isoglossia

We’re approaching the 48-hour mark of Magda and Adam’s departure, and it’s possible to track the trajectory of my days without them via statistics:

Hours of sleep logged — 18
Cans of Laško consumed — 8
SMSes, IMs, and emails exchanged — 6
Hours wasted at computer — 4
Hours spent reading — 3
Videos viewed — 2
New posts written — 2
Naps taken — 0
Moments spent missing the cookie-scent of my baby’s neck etc. — off the chart

We (by which I mean ‘me all alone — oh, and of course all the rest of Europe as if they count’) observed daylight saving last night, so some of those numbers may be skewed. When polled, most people say that if they had an extra hour in the day they would spend it either sleeping or exercising. That’s unimaginative. Here’s what I spent my free hour doing, a project which would have been im-frickin’-possible with Adam in the house:

The problem: CDs don’t toe the line, and Adam can thrust them back unto oblivion, and does. Frequently.

The solution: double-sticky tape under little battens. Applied, if at all possible, with no help from a baby.

The result: the slippery bastards finally and irrevocably line the hell up. PARADE REST, RHCP!

For the record, the sheer-strength of Scotch brand double-sided tape is remarkable. I can wholeheartedly and without hope of compensation from the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. recommend this product for all your anally-retentive needs. Also Post-It notes, like you didn’t already know that they rawk.

As I hoicked around the CDs, I was moved to contemplate how fleeting innovations can be. When I arrived at college I didn’t own a typewriter and felt under-abilitied, technology-wise. Your own typewriter was the state-of-the-art in paper-writing technology during that eon. By the time I graduated it was all about the Mac Lab and your floppy (which had to have the OS on it). During my sophomore year a rich girl I knew acquired a “compact disc” player. We all wanted to scoff, but were too jealous. Still, there were questions: what’re you gonna do with all your tapes and records? (the term ‘vinyl’ didn’t exist yet, kids). Never mind how are you gonna afford to replace all your music in this crazy little shiny disc format? Oh yeah, you’re rich. Never mind.
We were envious, dubious, and a little frightened.

It was eight years more before I became the owner of a CD player myself. Okay, it’s all gonna run on banana peels now? Fine, I’m in! It was a big purchase, but I found the prospect of buying the music much more daunting than the machine that would play it. The library grew, slowly and gradually, with occasional frenetic bursts if I was feeling rich or deluded. Pawn shops in army towns turn out to be great places for picking up cheap CDs (also weapons).

So I spent today’s golden gifted hour organizing the CD shelves. While wondering how long we’ll really need them.

Earlier this year I ripped all of our music to the secondary hard disc of our computer. As an archival thing. So all of our music, give or take a few recent acquisitions and maybe the Maria Carey Christmas album, physically occupy a space no larger and only slightly less reliable than a pack of tarot cards.

But the fully digitalized concept of music doesn’t quite work around here, not yet. We’re in the saurian process of changing over. I’ve spent a good deal of the last 48 hours listening to music in its “old” (that is, pre-mp3) form, painstakingly having to change the damn disc every hour or so. Nothing’s streaming here. I’ve also been doing some other old-fangled stuff, like looking though magazines and books (no, not E-books). I’m trying to feel good about being apart from Magda and the Destructor, doing things I wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do, like sleep late, lie around, and apply double-sticky tape to sticks of wood (WOO-HOO!) Also drink lots of beer while the sun is up, such as that occurs after daylight saving takes place. One of the books I’ve been finally delving into was a birthday present entitled “Empires of the Word — A Language History of the World”, and I’m finding it enthralling, a right ripping yarn. If you think you might be interested in it, re-read the title of this post.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, in the absence of my gorgeous wife and wondrous young son, I’m off to get to the bottom of this Assyrian business.

It’s nearly a month since I returned from my second, precipitous and unplanned, trip across the ocean during the third quarter. I’m struggling to put my finger on what has been going on since I returned. It’s tempting to blame feng shui as usual, but for various reasons that doesn’t entirely wash. My bowling addiction could be a culprit… I guess I can simply say that energy has been at a low ebb during the last month, and time at a special premium when I thought that it couldn’t really get any tighter. This translates into few photos taken, little writing, no projects ticked off any lists. I can’t fully blame work, although that has been pretty good at either keeping me engaged or sucking me dry. Baby Adam is a perennial suspect, but there’s no way to quantify or adequately explain why he deserves any extra credit for this increased time-suck throughout October. It’s not entirely out of the question that I’ve simply become even lazier than ever, but for such a noticeable jump in lameness to occur in just one month begs its own questions.

