Some other randoms tidbits…

…of late:

1) One night after work as I’m getting off the bus I thank the bus driver as I always do as I pass by them, and I see it’s a (late middle-aged) (done-up) (Latina) woman, and I recognize her from a local human-interest newspaper story about her and her family’s immigration story from (Latin Amercia), and so I do a double-take and am like, “Are you the celebrity?”, and I add, “From the newspaper?”, and she’s like, “Exactly!”, and she seems a bit happy to be recognized, probably since it’s a late night and it's a repetitive job and it’s something different and fun that happened, to be recognized, when she sits practically all day long every workday (something also mentioned in the newspaper story).

2) My one (middle-aged) (white) (remarried mom) coworker says that her and her boyfriend’s cat is out-of-control, and he’ll not only get outside, but actually go into other people’s houses.

3) Besides the typical homelessness set-up on the front porch of the township building, there’s now a tent pitched alongside the left wall, when you look at it from the street.

An endearing malapropism of my mother.

When she asks me about what exactly I’m studying so much with the one foreign language that I’m studying a lot for dual citizenship purposes – I honestly have been studying for more than an hour a day during certain stretches these past number of months – I tell her that it’s not really related to anything that anyone would know and that it also doesn’t have borrowings like from Latin, so almost all of the vocabulary is completely unrecognizable and unpredictable, and so I’m just memorizing thousands and thousands and thousands of new words, otherwise you can barely navigate texts or interactions at all, without that fundamental base of knowledge.

“So you’re really starting from Ground Zero, aren’t you?”, she’s like, trying to understand.

Some doings on a visit with my parents:

1) I discover an invasive species that's taken hold towards the front of their lot and I go to pull it out, though I ask some neighbors who are sitting out on a porch-swing if I can come around through their yard for one section of that, because that's the easiest method of access to go and take it out.

"Of course," the one (old) (white) (lady) is like. "We won't shoot you."

2) After I've peeled and sliced a cucumber from the local farmer's market near my parents' house, I bring a slice over to my father, so he can taste how good it is.

And, he grabs that little round slice, and he gestures with it in a cross-form as he puts on a solemn face, intoning, "In nomine patro filio..."

(His Latin was wrong, but he got the joke across.)

Two recent linguistic observations:

1) When I recently bumped into the one (gay) (Colombian) graduate student who I know from the neighborhood, I started speaking (Spanish) with him, and he responded back to my asking how he was by saying something about how he much he has been working lately, but the way he said "trabajo" ("I'm working"), it's like the b was barely articulated or maybe even absent, and what was left was a lot like a long vowel in a word that sounds a lot like traajo.

When I pointed this out to him, he said that that happens with the way he says words like nada ("nothing"), too, like they sound like naa, and that that particular pronunciation practice confuses and annoys his (Brazilian) boyfriend to no end, when they speak (Spanish) together and he pronounces a word like that.

He also said that this is much broader than a (Colombian) thing, but when I told him that I don't hear pronunciation like that from my (Mexican) and (Guatemalan) coworkers, he said maybe it's because they take pity on me and speak slowly and enunciate whenever they're talking with me.

(Personally, I think it's probably that he's just not quite keyed into this linguistic feature and who uses it from where. It's very distinctive... I also pointed out to him that oblivion is the end result of intervocalic lenition of these sounds, like how Latin cadere "to fall" had already become Spanish caer, only now it's happening more and more everywhere.)

2)  A bit ago towards the end of one dinner shift at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now, my one (smiley) (Guatemalan) coworker came up to me out of nowhere and started saying to me in (English) "Have a good night," repeating it over and over again and just smiling at me in between every time he said it.

And, he was just smiling, not only because it was like he was messing with me in a good-natured way, but also because he knew something in (English), though he then went on to ask me what exactly it meant, what he was saying.

Interestingly, his pronunciation was pretty amazing, and he even substituted out the final "-t" of "night" and put in a glottal stop instead, just like speakers do in casual (English).

You could tell that a native speaker had practiced that phrase with him, or that he had absorbed that phrase from overhearing native speakers.

You could also tell that his (native) language must almost certainly contain a phonemic glottal stop, for him to recognize and remember that sound there, in a phrase using the sound system of (English). It would be a very weird thing for him to pick up on and repeat, if he didn't already know that sound from somewhere.

