world, and we forget that we're a nation of immigrants! It's really wonderful to be able to reflect on how difficult it was and how brave they were to come here-- most of the time without even the language, and with very few resources.

Certainly, I think they were people who would have preferred to stay where their family support system was, but they migrated because they were escaping very, very difficult, bleak times."

Sarandon's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? is the second to last for the season and airs tonight at 8pm only on NBC. Sarandon will also be co-starring in HBO's original movie, You Don’t Know Jack, as one of Dr. Jack Kevorkian's closest friends on April 24th.

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2010/04/23/susan_sarandon_finds_her_grandmother_a ♪

<Susan Sarandon Finds Her Grandmother, And In Doing So, Finds Herself>--(part 1) 2010.6.20 ♪

Friday, April 23rd on NBC, the newest episode of Lisa Kudrow's Who Do You Think You Are? features Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon, a woman who is no stranger to the journey of delving into one's history. After all, she appeared on the Welsh spin-off of the original U.K. program in search of answers about her grandfather. There she learned how even the smallest villages would send off their men to America but leave the little ones behind simply because they couldn't feed them. The positive experience she had on that show was ultimately what led her to agree to do it all over again for American television.

"I had no idea what happened to my grandmother-- a woman who was so close in time to me," Sarandon explained on a conference call with Starpulse late last week. So when Kudrow approached her to air even more of her family history out on national television, Sarandon didn't even blink, knowing the story would be interesting and worthwhile.

"You know how family stories go as they get passed down," she started. "I had heard that [my grandmother] was a less than responsible mother and that her children had been taken from her-- they were in foster care and eventually in Catholic charities-- but the tale that I didn't learn until much, much later was that she had gotten pregnant at twelve and had her first baby at thirteen, which changed my whole framing of the issue."
The story Sarandon learned as she embarked on the filming of the episode all those months ago was indeed unique (she learned that her grandmother had even dated original Rat Packer Frank Sinatra—a discovery that was particularly thrilling for Sarandon’s mom, who raised her own children playing his music aloud in the house in the afternoons) but some might wonder why she would want to expose so much of herself in front of an audience.

Sarandon simply put it that "it was a small price to pay that people were discovering it as I was discovering it because I really wanted to know what had happened to her, and I didn't have the skills that [the production] had in tracking her down."

In tonight's episode audiences will learn alongside Sarandon the reasoning for her grandmother's struggles: her own mother had died after having ten children (only three survived) at a fairly young age, leaving Sarandon's grandmother when she was only ten. That had to weigh heavily on her and affect her greatly. "Immediately my sympathy for her was complete when you look at it as this little girl, left without her mom," Sarandon shared. "I still don't know how she managed to survive between the time her children were taken away...This woman who could be so bitter or a drug addict or God knows what, managed to stay afloat with dignity and love and finally ended up having a really sweet little life."

http://www.starpulse.com/news/index.php/2010/04/23/susan_sarandon_finds_her_grandmother_a

Today is June 20, 2010. It is morning, and it is the fifth day that I am writing in my diary. Just a note: this is from the previous day, June 19.
Today It will be a little bit shorter note than the days before, because I've been feeling sick for the whole day. I went to bed at 6 o'clock in the morning and got up at 1:45p.m. I woke up several times during the night, because I felt cold. It was terrible night and I dont remember when I experienced similar night before. Even though I still feel sick, I decided to write in my diary, because I dont want to leave out any single day. I know that if I skip one day, I easily skip other day as well. Next thing is that I can write down in my diary even diffent stuff - just like about feeling, sickness, pains, which can be helpfull for increasing my vocabulary. I can really practise everything while writing diary.
Anyway, at 2 p.m. I should have had a group conversation with a british tutor, Harry, and with a Japanese lady, Hiroko. Unfortunately, Harry did not give me a call at that time. Usually a tutor should give a call at the arranged time. I have already had a lot of conversations with Harry and he has never missed any conversations, so I wondered what had happened. I told myself that Harry must have forgotten it. Fortunatelly, Harry wrote to me in the evening that his Internet went down for 8 hours and that it was not possible to be on the Internet. He was very sorry and he even said that he wanted to make it up by giving me a free conversation in the future. I told him that it is okay and that it can happen to everyone. My internet is often down, so I understand it well. I felt sick at that time anyway, so it would not have been a good conversation since my brain does not think in English as good as when I feel normaly. I went to bed and slept for several hours because I felt really terrible.
After I got up, I prepared some sentences for my German conversation in the evening, even if I felt still bad. I dont have German conversations so often, so I wanted to be prepared, because time really flies and who knows what it will be in a few months when I get back to the Czech Republic. I mean, if I have to find a job, It will be good to know English and German. So, I just dont want to waste any time, otherwise I would have lied in my bad in order to feel better. The German conversation started at 8p.m and it took an hour. It was really great. We went through the text that I had prepared. My tutor, Reinhard, corrected it while we went though that text and after the conversation he send me a conversation repport with MP3 audio file where was these sentences recorded.
I havent had a lot of food today, just a mushroom soup and pasta with pasta sauce. Unfortunately, I put into it so much spice that it was really hot and so my mouth.
I had to turn on the central heating in the evening and to put on warm clothes, such as sweathshirt and sweatpants. I feel usually hot, not cold, so I can always recognise that someting is wrong with me.
I feel terrible that I did not do anything for my university today as well as yesterday and day before yesterday, but today I felt really bad. Today, I dont want to primse you anything, my diary, it depends how I will feel tomorrow, but if I will be better, I will certainly do something. Today I signed up for tomorrow's conversation with Harry, so hopefully I will feel better. I will write down what we will talk about and then I will write it in diary.
What should I say about my evaluation today? Well, today it was not so good since I slept a lot, but I still think that I did something at least. I would feel very terrible if I would not have done anything. Well, I listened to English and German for some time, I watched series and I prepared for german conversation and had a conversation in German. So I think that I did a lot even if I am sick. I hope that it will be better tomorrow. I am going to bed to get some sleep.
Well, that’s everything for today. Goodbye, see you tomorrow!