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Yes, I know the semicolon is incorrectly used. Sometimes, I feel, a semicolon is just a classy and ambiguous version of an emoticon. Also sometimes I like to pretend that if I know the rules it’s cool when I break them. Makes me feel all dangerous like Virginia Woolf.
Here’s the thing: I have been moping all evening. I’m not going to go into my reasons here–they’re not bad, but the point is, they’re not good enough. I have no excuse for moping. I have a comfortable, one might even say indulgent, lifestyle; I have dear friends and a boyfriend who defies adjectives and an offer from a great grad school. My spiritual life makes me mostly joyful and occasionally uncomfortable; I ran my first 10k last weekend; I am getting my teeth fixed; I am going to be just fine. So stop whining, Mary.
April is Poetry Month. Maybe if I’m feeling especially risk-taking I’ll share some poetry.
The season of Lent draws to a close, and it’s been a pretty slack one on my part. Since I was raised an Episcopalian, and I pretty much believe in God these days, I figure I’m supposed to do the Lent things–give up something that I love but that’s bad for me, take on some kind of prayer routine, try to purify myself body and soul for the celebration of that strange and compelling and credibility-stretching event that is the resurrection. And I’ve been truly sucking. I managed to come up with something that would be actually good for me to give up (since giving up fattening/sugary foods doesn’t make me holier, just grumpier), namely, unnecessary spending. Then I decided that enjoying my time with loved one over food and delicious beverages was absolutely necessary, and well, the momentum has just run out on that one.
But I did have a bit of a Lenten epiphany, albeit a last-minute and a slow one, and it all came from my visit to the dentist.
I have terrible teeth. Terrible. Comes from poor/nonexistent brushing habits as a child and a 5-cup a day habit of tea with milk and sugar. I know that the tea is a bad habit, but I justify it to myself by saying, well, it’s my only real vice (I don’t smoke or get plastered or do pot) and I lead a stressful life and I need it to stay awake during the day and it’s even kind of classy, right, I mean, hey, tea is so British. And I keep on sucking it down, cup after soothing cup of black tea (Ceylon and Earl Grey or Chai if I’m at Starbucks), with an ideal mix of roughly two teaspoonfuls of sugar per eight ounces. And I don’t give myself a hard time about it, for the reasons described above.
But the dentist does not understand that tea is British and that I am a virtuous person otherwise. What he understands is that my teeth are decaying. (I’m not even going to name the number of cavities because I’m embarrassed. Suffice it to say that they will require more than one visit.) And, in the most charming way possible, he has given me an ultimatum: no more sugary drinks. Ever. Period. No excuses.
As I try to adjust to life without sugar, I find myself thinking about my other bad habits. I spend more money than I can afford in an effort to convince myself I’m not as poor as I know myself to be. (Yeesh, that’s a scary one.) I never ever do the dishes. I rarely clean my apartment, period. I ignore work that I don’t want to do in the hope that it will go away. I waste time on the internet when I’m at work. I don’t take care of myself, physically or mentally. I never ever learn my Coptic/Hebrew/Greek vocabulary. I say that I’m too busy to do things that I just haven’t bothered to do yet. I somehow, despite all of this, manage to feed my already-overlarge ego by feeling superior to other people. I look at myself in mirrors as I walk by. I go to bed an hour later and leave the house 15 minutes later than I intend to…every single day. I feel sorry for myself. I bite my nails. I drink too much tea.
Maybe I should work on these. The spending diet helped, and I think I’m going to try to implement a modified version for the rest of the year (while allowing myself to buy things that I need, just not right away). I don’t bite my nails as much any more; ever since the dentist fixed my chipped front tooth, I can’t get a really good hold any more. Training for the 10k is helping, too, though I have allowed myself to get behind with that. I have actually kept 2 to 3 days ahead all week (though, granted, it’s the first week of the trimester). But that leaves a lot still to work on.
On the other hand, I found that giving up sugared tea–which, as anyone who knows me can attest, is almost unthinkable for me–has been easier than I expected once the stakes got high enough. And if I can give up sugar in my tea…either I’m a lot stronger than I thought I was, or there really is such a thing as divine grace. Or perhaps both.
During yesterday’s Hebrew reading, Lee and Gail and I chatted about numbers in foreign languages–specifically, why they are so freakishly difficult to remember. I certainly find this to be the case–number words are the hardest vocabulary words to learn and the quickest to slip away when I let a language lapse. I was relieved to find two such eminent linguists, both of whom have spent their professional lives learning and teaching languages, admit to the same difficulty.
This got us onto the topic of language learning itself, and its affinities with both the “left” and “right” sides of your brain (not that I really buy that “left/right” divide, but it’s a handy shorthand). Lee has said that he finds both “English people” and “math people” doing well in Latin, though they tend to approach the material slightly differently. And I am all about the artsy-fartsy big-picture intuitive learning and am still addicted to language learning, whereas Blondie is a straight-up logician for whom Latin is a grand and beautiful puzzle.
Maybe the solution is to teach language and mathematics in conjunction in some way–to trick the students who are into math into thinking they’re in a math class, and trick the students who are into humanities into thinking that they are in a language class. By the time they realize that both language learning and mathematics require the same type of thinking, it will be too late: they’ll have all the multiplication tables memorized in French, and have learned to do the quadratic equation in the finest Attic Greek, and they’ll never mix “three hundred” and “thirty thousand” again, and they’ll never again be able to put themselves in little boxes labeled “bad at math” and “bad at writing.” That, I think, would be a good thing.