Two more recent-ish events:

1) One night when I'm at the local brewery, there's two (early 30s-ish) guys -- one (white), one (Latin) -- talking about coding and start-ups, and the (likely neurodivergent) (white) guy asks for samples so he can decide on a beer, somehow asking for and getting a sample of like every single one of the 12+ beers they offer, just blithely doing that, to help him make his decision.

2) One afternoon I go to plug in my radio, and it doesn't work no matter how much I fiddle with it, and then I catch a bus to the nearby "pocket Target" near campus to see if I can get a new one, but they don't carry that, and then when I get home, I plug the radio in to try it again and it's suddenly working, only for it to conk out for good like three or four days later, no matter how much I fiddle with it.

Two impressions and one observation from a summer trip to the city that I used to live in:

1) At the hostel that I’ve been tending to stay in that has cheap single rooms – I could stay with friends, but my friends who all have room are in bad locations, and my friends who are all in good locations don’t really have room – there was a group (family?) of (Italian) tourists at the (free) continental breakfast spread in the kitchen in the morning, as I could tell from snatches of their conversation that were reaching me, as well as their modest but put-together style on all of them. And, at the very end of the meal, the (older gentleman) and the (dad guy?) and the (mom woman?) slowly sidled up to the wall, and each slyly took their phones from their pockets, and photographed something on it above the wall-radiator there.

After bussing my dishes, then, I walked by there to look, and there on the wall was a very small framed sign with a single saying in (English) that said --

YOUR MOTHER IS NOT HERE

PLEASE CLEAN UP YOUR MESS

-- and I can only surmise that signs like that simply do not exist in (Italy), and to them it must be a burst of incisive analysis, and wit.

I wonder if they put that on their Facebook profiles, or something.

2) In one part of the downtown area, the amount of (Latin American) (migrants) was breathtaking, with at least 30-40 people out by this intersection where a temporary shelter had been set up in a former hotel, with people out on the street by the hotel, and sitting out on the curb and on little chairs all set up all up and down the street towards and even right by this 7-11 like half a block away down a side street.

3) My one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the sister-brother pair) was saying how she had been reading that in one other (major metropolitan) city (recent) (Latin American) (migrants) were getting free access passes to the city check-outtable bike system there, and she was a bit enraged since “these people just show up and get that,” but it’s not the same case for the poor people who’ve been living here forever.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she was like, “I think everyone should have housing and bikes, but you can’t do that without trying to help the people who were here first.”

. . .

Summer reading.

So, after spending all last summer on a close reading of an infamous heretical text, my one (Mormon) colleague and I have decided on one of our big reading projects for this coming summer:

Petronius's Satyricon.

. . .

I love how he's this (Mormon) family guy, but reads just the weirdest shit in his time off... We had discussed reading another Latin text, maybe Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, but there wasn't a good reading aide edition, so we ended up with the Petronius. LOL.

Restaurant people (1 of 2): A monolingual customer.

The other day this (younger) (stubbled) (slightly prematurely greying) (rugged face) guy with a stylish coat and backpack came in, and he would speak into his phone and show it to me, and it turned out that he was a monolingual (Chilean) and je had come in to have lunch at the place where his friend from the local adult ed center's ESL class worked.

"Quien?", I was like ("Who?").

And, he said something like, "El guatemalteco" ("The Guatemalan"), and then he said something like, "El poquito" ("The short one"), and he made a wincing face and gestured with his chin downwards, to indicate that his friend is the (very short) guy who works in the kitchen, and who I later saw come out to say hi to him.

Overall, I tried to speak (Spanish) with him, but I kept accidentally mixing in (Romanian) -- orez for arroz ("rice"), and o for una ("a" with feminine singular nouns) -- and he kept looking at me like I was on crack whenever I did that, since it wasn't like bad (American English speaker) (Spanish), it was something else entirely, and just f*cking whack.

So, I explained to him that I study Romanian, and that it's like Italian and French and Spanish and Portuguese, and it's a daughter language of Latin.

And, he didn't know that, but he seemed intrigued, and later he said something about my language for where I come from, which I had to correct him about, since I'm not from there, I'm just an American who's studying it.

At some point, too, I also tried explaining "peanut" as "arahida," and he had to look it up and then made an "oooh" sound and was like, "Mani."

