My cheeky blogmother told me once that I should talk about myself here only in a one-sided ratio favoring shut-the fuck-up-about-yourself-you-narcissistic-journaling-hack…well, she said it much nicer than that, but you get the drift. Not much of a cherry-picking current events guy though; until the history worm gets to process factsoil I find it sterile of meaning, even if hubristic need-to-learn-before-you-teach(ers) pretend to have the future sussed out from their little pool of data points and face-against-the-glass perspective. If I did event regurgitation, it would look like:
"Bin Laden died yesterday, slain by a never ending revenge culture (mine, proud), some well-trained operators (go Navy, doubly proud), and a big-ass reward (hard currency, what it was really about). Now he’s a martyr? Probably. Did he matter anymore? No, but he owed. Good riddance to him and any of his confederates we were fortunate enough to spray with steel-jacketed consequences, hope we didn’t lose a single good man to destroy a bad one…duty though if we did."
Eh...
Have food blogged my way around a bit to add some taste. Writing about food is easy, about all sensual things actually. Immersive experience, sexual charge, the touch of weather, vistas seen; describing the world as it passes through you is usually worth a few lines, though I’ve seen some insensitive mimicry that’s transparently a copied look-at-me rather than an honest look-at-this. It’s hard to share what you've got without getting painted with that brush, so kept down.
Travelogue, sure, the road version of sensual translation. I have a big trip coming up, Uzbekistan by way of Istanbul (Turkish Air, cheapest first-class), Tajikistan, maybe some Iran. There should be enough input to have some pleasant output, and I’m looking forward to the journey. I’m going alone cause it’s dangerous? and adventuring isn’t really for everybody. There’s something about that Silk Road geography that captures me; the endpoints, waypoints, the viaditch that vast streams of wealth eroded into some hard scrabble country. Tamarlane’s hometown, the Beys’ extravagance, the Soviet cotton experiment (the worst of human greed, bye bye Aral Sea)…bread is sacred there, artisans are still more important than actors, and secular Islam lives crossroads cozy with everything else. Uzbeki is Altaic; vowel harmonies and agglutination…oh, the linguistic conflicts of having the Turskish languages (Ohguz) mixed with Korean and Japonic dialects in one language group? Now that’s fight-fun rhetorical fighting. To learn some glowing glottal goodness, wrangled the only English language Uzbek teaching grammar I could find and some linguistic training usefulness from the good folks at Transparent.
Languages...never really been a problem to drink them in. I’m no gifted wonder like some, but communicating seems intuitive once you have the rhythm of a speech. Rules and rationales help, but for me needful use makes the mind get plastic over by Broca and Wernicke's areas. Native to romance languages (with barbaric flavors), have some feeling for the sounds of the Chinese, so this language family really rounds me out. More as the trip nears maybe.
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