And so it happened that it was cold, and that we could wear jackets. And it was good.
It’s not the first time this has happened, but I’m not entirely sure what I ought to be saying. It’s like the toothpaste you forget to push to the end of the tube, or the shampoo you end up trying to squeeze out. It’s like getting stabbed, and then taking out the knife (you haven’t been stabbed, have you?). Okay, then it’s like not knowing when to panic when you’re on a sinking boat and the water is rushing up your neck, and (especially if you’re Leonardo DiCaprio) you’re handcuffed to that ship.
I had a coffee yesterday, which I am positive had no coffee in it, but instead of doing anything about it, I just drank it. It’s a sad life I lead, and I am becoming more and more angry at myself. I have options, true, but each one is more terrifying than the next. I’m insanely jealous and profoundly lazy. I feel misanthropic, and each and every time someone chastises me, I come a bit closer to a catastrophic meltdown. It takes a lot more courage to live than I think I’ve got; I should have been made of sterner stuff. I can recognize that giving and loving is still important, but I also still see people who shut themselves off and, giving nothing, receive nothing.
Have you ever felt that strange feeling, that when a person who was your constant companion, also around and loving, just isn’t anymore? I’ve been trying to explain it for a long time, I think. It’s a little bit like looking out through a cold, frosted window at the cars passing below you. You’re trying to hear, but there just isn’t any sound.
If one more person tells me that I should be able to pronounce any English word simply by looking at the way its spelled, I think I just might scream. You know what I’m thinking about, when someone asks you to read aloud, and as you stumble on the first word out of hundreds, they start tapping their foot. That we should be able to pronounce a single word correctly in even meager voices is astonishing, but the fact that we are daily expected talk our mouths off in coherent, even complex conversation is next to godliness. Language is perhaps the single most under appreciated but overwhelming important functions we perform in life. Language is the great enabler, and it’s rarely that we are thankful for that.
Every exceptional prophet has an equally righteous, yet less prominent brother. Jesus had John the Baptist, for example, and Language has English. In many ways, I actually do mean to evidence disdain for my mother tongue. Being a native speaker of a given language is a bit like having a depressed friend on your rare, internally sunny days; the fun is literally vaporized (and not in the fun way that happens on Star Trek). English is lingua franca of the world for the moment, and while that title does float, for the moment, English is our great enabler. Part of this glory is also shared as its downfall. English is historically complex; for example its Germanic roots are combined with Norman French, Latin, and even Greek. It is morphologically poor and phonetically diverse, with an orthography to make anyone’s head simply explode. It’s popularity is literally stretching it from all corners of the globe into new directions of new people and new cultures. It’s an exciting time to speak English, but it sure does make writing difficult.
English is the first language for up to 400 million people, and is spoken by more people than any other language, save perhaps Mandarin. It is the official language of 53 countries and at least three, large governing bodies, but is controlled and regulated by no one. English has anywhere from 13 to 19 vowels (depending on if you include diphthongs), which are all represented by five written vowels. English is written with a semi-alphabetic script based on the traditional Latin script, but often serves as little more than an iconography; if you don’t believe me, try to spell fish. And just today I found out that, because voicing is not a distinctive feature in our plosive consonants, the word guy is really pronounced [kai]. Again, if you don’t believe, just stop on buy and I’ll show you a magic trick.
In many ways, I’m just upset that people are telling me how to do something that is quite innate to me. Writing, on the other hand, is both learned and laborious, and I thus dislike anyone who tells me it should come as naturally as speaking. In the process of learning Linguistics, a throughly scientific pursuit, I have garnered so much. Just today my teacher sighing, sighing, “I just wish we had three years to go over everything here…I know you wouldn’t like that”-I couldn’t have disagreed more; and it was just the other night that I was sitting on a busy street with cold coffe and cold feet, talking about the intricacies of X-Bar theory and how it is applied to Turkish. I haven’t enjoyed myself learning in a long time, and it’s a very comforting and positive thought. Knowing more about the way I speak, how I speak, and even why I speak has lead me to produce some correspondingly huger mistakes, and I suppose it comes with the territory. But I can honestly say it doesn’t phase me, and I am enjoying it. I’ll be happy just so long as no one tells me how a word ought to be spelt.
I had every intention of explaining how incredibly upset I am, how seriously alone I feel. I was going to justify how angry I feel, and how I will be vindicated. I was going to write some nasty things, that while true, wouldn’t have fixed anything. I found this just before I wrote, and I changed my mind.
A SHORT LOVE STORY IN STOP MOTION from Carlos Lascano on Vimeo.