He also said that he works at the Panera Bread out by the mall, and he's been here for 8 months, and he came here for work.

When he left, for some reason he said "usted" for me (???), but I was like, "No no no no, soy un tu, soy un hombre informal, no necesitas dicer usted" ("No no no no, I'm an 'informal you,' I'm an informal person, you don't need to say 'polite you.'").

I really have no idea what the f*ck was up with that contextually, considering I was his waiter. Do people usually say "usted" to waiters?

A bit of fondness about the Romanian language.

Something that's really grown on me is how crazy it is that there's this group of people out in the Balkans calling themselves Romans this and Romans that like two thousand years after the empire had crumbled there, and actual Romans would be appalled at whatever their language had become, where there's this plural case marker that's "-lor" that must come from the Latin genitive plural "illorum," but you can use for the genitive *or* for the dative.

I honestly think Romans wouldn't know what the hell to make of it, it's just crazy.

I honestly think they could more understand something like Spanish that had lost all of the cases, than whatever the hell that thing is.

History can be pretty f*cking whack.

A Dream of Objects (1 of 2): Spice.

Last month I dreamnt -

I had a spice container in my hand and I turned it over, and there was a label saying "Cardinal," and I knew that that was pronounced "car-dee-NAHL" and came from Latin and meant "paprika" in Spanish.

And then, I woke up.

. . .

Observation, on the languages of resthome coworkers.

Last month at the resthome, I was going through the lobby because of something, and there was my one (Mexican) coworker standing there for some reason talking to the one (Romanian) receptionist.

And, both were speaking (English), but it was striking to me how both are products of vastly different cultures and places, but both speak a descendant of (Latin), in one case brought across the ocean to a new continent.

Just something to think about.

Banter with this one resthome resident who had been a professor.

The other week I was chit-chatting with this one (Jewish) resthome resident who had been a professor and who had gotten her doctorate from a Jesuit university.

"You know what they say about the Jesuits, don't you?", I was like.  "Si itis cum Iesuitis, non cum Iesu itis."

And, since she doesn't know Latin, I translated it for her:

"If you walk with the Jesuits, you don't walk with Jesus."

(It's punchier in Latin.)

"But I'm not Christian," she was like, "So I'm very happy to walk with the Jesuits."

My regimen returns.

So, after my worktrip abroad, I began doing what I've been meaning to do for a while, beginning again my reading and writing regimen that I had back in graduate school.

Which is, I write down in quarter hour increments how much time I've actually spent reading and writing, and I try to hit a certain number of hours per day or per week or whatever.

My current goal is at least 16 hours a week of reading and writing, with at least 4 hours of writing among that, and so far I've had no problem hitting it.

I also shelled out like sixty-five bucks and bought an app for my smartphone that lets me block the internet for huge chunks of time. 

I've been using that to restrict myself most days from online stuff during the morning and the evenings, and it really helps to detox you from national events and get you in touch with what's happening around you.

Some mornings I have my coffee and work on Egyptian in the late morning light, and it's just so idyllic.

I used to do that with Latin and Greek and Hebrew, and now I'm back there.

Resthome Coworkers and Languages (1 of 2): More for them.

My one pensive (Tibetan) coworker asked me for advice on learning Spanish, since she also works in an upscale grocery store in food prep and her coworkers there largely speak Spanish in the kitchen.

First off, since she used to be a teacher back in India, she's very educated, so I quickly quizzed her on English vocabulary like "carnivore," which she knew, so I told her that it would be easy for her to memorize words like "carne" for "meat" because of similar vocabulary in English and Spanish due to Latin and French words in English.

Second off, I told her that I had a few good books that I'd bring in the next time that we worked, so I did, and she's currently looking through them and thinking about getting copies.  One is a nice little phrasebook that's set up well, and another is a larger, clear grammar, in case you want to dig in deeper on any particular aspect of the grammar.

Isn't it kind of cool, that this (Tibetan) woman from India who knows Tibetan and Hindi and English, is now learning Spanish?

What a wonderful world we live in.

A dispute on (Mexican) Spanish.

My one (Mexican) coworker at the rest home sometimes lets me talk to her in Spanish, and the other day I was telling her about going to see a film and I used the word “la peli,” but she didn’t know what that was and she corrected me to “la pelicula.”

