James Hazlett Foreman

Category: Blog

These are blog posts.

  • What Would You Say to Your Younger Self?

    Be kind to that person you were.

    Tear down the entire city, destroy every building, the one still standing that would matter most to me is the humble, perfect, coffee shop.

    This is my favorite one: the 61C Cafe, in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh. I lived in Wheeling for a brief period after getting laid off and turning 30-ish, and I would drive the hour or so from Pittsburgh in order to drink tea there and write. I’m doing that now: writing and drinking coffee. What do I love about it?

    • the ambiance

    • the people watching

    • the tea

    You’ll notice that I didn’t include the coffee. It’s fine. It’s good, in fact, but it always makes me have to go to the bathroom.

    A History of Coffee, Briefly

    There has been so much written about coffee that I hesitate to begin another newsletter about it. I already wrote a bit about coffee in an earlier version of this newsletter in 2019.

    Thanks to the wonderful wikipedia, I found a paper that discussed the history of coffee. Here’s the important bit:

    Coffee was initially used for spiritual reasons. At least 1,100 years ago, traders brought coffee across the Red Sea into Arabia (modern-day Yemen), where Muslim dervishes began cultivating the shrub in their gardens.

    …

    Coffee drinking was prohibited by jurists and scholars (ulema) meeting in Mecca in 1511 as haraam, but the subject of whether it was intoxicating was hotly debated over the next 30 years until the ban was finally overturned in the mid-16th century.

    In a way, we use it for religious devotionals to this day. I would hardly call the work I do an act of religious significance, though there is something ritualistic about opening the computer and sending emails and blog posts, like prayers, into the invisible spaces of the internet.

    I see myself in these photos and —whoo boy— I feel old.

    I saw a TikTok the other day of a woman who was only just emerging from a depressive episode of multiple days triggered by the absolute certainty that she was too old, that she had aged beyond her goals, that she was going to amount to nothing because she was too old.

    How old was she?

    25. She had just turned 25 and had spiraled into a depression bender about how old she was.

    I am 45.

    I wrote two novels. Nobody wanted to publish them. I tried! I really did. Maybe they’re not good? I probably didn’t try hard enough. I read them again and I love them. They ARE good! But maybe the next one will be better.

    The point I’m making is this: you’re not too old—for anything—until you’re dead.

    I’m not dead yet.

    I need your support to keep writing. It’s true. Subscribe if you haven’t. Share if you wanna. I’d love to reach more people because I think I have something to say!

    Speaking of Getting Old

    GenX is on TikTok. If you’re not on TikTok, you’re missing out, because it is a constantly shifting firehose of Everything.

    Of the many fun things you can do on the platform, you can use filters that alter your voice or appearance, using various machine learning algorithms. One of those is the Teen Filter, that makes you look like what you allegedly looked like as a teenager.

    For some people this is an accurate depiction of what they looked like when they were younger. The tweet below is part of an amazing thread of people my age discovering this filter and how it makes them feel about themselves.

    I picked this one because, well, watch it and keep reading:

  • Shifting the Night Away

    Let’s Shift Again, Like We Did Last Summer

    Thank you for reading this newsletter. I am trying to do this more often. Part of this plan (which you may have seen a tease for in the last newsletter I wrote) is to write more things that give me joy. This newsletter is one of the joyful things.

    You’ll see that this one follows a structure wherein I write about a subject and then, in the second half, write some personal thoughts.

    I intend to write these every week. If you would like to read more, please subscribe. If you’re already subscribed, I love you.

    Like Tinkerbell, I am given life by applause. Knowing that I have an audience (54% open rate!) keeps me writing. Hearing from you makes me want to write even more. If you like what you read here, tell somebody. You might know a person who would enjoy these newsletters, too.

    Everybody’s Shifting, So Why Aren’t You?

    Wait, I can hear you saying, what is shifting? Should I know what that is? Should I be shifting?

    My answer to you is a most emphatic: no, you should not be shifting. Actually, in all honesty, you’re probably already doing it, at least a little.

    Let me explain.

    What is Shifting?

    I was first introduced to “shifting” from a video much like this one:

  • A Touch Too Much Orson

    It’s All About Me

    I went to bed the other night with joy in my heart.

    My phone, and other devices I use, have immediate and unlimited access to millions of books. Books are my favorite things in the world. I always prefer things in book form over other forms. It’s not a contest—I love movies, music, and short stories, but books are my first and greatest love.

    The joy I felt came from the vast piles of books I have not yet read. I will never run out of books.

