Tonight

Tonight my head hurts, and I somehow can't get rid of the idea that my thoughts are getting fuzzier as I grow older, concepts and truths escaping me the more I chase them.

Dehydration really sucks. xD

Also... I want someone to take care of me. I want someone who has the resources to try... to want to, and to try. But is that a fair thing to ask of this world? I think probably not.

over 'n out.

Pockets! and Buttons!

And so it happens. The new school year comes, and every day I have material for a new post, I want to blog 'til my fingers ache. Fortunately for the internet, I don't. However. This, I have to write. Because you know, it's making me happy. I bought a jacket the other day from a large chain-store that shall remain unnamed. Within two days of buying said jacket (with pockets! in the right places!), the thread holding the buttons onto the front of it started to unravel, resulting in my almost-losing three of them. I decided to fix this issue. And, since the button-holes didn't look too great (read: sturdy) either, I decided to sew 'em up. The only problem was, I really didn't know how... aaand wasn't sure I even had a needle.
Fortunately for me, my roommate DID have one, and the internet can tell you ANYTHING- including, without much trouble at all, how to hand-sew a button-hole.
So what have I been doing for the past two days, do you think, instead of studying for a test*, or finishing my homework, or starting new homework, or doing laundry, or reading for class, etc? Yes. I have been sewing on buttons and re-sewing button-holes into this new jacket. It makes me feel nice and craft-y, like I actually did something with my money - after all, someone else would've just returned it, and then- what do big chain stores do with faulty clothes? throw them away? donate them to the homeless? hmm... if it's that last one, maybe I should've swapped it after all... piffle, I should've asked the attendant. Sigh. Anyway- Paradoxical, no? =) ...I just hope the rest of it isn't as flimsily sewn as the buttons were. :S
over 'n out.
E.O.

*which turned out to be the easiest test of its kind that I've ever taken, fortunately.

I'm here.

I'm here. Here to listen to your troubles, dear. Didn't think I'd be the one you'd pick to say, hey, I can't take this shit, please listen to me for a bit. Didn't think you'd see such strength in me, didn't think I'd have the eyes to see that something's troubling you, causing you to doubt yourself. But if I can, I'll help.
I'll do for you what I wish someone would do for me, ask you how you are- no really, I mean it, it's more than just a greeting, I can see that something's keeping you from smiling, so- I'll ask what's up with you, and try to help you reason through, let you know there's someone here who cares about just you.
And these new eyes I have? This new-found strength that lets me reach out? No, no, it's not my own, it's not from me. This ability I seem to have, now, comes from knowing that God loves me, somehow, and has my back, and what's more, has commanded me to love him back. So I will. I do. And that is how I am able to be here for you, and hope that you see in this love that seems to come from me that He, he loves you too.

Thank you Skip.
over 'n out.
E.O.

If I'd had a dream

Today I had a tutee who reminded me of Imogen Heap, but Chinese. It was something about the structure of her face and the way she pronounced her vowels (she had spent time in Britain- I'm not totally crazy, y'all).
So then I started to imagine, well, what if I DID tutor Imogen Heap? - And then promptly realized that that could only ever happen in a dream. So. If I had had a dream about tutoring Imogen Heap, here's what it would've looked like:

Last night I dreamt that I was helping Imogen Heap edit her paper for English class. It was hard for her, because she only ever writes in song, and she couldn't seem to get anything down in prose. She kept trying to explain to me that she needed to condense her ideas all the way into one word, and she couldn't understand why I wanted her to change "which" to "who" ... She was up a tree, she said, and needed to get down, but couldn't find the branch she came up by. Eventually, we agreed that if I told her where the button on the tree-trunk was that would make the branch she wanted come out, she would use the right word in her essay. Then she was back on the ground with me, singing something about her heart, and I sent her on her way, saying that I couldn't help her WRITE the thing, I was only there to help EDIT, and she ought to get her ideas out onto paper first, before she came asking me things. Then she suddenly had a typewriter that was typing words into the air and I was trying to catch them, like bubbles, and put them into an organized sequence... but they kept popping as soon as I had more than one.

etc. etc.

Yes. I just wrote a fictional dream. Um... ? How to explain... I don't know. Sometimes you just have to write silly things, for the heck of it.

over 'n out.
E.O.

It's good to know I'm not the only one who has been suddenly been overpowered by the need to cry about the wrongness of the world.
http://sarahthe.com/2010/09/20/weeping-in-the-bathroom/
Thanks Sarah.

