"Policing language is a waste of time"

(video: Network)

After much confusion and bureaucracy and bitching, my explicitly required Intro. to Linguistics course has begun. It's in this contrived glass and drywall nuisance tucked behind the math building, some unholy conglomeration of food vending and study nooks and trendy chairs and tables with locked wheels arranged in a well-researched pattern for optimizing pedagogy. No dismissal of what I'm going to learn there, however. The prof paces back and forth across the front of the room, throwing things up onto the whiteboard ad hoc, relating relevant parables of a life lived spastically, pointing out the skeletons of predecessors who did not take her seriously. The subject matter itself is instantly enthralling, I've studied this thing so circuitously and empty-handed and now to have terms and studies and it is thus far dovetailing nicely with whatever else I think I know about being a human.

Following that I had a further training session in Microstation. Which is one of these tremendously powerful software packages that makes the last several hundred years of engineering seem almost silly. And there are 9 other people in there that are "just like me" . . .coming to this thing on their company's dime so they can return to the cubicle more marketable and talented. And though the time is a sacrifice that is impossible for me to ignore, I'm there doing it and ripping through exercises faster than anyone though I sit there with charged neurotransmitters and the least experience in the room. So . . the point . . .standing around in the lobby waiting for temp. passes and the excitable little man that runs the course to peel himself away from whatever insanely complex project he must be working on, the engineers talk to each other. And, yes, there's talk about our commonalities and overlaps in our respective businesses. But there's something I still can't understand, no matter how often I see it. Actual, genuine interest in landscape architecture and drainage and design standards. Like an alien, I feel.

This weekend I took things right up to that edge called "too far" and woke up with no memory of the drunken stammering and self-aggrandizement that must have esclated and finally plateaued and gradually ebbed into a childish yammering as I fell asleep dreamless. And piecing together what happened, and the relevant outline did emerge sequined with unreliable images and the way light played on things and a few hard-edged words that still cut at the morass, was like relearning to talk or dance in fast forward. Like my brain had been emptied, its contents handled roughly and poured back in. Whatever detritus was added or slurry atomized and lost to the air, there will be this runic punctuation mark there in my memory and experience.