    The Joy Didn’t Last

    I have spent the last 18 months depressed. I am in the deeps of it now, though some days are better than others. Don’t worry, I’m fine. I mean, this is part of being me. It happens. I say “I’m fine” because I’m not the kind of depressed that leads to self-harm. I always feel the need to say that, because I don’t want anybody to worry about me.

    This particular bout of depression is notable not for its intensity but for its length.

    What Kind of Depression Is It?

    Two mornings a week, I don’t have to get up for work, so I sleep. I sleep 12 hours, maybe more. I have almost no appetite, yet I’ve gained every pound back that I had lost just before it started. I am disgusted by the very sight of myself.

    This is not the largest I have ever been, but it sits differently than it did. Rather than distribute itself around my body, it now sits reliably in my abdomen. I feel more like Orson Welles than I ever have, because I resemble him more than I ever have.

    Orson was exactly the same age as me when he recorded this interview in 1960.

     

    He was big, brilliant, big. There are other huge differences between me and Orson, but it’s the similarities that plague me.

    Enough about that. There’s more to depression than the physical features. There is a spiritual toll, too.

    The things that brought reliable joy no longer do. I find it hard to motivate myself to do anything that doesn’t keep the lights on.

    Work is something I still am able to do, enthusiastically, as I find a great respite in the reliability and challenge of work and it is only during the work day that I feel distant from the cloud that follows me. Sidebar: I’m reminded of the many stories about David Letterman and his intense self-punishment and loathing that he endured in every hour of the day that wasn’t spent at work.

    Spurts of extra motivation go to cleaning. I’ve never been very messy, but I’ve also never been very clean. The litter box and the bathroom and the kitchen and the living room and the laundry all get cleaned regularly, and when those tasks are completed I reward myself by doing nothing. I’ve gotten very good at doing nothing.

    I work, and then nothing. I don’t do anything.

    I spend many nights nights on my phone, reading articles on Reddit and Twitter. I have friendships that go unattended, hobbies ignored, movies remain unwatched, tv shows unbinged.

    Everybody talks about how great a show is, and, rarely, I might watch a few episodes. I watched the entirety of Squid Game, but I found myself entranced by the difference between the subtitles and the dubbing (I watch everything with subtitles on, because I’m much more annoyed by loudness than I am by closed captions).

    I didn’t really even watch the show for the plot, which I found unremarkable, or the characters, which I found familiar, or the message, which I found pedantic. I watched one episode, the one with the glass bridge, in bursts. I fast forwarded through most of that episode. The drama and suspense of the game itself didn’t thrill me.

    I don’t say that to brag. I don’t think it’s a good thing to watch a popular suspense/thriller show and ignore everything except the subtitles and the dubbing.

    Breakthrough Happiness

    When people who are being treated for depression and anxiety are stable and adequately treated, the brief bouts they get of their symptoms are called “breakthrough.” I have breakthrough happiness. It comes in brief blasts. It can come from many places, or, indeed, any place. My cat is a frequent source of joy. My family. My friends. The usual suspects. But it’s elusive.

    I have felt lately that some of the fog is lifting, though I am reluctant to celebrate too early. Early signs are good that some of these struggles are becoming less struggl-y.

    I wrote a bunch of new words for my second novel, which is almost done and needs only a great opening chapter (and then a great deal of editing, which I enjoy). That was impossible only a month ago.

    I gained weight, yes, but I really just returned to the weight I was before. What is more alarming than the weight I gained was that I lost it in the first place. I was living under a different cloud then, one of anxiety. I was an anxious wreck. I didn’t eat. What was terrible for my happiness was great for my waistline. I would say it was good for my health except it most definitely was not. My current weight is bad for my health, too, and I have already made great strides to getting closer to where my body wants to be.

    My life was extremely different when it was bad, and I am still trying to fix some of the things I broke. I fear that some of them never can be fixed at all, but that’s life.

    I fully expect that the next edition of this newsletter will be about something other than me, because I’m frankly tired of myself. It took me weeks to write this newsletter, and I push publish with the relief of having finished something.

    I direct you to the most recent League of Lensgrinders, where we discuss our depression specifically in the ways it intersects our creativity. We took most of 2021 off, but my friend Evelyn Pryce and my brother Robert Long Foreman are still excited about the League. It’s far too much fun for us to stop altogether. Frankly, I don’t think I could stop it if I wanted to.

    I leave you with one of my favorite songs. I used to listen to this with my father, who is in my mind a lot lately. He’s still around, but, you know, getting old. Parents tend to do that, if you’re lucky.

