It's all about language

Since arriving in Vietnam in late August, I haven't really been writing much. That's all starting to change. I have a project in mind. It's sort of about my dad. It's sort of about visions, the macroscopic and microscopic, the psychedelic and the cosmic. My dad is kind of that way, an oddball quasi-mystical, geek, bicyclist, environmentalist, and a nurse. It's sort of about dads in general. It's also about language. My relationship with language is inherited from my father in a weird way. I am an English teacher and my profession before that was working with books. I am immersed in language. Language is a slippery thing that I sometimes feel ill-equipped to use. Teaching people to use my native language has been interesting lesson. So much of our language functions on the level of intuition and automation. Even in writing we rely on the automatic to propel the phrase and the paragraph forward. It is when you begin to dissect your language, to break it into components, grammatical structures, and theoretical movements, that things start to get interesting. While teaching, I rarely get the opportunity to push students into this level. Usually, we are working on the basic units of pronunciation, meaning, usage, vocabulary building, that sort of thing. So I'm sitting here and I wonder, fuck, how do I teach someone how to use this thing that I use intuitively? As a native speaker, a writer, and a reader, there is all of this stuff that I can draw from in order to express myself. How do I teach someone that? I don't know.

But anyway, now that I'm writing again, life seems to have a purpose or at the very least a direction. I am also writing lists. Things like "10 things I want to accomplish by 2011" and "Things I want to do in Vietnam before leaving Vietnam" and "Possible places to go after Vietnam." My lists include things like: Taiwan, learn Vietnamese (học tiếng Việt), write a book, get better at the guitar, fall in or out of love.