Have I mentioned

that I love being an ESL tutor? No? Maybe I mentioned that I LOVE being an ESL tutor? That either. Well. Now you know.
Here is an excerpt from a letter to a friend about just HOW COOL it is:
I've started doing ESL tutoring, which is a blast. It requires a lot of mental and social energy because I have to analyze a paper and a person at the same time. It's like… you have to read the surface meaning of the paper, with all its grammar mistakes and awkward wordings, but also what the person was trying to say when they wrote it; you also have to think about it as just a paper, so, is it well-organized, does it have an intro and a thesis statement, do the ideas flow with one another and so forth. At the same time though, you have to read the author of the paper: are they comfortable, are they understanding you, are you being overbearing, do they know the answer and they just can't see it yet, or do they really have no clue? All while trying to get them to fix their work for themselves, without needing me to spell it out for them. ‘Cause oftentimes it’s an easy fix, but you don’t want to just say “you need to make this word plural,” you want them to see it. Because the goal is for the person to be able to self-correct and thus, write better in the first place. It's really fascinating, deciphering the paper and analyzing it as a thing full of two languages, and then talking about the nuances of English meanings and usages with the authors. I can tell from talking to them that they understand so much more than they can convey in their English words, that there’s a whole world lurking behind their broken sentences. It’s like peering through a keyhole. Sometimes I wish the meetings could last more than an hour, but I know that I'd be terribly exhausted if they did.

End of excerpt.

ALSO! Today I met with a girl who wanted help planning her paper- which is not technically what ESL is supposed to help with, they have the writing center for that (deals more with content and with Native English Speakers) BUT as it turned out, she was totally a TCK and as fascinated by languages as I was. So we spent an hour talking about categorical perception, IPA, how people learn languages, what languages we want to learn, etc. :D I cannot even TELL you how big the smile on my face was when I left.
anyways. So yeah.
I LOVE BEING AN ESL TUTOR. Just in case that wasn't clear.

Coming to Terms: 1

Girl, why are you crying?
How do you want God to interact with the world?
Is that right/fair?
Do you believe in faith?

Does one lose the ability to think abstractly as one advances in years? Or does one gain it? I have always loved the concrete. I like for things to be spelled out and clear cut. Prevarication gets on my nerves; so do empty polite phrases or intensely idea-focused conversations. When an example crops up, I perk up and listen. When I have trouble thinking about something, I try to put it into some kind of real-life situation. Practicality and straight-forward bluntness would be my middle-names, if they weren't too long. I don't generally like poetry because it is too condensed, and I can't tell what it says right off the bat, I have to look at it from a cajillion different angles and imagine what it might mean. But I'm starting to fear that these tendencies may be working to my disadvantage- or at least making my mental life more strenuous than those of others.
Abstract ideas are just so fuzzy to me. They don't make sense unless they're put into a situation; otherwise they confuse me and I don't know how to think anymore.
That's just not who I thought I was, you know? So often I've been hailed as smart. So often people have praised my contributions to discussion, my need to keep us honest and grounded; they say it makes them think harder & deeper.
But really all that's going on is I'm so practical I can't follow the discussion otherwise. Turns out this sage is ought but a fool with a big vocabulary. (side question: so is it praise or pity? do they realize?)

How then can I approach this question: do I think there is value in faith?
It's too elusive for me to pin it down and hash it out with myself...
but I will. This isn't over yet.

Okay, a real post

So here's the deal, y'all. Summer's over. There's a lot going on in my life now, and things aren't as simple as they were in the summer, 'cause there's lots of things to keep track of. I had to buy a planner. A PLANNER! Me! The girl who just keeps it all in her head and makes a list or two a day, just to make sure it's all still there. But no more. Or maybe just allinoneplace, lol.
What am I doing, you ask? Well. For starters, I'm in classes. Of course. I have been for the past many years of my life (read: I only have two more years of this, then comes the REAL WORLD. How do I feel about this? I have not yet decided, but I'm guessing it's somewhere between scared and curious). Classes are filling my head with thoughts of translation, translatability, borrowing, being able to read and write, and what-do-words-really-mean. I love words.
That's another thing. I am discovering that I love a lot of things in life. I love sunlight in my room of a morning. I love waking up and putzing around my flat and biking to campus. I love ESL tutoring (oh, I'll tell you about that in a minute) and I love all of my small groups (another hing I'll tell you about in just a minute, maybe) etc. I guess what I'm discovering is the ability to say that I love things, the ability to tell people, when they ask me how I'm doing, that it's been a wonderful day, or that I love my classes, and my jobs, and my life. This pervasive - can I call it joy? - is almost bewildering. God is good.
Life feels substantially different to me this beginning. It's partially the old love of change and fall, and schoolstart, but it's also... well, more than that. For one thing, I am somehow in a place where I can be strong for other people now. I'm in leadership positions too, which is new and strange. You know what else is very different this year? The amount of time I'm spending in the Bible. Yes, it's true. I suppose now would be a good time to mention all those small groups I was talking about. I'm participating in two and helping lead one. The two I'm a participant in are vastly different from one another, which is good. All of them, however, require some intense study of Bible passages.
All this newness and happiness are giving me space to be able to ask myself some tough questions. What those are, I will preserve for another night, because I just sat staring at the screen for the past 5 minutes straight. Lol. Clearly, it's time for sleep. Tomorrow is another full (FULL) day.
I will leave you with this thought:

I'm hoping that I become a conglomeration of all the people I admire, plus a little something extra; every text is a translation of and draws on the ones that have come before it.

over 'n out.
E.O.

if my day were nominalized

Good heavens. Could there have been a fuller day? I really hope I get some downtime tomorrow...

