:: Maintenant, detente ::

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

We begin in the Autumn of 1991. The television show In Living Color enters its golden age, fans of alcoholic lechers everywhere continue to mourn Serge Gainsbourg's passing, and the Warsaw Pact states resemble more of a block party than Eastern Bloc. Somewhere amongst a sprawling social mass of industry name-dropping and precocious ivy-league ambitions an impressionable twelve-year-old and newly-christened seventh-grader is presented with a seemingly innocuous choice: shall he spend sixth period studying French, Latin, Russian, or Spanish?

The superhighway to hell is paved with good intentions. The on-ramp is paved with paternal advice about which language to pursue. And the on-ramp's high-speed carpool lane is paved with the recommendation of "French", despite seven years of elementary school study lending weight to "Spanish" as the logical choice.

Now I won't disparage the French language. Maybe some types of suffering mutate into wistfulness as years pass, but I have no grudge against the language of love. I never though, had a French teacher I could call anything less than uncomfortably tolerable. They, and to an equal extent the general composition of institutionalized secondary school language instruction, convinced me to issue a restraining order against any and all step-mother tongues. When, senior year of high school, language study went from obligatory to optional (my own personal Bastille Day), I and a few cronies celebrated with some "minor" vandalism which resulted in some "minor" suspension. It was far from my finest hour, but this was the extent to which I was driven mad.

Thankfully the incident was withheld from my permanent record, and along came college, with its lax distribution requirements and succulent electives. No departments enticed me less than those vile foreign languages, requiring five lecture hours and two of "laboratory" per week. They were dead to me (Latin, actually, was and is dead to everyone, but still, people sometimes use Latin phrases to sound smart, so in that sense it's on life-support). They were lingua non grata (see?).

Then I graduated, went out into the world to stake my claim, and realized that I would not be utilizing much of what I'd learned ever again. Sure, I knew about the anterior cingulate cortex, Pareto optimality versus a Nash equilibrium, and how much Ritalin to snort before an exam (10mg before noon, 5mg after - you don't want a major buzz, just enough to focus - cut most of it up very fine but leave a line or two coarse for that time-release effect) but I had no applicable skills to aid me in my rise to fame. Sure, I wasn't attending a trade school - I didn't go to college as an exercise in job training - but knowing I wasn't headed for a life in academia, I could have balanced out all this esoteric learning with some practical knowledge. And what practical knowledge would be better, more widely-applicable to a variety of industries, than foreign language proficiency? For the first time, regrets surfaced of linguistic opportunities lost. As time passed, they grew.

So now I and three coworkers will venture along a path that would have paralyzed me with trepidation not long ago. Starting Monday, I'll be studying Japanese for seven weeks at the very un-private-university-like rate of $15.35 per hour. It's either a genuine act of self-improvement or, given that I now work for an American subsidiary of a Japanese corporation, the most expensive exercise in sycophancy of my life.

Posted by morland @ 06:46 PM

:: Comments ::

You're not going to elaborate on your 'minor' suspension and your stunning discoveries whilst on said suspension? Because I'll tell. I swear.

Posted by: the guy who lived in vail on September 29, 2004 09:37 PM

We learned a lot of useful things, like when to take someone to the hospital, how many shrooms you should eat the night before the MCATs, and generosity (leaving lines of ritalin on the table for the person you know has a test the next day), and how to subtlely communicate to your friend that you want to fuck them. We also learned how to steal furniture without getting caught (ok, maybe not the latter, but definitely the former), how to throw up in someone's bed the night before their final, and how to completely miss out on the fact that you have a final at all. And I definitely recall learning how to piss off your significant other multiple times. See? All things that are useful in the real world today.

Posted by: choistein on September 29, 2004 10:37 PM

first, i would like to echo the comment about stealing furniture. I thought I was the only one, but apparently not.

As for morland, do you get to go to Japan for all of this?

Posted by: rob on September 30, 2004 09:05 AM

Sono mono no kiku no ato de, hakike shitai yo.

Watashi: Nihongo wakaru?
Miku-kun: Mada mada des.
Watashi: Baka na...

Posted by: Hirobumi Ito on September 30, 2004 10:07 AM

Washinguton Daigaku de, nihongo no kurasu ga arimashita.

Harubadu Huesturakee moo, nihongo no kurasu ga arimashita.

Watashi wa unko desu.

Da kara, ima nihingo no benkyo hajimemashita.

Hai, gambarimasu!!!#@#!

Posted by: Miku-kun on September 30, 2004 10:10 AM

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