Double Dactyl of the Day

Argentum bargentum
President Plutocrat
sits in his golf cart and
angrily tweets

odious nonsense; he's
egomaniacally
sure this will bring his
opponents defeats.

Quindecennial

This fall is my 15th anniversary of being deaf, if you measure from when I stopped being able to hear well enough to use a telephone (even with maximum amounts of amplification).

It is kind of weird to think about how long it's been since I answered a phone or called someone. It is also kind of weird how, in the interim, everyone else has basically stopped (voluntarily) using phones, too, so now we all just text and email and facebook each other like the gods intended.

[ETA] In the olden days, when I was in high school and I was hearing, phones still had cords. I talked on the phone all the time and wrapped the cord around things and got in trouble for stretching it out. My parents thought it was excessive but I spent hours on the phone anyway. While I was thinking about this post, I tried to remember what I spent those hours talking about, and I have no idea.

I have started to forget whether things make noise or not. Only every once in a while. And forget that there are noises regularly in the background. I completely forgot about the whole birds and crickets and traffic background, until someone else couldn't hear me because the crickets were too loud. That feels pretty weird, too.

There are also other weird things about it, but they are private and I have emotions about them and am not going to discuss them on the internet.

The Unrealized Inceptive

Here's a thing I wrote a few weeks ago, when I was riffing on toddlers and their mysterious, repetetive, data-gathering ways:

She spends hours, weeks, months, locking eyes with nearby adults and beginning to do things she has (hypothetically) been told not to do. Every time, the adult demonstrates some form of negative signalling until the Tiny Anthropologist sits back down, or stops shrieking, or backs away from the fire pit.

It's all true. This is what toddlers do. However, it also occurrs to me that this exact behavior has a posited name/verbal inflection in ASL. According to Liddell &/or Johnson, in various articles that I'm not going to look up right now, there is an aspectual inflection in ASL called the "unrealized inceptive" which is basically pretending you're about to do something but then stopping before actually doing it, because of suspense or other storytelling reasons.

In ASL, this works as a narrative device: "I was just about to begin writing on the paper when..."  "I was ready to get into bed when..."  "The swarm of creatures was just coming down the stairs when..." etc.

In toddlerdom, it works as a narrative device also, except that you are forcing other people to participate in your live-action reality television series. "I was just about to dump my cup of water out when..." and then they wait to see what happens next. The narrative is real life.

Next up in strained metaphors: Human toddlers are drunk screenwriters.