Godis.
Emily.
Laurie.
Cameron.
Joni/Stephanie/Sara (& me).
Cece.
Anne.

light convo. blustery presences. um?? so much to say, so choose wisely. spilling my guts. BOMBSHELL. buoy.

On C&A

To the next person who tells me that they think I'm so awesome/amazing because I think so much/deeply/interestingly or something to that effect:
You canNOT have a piece of my heart. NO. Go bother someone else. Why are you acting surprised? Don't you know brain and heart are of a piece? Like I said. Go bother someone else.
over 'n out.
E.O.

Literacy Log 1 - I don't get it!

What is literacy? This question is deceptive, as all simple questions are The dictionary definition of literacy is a person's ability o read and write. Immediately however, his raises several more questions. What does it mean to be able to read, and what level constitutes "reading"? Should the literate person be vaguely familiar with letters and the ways in which they combine to form sounds? In that case, my six-year-old cousin is literate. Or should a literate person be capable of reading something as complex as "The Count of Montechristo" or the entirety of "Les Miserables"? Does being literate include a working knowledge of literature? And then what of literary history? And these are the easy questions; if I start asking what it means to be able to write, this paragraph will be extremely long (is knowing the standard length of a paragraph included in literacy?).
Coming into this discussion, my ideas (or preconceived notions, perhaps) are thus: a literate person can look at written symbols in a given language and recognize their meaning insofar that they understand (if without knowing that they do) its grammatical structure and a follow general gist of the text. Also, a literate person has probably undergone a certain amount of formal or informal schooling to arrive at this skill-level.
As I go through my day, I encounter words. The DUC worker's tool box says "ORKIN" on the side, and I only need a quick glance to know that, it seems, almost without the effort of thought. A kid's shirt on the street reads "DUKE". I read academic papers for classes, as well as textbooks and literature books. I also read statuses on Facebook and e-mails from friends, work-colleagues, automated systems, professors, class mates... I read webcomics and blogs, directions for setting up a bookshelf or a wireless modem so that I can have internet. The written word so surrounds me that I don't even think about it as such, unless it's to bemoan that my eyes, my synapses move too slowly for me to be able to take in the 150 pages of reading I have to do for the day after tomorrow. It takes something out of the ordinary for me to realize that reading is a skill I acquired at some point in my long-seeming life. If you udenrsatnd tihs anoniyng setnnece of mnie, tehn yuo mgiht be fimailar wtih waht I'm aubot tlak aubot. An e-mail circulated a few years ago claiming that, if the first and last letter of a word were kept the same, it didn't matter how you scrambled the middle letters, you would be able to read it just as easily as well-spelled English. This sort of word-play aside, my verbal abilities are second nature to me, and while I can think of literacy-events in my life without batting an eyelash I am very certain that there are many things in my life affected by my own literacy that I don't even realize.
It seems so clear-cut to me that I think the first question that needs to be asked, the first idea that needs to be justified is this: does the word "literacy" need to be redefined? After all, that is the basis of this class, it seems: to figure out what it means to be literate. I confess, I do not find this to be a particularly prepossessing question. If you can read words written on a surface, if you can write words and form them into meaningful thoughts, you are literate. The end. Every other question that we have posed as a class as to what literacy means appears, to me, to be not a question of literacy, but rather of knowledge. It seems to me that we have been exploiting the word literacy as a metaphor for being able to extract and convey information in as many possible different situations as we can think of. In one way, that is fair, since the very basis of language is attempting to codify information using a commonly understood pathway so that others may then decode that information. The term literacy includes the idea that one is able to do this. However, in using the word "literacy" to think about that idea alone, we ignore the other, vital, part of its significance, namely its specific reference to the written word.
In all fairness, the New London Group has a point when they talk about understanding that the first world's current culture uses images as a sort of language, an that people need to achieve literacy in that language to be successful in their lives. But I would like to argue that the other types of literacy (they call it design) they mention, namely spatial, visual, audio, and gestural are simply things that people have been manipulating for centuries, as part and parcel of our natural environments, and that one will pick up as the child of a culture without the necessity of specific schooling. If I may be so bold as to make yet another statement of semi-informed opinion, social understanding is not literacy. It is culture. To call it literacy is calling cultural knowledge by another name. There is no need for such misnomers, and indeed, this is only one aspect of general knowledge of how the world works that has been suggested as “literacy” in the past two weeks. If literacy means everything from knowing how to dress in a certain situation, to knowing how to greet someone, to being able to read a textbook, to knowing all the details of tree-husbandry, to knowing all the ins and outs of the Belgian legal system (and these are tame examples), then what, in fact, are we discussing? Let's just call literacy a synonym for knowledge, and a literate person a discerning Jack-of-all-trades, and be done with it. It is possible that I have missed something in this class- maybe I am not understanding the readings fully, or lack the discernment to understand the issues at hand, but though I have found the discussions of how knowledge and standards of knowledge differ across societies, cultures, and social standings fascinating, I am still not convinced that the dictionary definition of literacy is somehow insufficient or incomplete. What seems to be the problem? Why are we framing the changing importances of different kinds of knowledge as lack of literacy?