A few hours ago I put Magda and Adam on a plane out of Ljubljana. They’re spending the next two weeks in Poland to visit the mitteleuropean grandparents and take care of various business there. I’m still recovering from spending two weeks apart from them during my solo trip to Maine, but then I had ample distractions, being among family. This time it’s just me, and I predict that there will be some rattling around in this now Magda-less and Adam-free apartment. Also some pathetically lonely posts to this site.

Of course I have a large list of things I’d like to accomplish. Most of them involve sitting in front of the damn computer. Not least of them is to get back on top of this fledgling isoglossia enterprise. Getting my correspondence up to date is there, too (oh, I have siblings? Nephews and new nieces, even? Parents, too, you say?) Filing. Organizing stuff. Sorting, cleaning, the mundanity that is so difficult to accomplish with a baby trying, oh, trying so hard, to help, papa. Now I can get it all done. Every day will be free of the face-cracking grin of Adam sprint-crawling across the parquet to slime me at 5.00 pm sharp and then run time-consuming laps up and down my body on the carpet. Poopy or granola-encrusted diapers will be outside my jurisdiction, well outside it by 1,106 km. I will not be in attendance as he paints his face red with a tortiglioni brush, nor will I scrub vainly to remove orange sauce stains from his velvety cheeks. I’m relieved of pajama duty, so I won’t have the nightly distraction of having to listen to any silly giggling as I dry the bathwater off him and wage my nightly struggle against the post-bath clammies that are the natural enemy of the snuggly ‘jammies. Now I can concentrate and get some shit done.

Except for two things: First, I’ll be thinking about the cookie-scent the apartment is lacking, what with the nape of his neck not being anywhere around. Not anywhere.

And second, before I dive into any of these ambitious projects, I’ve got a lot of “Arrested Development” to watch.

This is just a quick post to wish a happy Scotchtoberfest to all of isoglossia’s readers, and to remind them both to celebrate this holiday in a responsible manner. If you’re not familiar with Scotchtoberfest, by all means gae acquaint yersel’.

Occasionally in raising Adam, Magda and I have had occasion to question our cultural and linguistic baggage (here and here, for example). Here we go again.

Me: [singing] Old MacDonald had a farm, e-i-e-i-o. [Magda joins in]
And on that farm he had some pigs, e-i-e-i-o. With a…
Magda: I don’t know what noise pigs make.
Me: oink-oink.
Magda: What is that?
Me: Oink. The noise pigs make.
Magda: [firmly] No.
Me: What do you mean, ‘no’?
Magda: Pigs don’t go ‘oink’.
Me: Okay, what do pigs say?
Magda: [tentatively] Eeeh-houw…?
Me: That’s a donkey.
Magda: Well, no pig ever said ‘oink’.

You would think that onomatopoeia would be more universal. It certainly is stupid. Which of our languages has the silliest animal noises? To further this discussion I’ve put together this table (which is sure to contain errors — as in any language-related post, we welcome corrections). In the interest of impartiality, a moderator appears in the fourth column.

*Thanks to ka-ma for input on these (see comments)

**This row is problematic; I could find information only for the male of the species in Esperanto, while the Slavic birds are more like “chicken”. Also, “cock-a-doodle-doo” is the most egregiously silly sound in the table, and I feel stupid just typing it.

I am indebted to the Georgetown University Sounds of the World’s Animals page for much of the above information.

Magda comes in from a walk with Adam and announces that Slovenia is preparing for bird flu. What does this mean? I ask. “I don’t know, it’s just that the newsstand had a poster up with a headline on it, and it said something like, “Slovenia prepares for bird flu.”

We spend a few moments speculating about fluctuations in the price of duck breast.

Later we are watching BBC World News. Bird flu has been confirmed in Turkey and Romania. Across the bottom of the screen a blood-red newsbar announces IN ALL CAPS what is being done about this creeping public health menace:

With Greece reporting an outbreak, and the European Commission ordering our southern neighbor Croatia to perform tests on some suspect birds, we go to bed comforted by the idea of all those EU citizens moving all their poultry indoors. Safe at last!