A mail occurrence:

Recently, I go to go get my mail from my mailbox up by the front house, and there in the box is a single letter, and it contains a return receipt from a national charitable organization that I had made a donation to around the holidays, with the outside envelope saying something like RECEIPT ENCLOSED, and the one end of the envelope is hastily torn open in a big ragged flap, like someone has been looking for money.

Two sights in one day:

1) I go to do something in my kitchen, and I look out the window towards the front house, only to see some motion and a flash of like a giant half-eaten bread roll towards the top and back of a big needle-bearing bush, and there I also briefly see glimpses of a very large squirrel, eating and scrambling, as the branches sway and move and then go shaking back slowly into place.

2) At the local library, a group of librarians are gathered in a group behind the front desk and a (blonde) (middle-aged) one who has told me about her childhood trauma before has a guitar out, and she begins deftly strumming the guitar part to Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," as a (middle middle-aged) (dreaded) (hair pulled-back) (black) (female) patron leaning on the counter and looking at something starts singing along, including the "Hey farmer farmer, put away your DDT now" verse.

Addendum.

Since I've had my big discovery on the one ancient language that I've been working on for a few years, now, I notice that I'm not quite there all the time; it's like my head is in a different place. Like, I'm not quite keyed in to other stuff I'm doing or my normal social interactions, and I'm kind of letting regular social interactions like texting friends drop away without noticing that it's happening, until I go to text someone and I see that it's been over a week since we'd last talked that way, when usually it would be only a few days, at most.

Somehow I feel like I'm going to be like this all year, through discovery debut and beyond.

I'm just like "in the zone."

A conversation with a local artist.

A few weeks ago I was socializing with this one (later middle-aged) (ostracized) local artist who I've gotten to know from around town in the (college) town that I now live in, and I was gushing about my big finding in the one ancient language that I've been studying for a few years, now.

And, I told her that I felt that it was super weird, but it made me think about death, and I was actually writing up everything in nuce in a file to give to a confidante or two or maybe even three, so that the findings can reach the world in case I accidentally get hit by a car or something before I have a chance to publicly present them, since it's such a major advancement for the entire history of that language's study, it would be a shame if somehow it didn't reach the light now, since who knows when someone else would come along who would have that same major realization again.

Like, there's other stuff I'm working on with that language, but other people could get that stuff with a little effort, so I try to get that out there quickly but I don't really worry about it in the same way at all, while this is just a whole different level of work, both in intricacy and importance.

"No, I get it," she was like, and she said that back when she was in the process of making the one big project that she's kind of known for, she often had the thought, "Please don't let me die now, I need to get this thing done, then I can go," and she said that it was refreshing to be around someone who was in that same headspace.

She also gave me one big piece of life advice: 

Never make enough money to where you can't qualify for Medicaid, since Medicaid is like the bomb.

Several occurrences on one recent day at work...

...at the one (Thai) restaurant where I work now:

1) When I tell my coworkers that I'm going to the bathroom so that they know that I'm temporarily not around, my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker starts a new thing, where she shakes her head and gravely and very firmly says "No, no, noooo," like I don't have permission to go do that, and she does that several times over the course of the shift (I was drinking a lot of Diet Coke that day).

2) A (dumpy) (nerdy) (poorly-groomed) (young grad-student age) (white) guy comes in with a(n out-of-it) (eyeglassed) (well-groomed) (strange-eyed) (slightly older grad-student age) (Chinese from China) woman, and after they both say water with ice and I bring it to them, the woman touches the glass and immediately says that the water is too cold, and she sends it back and asks for water without ice, now, instead.