  • Let's Celebrate Five Years

    Dear God, That’s a Long Time

    In October of 2016, I published my first newsletter. Since then, I have finished 1 blog post, 0 short stories and 0 novels. This newsletter is the only substantial writing I’ve done that wasn’t work-related (where I do a lot of writing).

    I can’t blame COVID-19, because that’s only been an impediment for 2 of those years. I can’t blame my brain tumor, because that didn’t happen until 2018.

    I have not been writing the newsletter instead of those other things that ostensibly amount to my raison d’être, but the evidence is clear: I have not been writing fiction. I have only been writing this.

    Sidebar: I have also been writing work-related material, as my primary job is as a content writer. The muscle gets exercise.

    I started out writing these newsletters as an exercise to keep my juices flowing. I’ve learned a lot about myself in the intervening years since I wrote the first issue, which I called a pamphlet. Here it is:

    The Collected Foremania
    Pamphlet 1: “Debate”
    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️ “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk…
    Read more
    9 years ago · James Foreman

    If this newsletter seems disconnected, that’s because I’ve been writing a lot of different things and said to myself “this is newsletter content!” and then set it aside. I collect it here tonight for you to enjoy and to clear my drafts, as it were.

    Pretending to Play

    In 8th grade or so, we were given the choice between band and gym. Terrorized by communal showers and sports I didn’t understand, I chose band. I didn’t play an instrument during middle school band, but I was there for every practice, and I took a baritone home every night and enjoyed the travel of the keys for a few minutes before putting it away. During recitals, I pretended to play. If anybody noticed that my tuba never made a noise, they didn’t say anything.

    For reasons I don’t remember, I played football in 8th grade. We never scored a touchdown. I played for an entire season and never learned what a down was. I didn’t understand any of the rules. I ran fast when they told me to, and threw my body against people I was told to throw it against. I was told to listen for audibles. I didn’t know what those were. I faked it. Nobody noticed.

    I played on offensive, defense, special teams. I was good at it. I hated every minute.

    The list of things I hated about the experience is also a list of waypoints through my 12 year old mental geography.

    A List of Things I Hated About Playing Football

    – competition

    – proving myself

    – “hitting the showers”

    – running laps

    – doing pushups

    – committing violence

    – having violence committed against me

    Sidebar: I have a pet theory that one of the reasons football persists as a national game is because of the armor you have to wear. Sorry, I meant to call them pads. Whatever you call it, it still looks like armor. Every major civilization develops warfare to the point where people wearing interlocking plates heave themselves against other people wearing similar gear.

    Like some instinctual regression toward armor, we’re drawn to both wearing it and watching people who are wearing it fight each other. Eh, it’s not much of a theory.

    It won’t be long until we grind the gears

    But carry on, we’re on to something here

    – The Surprise Knock by The New Pornographers

    The Anti-Participator

    Difficult People, the late tv show about my kind of people (I don’t think you’re supposed to like the leads, played by Julie Klausner and Billy Eichner, but I do anyway) made a whole episode around the idea of the participator. Billy starts dating a guy who eagerly volunteered to be a magician’s assistant while on a date at a magic show. Billy and Julie, the annoying, obnoxious, judgmental, insensitive main characters, are shocked and dismayed to find that out about somebody who they otherwise like.

    I am not a participator.

    I have always said that there are two kinds of non-participator who doesn’t like to participate in “can I get a volunteer from the audience” stuff: the “aw-shucks-please-don’t-pick-me-ha-ha-I-actually-love-it” and ruin your day non-participators. I am better than I used to be in that I will smile and go along with it but I won’t volunteer and I won’t actually do anything. I am not a Yes And kind of guy. I’m more of a “please don’t talk to me.”

    The Outdoor Center

    I went to a private school in West Virginia for high school and junior high. In seventh or eighth grade, we were forced to spend a week at a camp with limited amenities run by hippies. It was not the best environment for 13 year olds.

    I don’t know who might have thrived there but it’s hard to imagine that five days of “roughing it” to private school kids under the watchful eye of crunchy, early-90s granola crusties had much positive impact on anybody, including the crusties.

    I had to do this at least five times that I can recall, each time for a week. This always took place during autumn, because that’s when school was, and it was always extremely muddy. There were communal showers.

