At at one point in the distant past, my school notes were cold, clinical, written in neat straight block lines, without style or care; people had accused me of memorizing Helvetica; they weren’t far off.
And now, here I am in my middle age, taking a photography class, and my notes look like this:
Pre-transition, I had always thought there were rules about thought: that thoughts always had to stay “normal” and couldn’t really veer off a beaten path. This could have come from my childhood, where I grew up in a culture where conformity was taken to an extreme.
But now, I’ll write random notes to myself, say funny things online and into a microphone, and be human as broadly as possible, to relate to the feelings of others and create my own as well, do lateral thoughts, wordplay all over, and just try to do and think things that make my personal world a bit brighter for me.
I mean, I thought Japanese was super straightforward compared to English. I’ve been speaking English for three goddamn decades and I:
still occasionally flip my Rs and Ls when I’m going fast and being careless
have to pause a beat before saying “Canada” to make sure I don’t use the rhythm structure/emphasis pattern for “banana”
sometimes just get really lost when I make a complicated sentence and have to stop and try again
can barely remember that English speakers take pills, and not drink them (you don’t chew them, for fucks sake! Just say drink!)
fucking hate that OUGH has more readings than most kanji
realized a couple years into learning English, that English has twenty-six radicals, stacked horizontally, and they make a word, and that word may not be pronounced how the radicals suggest, and it’s best just to memorize 116,000 kanji-words (and you English speakers bitch about kanji so endlessly, not understanding the sheer absolute fucking monster you came from)
Hi, I came the other way. Air Force baby who spent most of her younger years speaking Japanese and eventually got English happening.
So many people have asked me if they can learn Japanese, and my answer is the same: it’s a whole-ass language that takes many years to be good at, to use for communication. Most people realize they’re not going to be good at a language in three weeks and they bail.
Don’t use a language for just one thing (unless that one thing is to communicate with a society).
I committed myself to learning English because my family and I live in America now, and I needed to communicate with a society in it. (And I think my English is pretty good now but it’s not without a lot of trying, even now. I actually have to fight to maintain my Japanese, by reading books and watching movies and TV!)
*I realize that on second take, by googling her name, it comes up with a whole big old list of actually living or dead people. I mean the Heather Morell from Katalepsis, which honestly every trans girl should read, full stop, bar none.*
庭には、鶏が二羽いる。
I almost forgot about that one!
English is squeezing the last scraps of Japanese out of me. :(