3) A (fatter) (older) (bleached out) (decently bald) (white) (fluffy-haired) man with (big blank eyes) and a (big) (fat) (belly) that he rests his arms on when sitting comes in with a(n older) (trim) (brown-skinned) (dark curly-haired) (very well-dressed) (vaguely-accented) woman who he keeps calling "my lady," and she is disappointed that we don't have the full range of (Japanese) food anymore "because of the pandemic" (like I always say), and she says she needs more time to order and right after that the guy jumps in and gives me his order and then she says right after that that she needs more time to order, and later when I come back to the table, she asks me about two entrees but says she doesn't like spicy and so I direct her to one of the two but she seems uncomfortable with that choice even when I say that she shouldn't try the other one if she doesn't like any spice at all, which she or maybe him had said, and when a bit later we serve the vegetable egg roll appetizer that she ordered she points to it and says "Is that veggie?", and later when my one (chubby) (Thai) coworker serves the food she asks for brown rice instead, which takes time to heat up, and when my coworker brings it out, she's eaten half her food, already, and she seems unhappy, and later the guy brings the bill all the way up to the front of the restaurant, and suddenly seems in a hurry.

(As soon as he leaves, "Two eighty-four," my one [older] [Thai] coworker who's a whiz at the phones says, pointing to the tip line on the like $45 bill, at which I'm like, "Yeah, they're very weird people.")

4) When I go into the kitchen at the end of shift, my one (young) (silver-toothed) (Guatemalan) coworker with the strong (indigenous) accent is sweeping up the floor as part of his end-of-night duties, and among all the random kitchen crap that he's sweeping up, right there in the middle of it is a single crab rangoon. "?Puedo comer?" ('Can I eat?') I'm like as I slightly stoop and point like I'm about to go pick it up, at which he pauses with his broom and looks at me, and then is like, "Si, senor" ('Yes, sir'), and then giggles.

. . .

Appreciative text about a gift...

...from my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend (the sister of the brother-sister pair), after I brought her and her family some lemon poppy seed bread from a local bakery that makes good dessert breads:

Your cake was finished the day after you left. The kids keep asking for some and I'm like "you ate it all!" And then they go "oh yeh.."

. . .

(She always does follow-up letting you know how her kids like any gifts. She also told me verbally that they loved the locally-made sausages I brought them last time, and to bring more.)

A good year.

Recently, I had a major major major breakthrough with the one ancient language that I've been studying intensively for the past like 5 years, and it's put me in an extremely good mood, where I've been feeling like high for like a month.

So, basically, with this language, although I don't think it could have been avoided, they f*cked up something big that goes right to the heart of the grammar and right to the heart of major texts, and though it doesn't so much affect current translation values as perceive different structures and add a few nuances and open up translations into difficult passages, not to mention streamline the story of the language's development over time and make it vastly more intelligible, it seems pretty decisive, and once some details are worked out and it gets accepted by the field, no-one will ever be able to learn this well-known language without going through me and my major insight, ever again, and all the grammars that have ever been written will just look wonky and off, in at least one major portion of them.

The past few things I've done with this language have been pretty big picture too, but this is so much bigger picture, it doesn't even compare.

Like, with just around 40% of this idea, when I mentioned it to an old friend over the phone, she was like, "They didn't know that?".

Though there's good work going on with this language, and increasingly so, it really does make the whole field look like shit.

Like, on a listhost I'm on, they recently had an advertisement for an open enrollment language course put on out of some academic place, and I just kept reading it and was like, "I can't believe there's people out there teaching this language right now without knowing this," it's just that insane.

And, it makes everything so much simpler and less esoteric to learn, that I feel it's just going to set some people in the field off, where, to the extent that they are forced to notice or engage with it, they will be absolutely vicious and attempt to tear me down in any way possible, since it's just that big.

For the first time ever perhaps in my life, too, I have found myself thinking, "This is going to be a good year."

I'm not sure if I've ever really thought in those terms, before.

That said, I'm typing all this up and putting it in a Word file and entrusting it to like 3 people, so they can release it to another scholar for them to put online in case something should happen to me like I get hit by a car, because that would really, really suck, both for me, and for study of that language as a whole.