The Curse of 7 Gods

     I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  Mostly just American 1-way streets.  I admit that there must be some kind of logic to them.  That’s the end of my paragraph.

     So here’s the story, we moved to Baltimore.  I just arrived a few days ago and I was driving to and from our storage unit this afternoon.  I’ve done alright route-finding so far: not perfectly but I've never really gotten lost, just off by a street or two sometimes, and that’s easy to correct.  Nevertheless, I blew the dust off my phone’s GPS and set it up just to make sure I didn’t end up driving into no man’s land—Baltimore has its scarier parts, even by my standards.  And thus the adventure began.

      I should have realized from the beginning what I was getting myself into when the GPS told me to turn the wrong way down a 1-way street.  I simply adjusted and went to the next street and got right back on track.  The GPS then took a good 30 seconds to a minute to recalibrate itself—this is a long time when you’re on the road looking for a turn a couple blocks away from you.  This happened twice within a short distance from our temporary apartment.

     After the initial hang-ups I figured we were just fine, the GPS and me.  And we were until we got across town.  This time the I got directions to drive through a dead-end, over the sidewalk and hang a right at the fire hydrant about 20 feet in front of me.  I decided I should maybe stop instead.  Fortunately I was in the neighborhood of my future apartment—it’s a big pretzel-shaped series of roads that, despite the fact that they all seem to intersect, you can’t actually turn onto any of them.  In other words, all the roads are 1-way and lead to the center of the pretzel where traffic has been stopped since the dawn of man.  Once you drive through a few times, it’s not so bad.  By the time I got out of there and onto a better route, the GPS had just recalibrated again.  Really.

     At this point I just decided to bag it and work through Google Maps on my phone.  No incidents after that but I also didn’t have the bonus of the sexy, robotic female voice of undetermined age, ethnicity, accent or emotional state.  I say no incident but I mean no incident related to Google Maps or my phone.  On my way back home I couldn’t find the mini-highway that takes me to my neighborhood.  I knew the name of the street that I wanted (the mini-highway), plus the name of a couple optional streets in case I couldn’t find the one I really wanted.  I found none of them.  Better yet, I found myself in a right-hand lane that disappeared into a curb (literally), fought my way into the center lane (literally. Ok, maybe not really fought), and went straight through the light.  Had there been any kind of signage I would have just run over the curb and slammed into a building because I found myself going down a 1-way street the wrong way.

     This brings me back to my original statement: I hate 1-way streets with a passion.  I might have liked them a little more had I even seen a sign.  I don’t much like the placement of “do not enter” signs in America either—half underneath a tree, 30 yards (not meters) before the intersection, or turned to face the other side of the street even though they're all bloody 1-way streets in the first place going my direction of traffic.  To not belabor the point further than what I’ve been doing since the beginning of this post, I was on the 1-way street going the wrong way.  Fortunately, the local loiterers shouted directions to me from halfway down the block (“you son of a ******, it’s a 1-way ****** street!”).  This gracious act helped me quickly identify my problem.  Having only received the curse of upwards of a half-dozen deities that I’d never heard of before, I ducked into the next street I could find where a woman was staring at me open-mouthed, unable to finish opening her car door, so dumb-stricken she was (note the somewhat archaic syntax and morphology of that last Inflectional Phrase) at seeing what I had done.

     I let out a good belly-laugh and a har-har-har as I came around the next corner and before allowing myself to feel guilty and upset at the whole scene, as per my sensitive nature.  The belly laugh was the funnest part.

Arabic Summer Institute

    If those words aren't scary enough for you, how about INTENSIVE ARABIC or "concentrated Arabic studies".  As if it wasn't hard enough to learn Arabic in the first place.

    Somehow I envisioned depicting my mental image of Arabic as something scarier than a teenage mutant couch potato bunny that’s been stock-piling Ben & Jerry’s in his gut for the last decade.  Hopefully the red eyes at least do something.

     Actually Arabic is not all that hard.  Language classes tend to push students really hard because class spots can be limited and because programs want to keep their funding (re: SUNY).  But when you take away some of the pressure from above, Arabic isn't so terribly much more difficult than anything else.  But that's an entirely different discussion that will require a lot more citations and anecdotes before I feel comfortable making my case.

    This summer I've extended my already 8 years of schooling to be a teaching assistant and sometimes instructor (I dare not use the term part-time, adjunct or anything else.  I'm a lowly TA that gets to teach 3ish days a week).  Somehow my 200+ credit hours for my BA in Linguistics and French (including a side trip through electronics, astronomy and fencing) plus MA in Arabic did not satiate my lust for being in an academic environment.  After 3 hours a morning of core classes, plus homework/grading, plus 3 hours a week of a conversation course (times two sections for me), a listening hour (like a lab), an Arabic film, an Arabic lecture and some kind of cultural activity each week—after all that, I’m officially satiated.

    You might think that cramming everything we do into 1 semester is difficult, but for ASI we’ve crammed it into 1 single month.  Impressively, the students have largely risen to the occasion and can speak, read and write in Arabic—at a basic level.  They could tell you were to go in Arabic.  Literally.

    The real problem that I discovered in all of this is that I am the instructor, not the student.  Every day I walk past the Chinese intensive class and the Farsi intensive class as I go to work TAing and instructing.  They all get to learn a new language in 1 month.  Not me.

    I've been dreaming of learning Chinese since 2005 when I started Arabic.  I signed up for Swahili around 2007/2008 but had to drop the class before it started so I could take a required class that was only taught at that time.  And since 2008 I've been dreaming of learning Russian.  The only reason I didn't pursue it was that I decided that love of life and the outdoors should be as important to me as driving myself upward in academia—nigh-sacrilege at the time!  Trisha and I even took an ASL class while we were dating, a recap of the month of ASL I audited in college.  I haven't stopped wanting to learn any of these new-to-me languages.  On the contrary, I've been asking around to see what good resources there are for me to use on my own.

    I kind of wish I could be like this guy: Alexander Arguelles.  He reads some dozens of languages.  Well.  I'm not sure about his speaking, since speaking can't be completely picked up from reading.  But still, I get jealous hearing about him and many others who have the time and the opportunity to learn more languages.

    I'm not sure it's just the ability to communicate with others that fascinates me.  I'm not the most talkative person unless you catch me in an uncharacteristic mood.  What I do like is the mathy part of language learning, building and manipulating those syntactic, morphological and phonological formulae that are so clear for the first couple years of study.  It's like a puzzle!

    But I also like being able to understand other people.  When folks are in line behind or ahead of me at the grocery store speaking in another language I get elated when I can eavesdrop on them.  It's even more fun when they're saying stuff they don't want other people to understand.  It’s amazing how many private conversations are held at an uncomfortably loud level while the people speaking assume nobody else speaks their language.  My favorite is when people do this in Spanish, as if no one in America speaks Spanish!!

Memoirs of German Haus

My favorite part about the title is that the word memoir comes from French.

Today I witnessed the unleashing of decades of tension between Germany and Russia.  I don't recall what catalyzed the fighting but I do recall watching Russia chasing Germany's butt out the house and down the street despite the fact that Germany was carrying heavy weaponry.  In the meantime, America waited on the sidelines watching and laughing until both sides were exhausted and were about out of ammo.  That's about the time they intervened and shot both of them in the face.  And butt, actually.  All in all, pretty historically accurate.

The picture is the interim before America got involved.  You'll notice Russia in the foreground with Germany proudly marching forward even though he's out of ammo.  As the one documenting the aftermath of such a historic catastrophe but not getting involved, I wonder who I am.