Troubles With Language

I've been thinking a lot lately about language (more than usual, I suppose I think about language a lot in general) and about private languages. Not the idea of an inner monologue that no one else can understand, but the vernacular that develops between two people as a part of their relationship. About, for example, the way that Rebecca and I use "bro" as a term of endearment, the way that Hannah will text me "I'm owl" in the middle of the day and I know immediately she is going through it, the way people's nicknames for you morph into newer and weirder things as time goes by, the way you can spell something wrong one time in the group chat and it will become a punchline for days to come. 

I've been thinking about it mostly in the context of comfort. August is weird and bad and sweaty, and language shortcuts save time and energy and they also say I know you and I care about you and are you okay more effectively than anything. As twenty-somethings, Christiana and I used to roll our eyes at each other commiserating over drinks at the bar and say "when it rains, it boys"'; now, it's text shorthand for "There are paragraphs worth of fuckery afoot and I simply do not want to talk about it."

The best thing about friend shorthand is that it feels like love; the second best thing is that it conveys sentiment clearer and more concisely, in most situations, than the language typically needed to explain oneself. 

Someone asked me recently about mentors, and it got me thinking very fondly about everything I learned from my first mentor. She was - and still is - on the faculty of the philosophy department at my university; she singlehandedly navigated getting me accepted into a beta program for a combined BA/MA that saved me years of time and money. She negotiated for me to get a bigger scholarship when she was disgusted by what the program offered me. She taught me how to deal with men in philosophy, who would tell you to your face that women's brains simply can't do philosophy like men's can, as though "doing philosophy" is a life skill and not just something that makes you impossibly weird for your whole fucking life. 

She also taught me that being clear and concise in my writing would benefit my life, and it's the most important lesson I have ever learned. Nothing is ever made better by being made longer. If you can say it in two pages instead of ten, everyone will be better for it. This is true of term papers, of marketing proposals, and of love letters. Flowery language exists for you to feel self satisfied; clear language exists for other people to understand what you mean. 

I have been thinking about language, too, because I have been trying to read and write more lately. (By "read" I mean "books that aren't romance novels", which is what I fell into when my brain stopped working when I had COVID. As of this writing, by the way, Rebecca is still experiencing brain fog from hers; I mention this because the fact of the matter is if you can still avoid getting this shit, do.) Reading has always come naturally to me, because I believe it is genetically programmed into my body and because I did not have any friends as a child. Reading has also - at least for me, personally - always beget a certain measure of longing. If I read a book I really love, I am desperate to have written it. I am bereft, at least momentarily, that it did not come from my brain. I want to have done those things with words, to have arranged them in those ways, to have evoked those feelings in someone the way they evoked feelings in me. That jealousy is how I know a book is really, really good.

It is also at the heart of a lifelong struggle with my own laziness. The fact of the matter is that I can write, am very capable of it, and certainly spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars I did not have in order for people to keep telling me that I was good at it. I simply don’t, because I’m easily frustrated and easily distracted and am chasing a feeling that is hard to come by.

My mentor, Alice, and I once took a walk with her dog in Union Square in lieu of a meeting about my thesis. We watched her dog play with all the other dogs in the dog run while we talked about the ways in which literature can serve as moral philosophy without prescribing morality itself. (We talked about this all the time, in class and out of class, and unfortunately if you let me now I will still talk about it forever.) It was a day I remember very well because the framework for my thesis stretched out in my mind with remarkable clarity as we spoke; the ideas untangled themselves in the form of real words and sentences. 

It's a feeling I still strive for every time I sit down at a computer, a feeling of clarity that bonks you over the head as you're working through an idea and that, when it hits, feels like solving a puzzle or eating a great sandwich or falling in love. It's a feeling that you can't really chase, but you try to, and that sometimes makes struggles with language all that much worse in the trying. And that's when you reach for your phone and for some of that friend shorthand you need for a quick hit of dopamine, because even if you can't get the words right out of your own head, you can at least get a "love you, bro." 

I woke up this morning at 4:30 again, like I always do on Sundays, and I read in bed for several hours before getting up to make Eggs Benedict because I wanted, as I said to a friend, "to eat luxuriously." This is the recipe that I use most reliably; my apologies that it's by Alison Roman. 

People are always surprised to learn that I, a single person who lives alone, so often go to the trouble to make myself meals like this. Why waste the time, the effort, the dishes on just yourself? But the demonstrable truth of the matter is that you can't ever expect anyone to love you as much as you can love yourself, and that means you fucking deserve Eggs Benedict more than anyone else.

Be gentle to yourselves, folks. Summer ain't over yet.