So, I broke into English and told her that I had just seen a (younger) (Mexican) friend use that word on Facebook for “la pelicula,” so I had assumed that it was okay.

She still hadn’t heard of it.

So, I had to take out my phone and google “la peli” to show her that it was okay to use that in some Latin American cultures, and of course it was.

I wonder if she’s been here so long that maybe with the media she watches and her being off the internet and the people that she talks to, she isn’t necessarily plugged into the words that a person from the same country who’s 40 and under might say?

I told that to her, and she thought that it could be the case.

A dream of opera.

The other night before bed I was reading a history of opera, and I had just finished reading a part about how with Beethoven's only opera he wrote he wrote multiple overtures for it that he was dissatisfied with but some of which were really good and so sometimes people would find a reason to insert them into some place in the middle of the opera, and then I dreamnt:

I'm in the front row of an opera house, but also above it, and the lighting is dim and there's an open boat full of like cargo sitting on water, and somehow I know it's the hold, and there's a man in rags lying down, and I know that soon the music in the score will stop, and he'll rouse from his sleep and start singing and that's the point where they'll insert a song that's not supposed to be in the opera.

Then, that happens, and the man gets up, except now he's a woman, and he's on the stage, which isn't a stage now, but it's water, and she's slowly swimming in the water towards the front of the stage while singing operatically, and the music is quiet and simple and the words I can remember are just a repeated Latin-y phrase that's supposed to be an imperative plural and a vocative plural, but both are nothing I recognize vocabulary-wise, and the next thing I know the woman is at the very front of the stage and there I am in my seat, and I see how the stage has been turned into a giant pool, with like a big barrier with big crinkles that is holding all the water in, though some sloshes over a little bit at the top, and I think how experimental that all is, and how incredible it is that a woman can sing like that while swimming.

. . .

And then I wake up.

Random thoughts on my academic preparation.

I'm much happier working in the resthome where I'm at, and not being walking on eggshells among the corrupt and malfeasant in academia, while investing 80-hour workweeks over years for no money and no certain career or even a certain offramp where you can make ends meet as you try to transition out and transition into a more stable career.

But, the other day I was thinking about all the languages I know, and how many hours I'd spent putting into learning Greek and Latin and Hebrew and whatnot.

So many hours, over simply years and years; the courses, and the summer courses, and the mornings at my kitchen table a few times a week, with texts and language aides and study cards that I'd make up.

I enjoyed it and I'm glad I did it, but it's simply odd, that it's not being used somehow.

I honestly have these file folders with texts of Eusebius and Origen that I'd read in the original, on something vaguely related to my research interest but more just something I was interested in in order to help me master the language.

It's so strange, that it's just locked away in there.

Maybe one day I'll go back.  If I ever turn my dissertation into a pop book, the project after the next project after that will involve the languages, "should I live so long."

It's not obvious any more that I'll have the ability to get around to those projects, though I more probably will if I lose my campaign, since I can see how my resthome job dovetails nicely with long days off at home where I sit and rest up and read and write.

In a way, it's the academy's loss, that they don't have a home for a competent person of good will.  Just sad.

Addendum.

You really don't think about it until you type it out (or at least I don't?), but "deodorant" is really like "de-" and "odor" and maybe like an "-ant" suffix from Latin, where it's the thing that takes the odor off of you.

City begging is really up.

I'm really surprised how much begging is happening in the city on the subway, it seems like a lot more than usual.

Young people, too.

A lot of times, I see someone (Latin) or (black) who's going through asking for money, and they have decent clothes on and don't seem addicted to drugs or anything.

It really must be lack of work, or the general shittiness of jobs out there.

Everywhere I look, the economy just seems weak and listless.  No one can get where they want, and there's this odd energy building up, since their energies are derailed into that, and causing weird restlessness and dissatisfaction.

It's really an abnormal and untenable situation.  Something's got to give.

Warning of a teenager on my street.

The other afternoon it was cold but very sunshine-y and I was walking down my street to my apartment on my way back from the grocery store, and this (young) (Latin) guy was walking up toward me, and looking over his shoulder nervously at a van parked a quarter block behind him and idling with its rear doors thrown open.

"Hey man," he was like, "Be careful, that van, you never know, this city is crazy."

And at that he walked past me, at that same quickened pace he had been walking at.