    These are three of my main memories:

    1. five days of not bathing, as a teenager. The alternative, showering with other boys my age who were way farther along in adolescence than me, was unthinkable

    2. a fellow student in my grade, shirtless, muscular, walking around the “dorm” (barracks) popping his pimples at the rest of us

    3. another student, widely considered the strongest and toughest of all seventh graders (not the same one as number 2), picking his fellow classmates out of the crowd, at the cheers and encouragement of his peers, and bestowing upon them wedgies so atomic that they qualified as neutron bombs—I have memories of watching from behind a pile of firewood as he held up a poor victim’s underwear waistband, to the cheers of the rest of them

    How Not to Participate

    If there is a canonical story for non-parcipators, specifically those of us who were at the mercy of crusty granolas in the early 90s/late 80s, it’s this:

    I was likely identified early, by the crusties (also called camp counselors or whatever) as a Shy Kid who kept to himself.

    Whenever we were presented with an option to do something “fun” I always receded to the back. When participation was required, I was nowhere to be found. They were crusties but they were smart, and they clocked me early. They identified me as a Shy Kid Who Needed To Come Out of His Shell.

    They initiated a Fun Game. They had a deck of cards and anybody who drew the one single Joker card in the deck was designated the “assassin” who was supposed to privately signal the other students (I think with an “ok” sign) whereupon the victim was to theatrically “die” as if struck by God’s disfavor or whatever. This is a great idea for bringing a kid out of his shell, I think. I don’t know if it would be tried today, but back then it made sense.

    Having identified me as a Shy Kid, they arranged for me to draw the Joker and thus become the kid who would be the center of attention. They thought this would bring me out of my shell. It probably worked very well on the shy kids before me.

    They had never encountered a Foreman before.

    This Story is About a Different Foreman

    This story illustrates how we Foremans, in our larval stage especially, approach events or situations that others might find invigorating, interesting, or exciting (situations and events you might also call “new”).

    This brother started at Linsly at around the same age that the rest of us did (I have four brothers, so you will never know which one I’m referring to unless I name him, and I won’t do that here).

    Every day, this Foreman left the house and walked to school, for the first few days of his first year (this private school, with uniforms, is within walking distance of our house). He came back every day at the appropriate time, and seemed fine. Nobody suspected anything was amiss.

    A few days into this incredible first week of school at a new place with new people where he had to wear a uniform, my mother was approached by the man she had hired to do some plumbing work in a part of the basement Where Spiders Are (and where my mother resolutely refused to go). It was not the spiders that kept my mother away from the work that needed to be done but the plumbing. It was the rare home improvement task that was beyond her.

    Sidebar: my mother’s ability to do seemingly everything and anything related to running and maintaining a household is probably a big part of why the gender roles modeled for me are anything but traditional.

    The plumber came up from the basement and said “ma’am there is a young boy wearing a suit in your basement.”

    My brother, the Foreman, instead of walking to school, hid in the one place in the house he was pretty sure my mother would never look for him. He spent all day there and reemerged at the end.

    No muss, no fuss, no tantrums, no drama. He completely, imperceptibly, declined to participate. Faced with a new school in a new place, he said “No, thank you” and quietly extricated himself.

    The thing about tantrums and drama is that they bring attention right back to the person who’s throwing it. By making a big stink about how you don’t want to participate in something, you are, by default, participating in it.

    Okay, Back to Me

    I did not know that these crusties were trying to get me to participate, but it wouldn’t have mattered. No attempt to make me participate, no matter how clever, was ever going to work.

    Instead of reluctantly shrugging my shoulders and joining in the fun and realizing that I could fit in anyway, as it should have gone, I took one of my few friends aside and asked him if he wanted to be the “assassin” instead. I didn’t want it.

    If it was all secret, and I believed what they had told us — that it was completely random that I had been designated the secret center of attention, then nobody would know.

    A perfect avoidance! My friend agreed and proceeded to “assassinate” our fellow classmates instead of me. I retreated to anonymity.

    After his first few assassinations, the game was canceled. One of the counselors specifically singled my friend out, having identified him as the assassin, and said “you’re not supposed to be the assassin.”

    The game they these granola crunchies had concocted, perfectly tuned to bring a shy kid out of his shell, shattered against the power of one kid who absolutely, unequivocally refused to join. They had never before encountered an anti-participator.

    I don’t relate this to celebrate my family’s inveterate rejection of group activities. It’s not universal to every Foreman in every scenario. I’m using a shaky throughline among members of my family to make a point about myself. I don’t like being an anti-participator. I don’t think it’s a good thing. I think it’s okay, maybe even good, maybe even great, to participate in some things.

    I very strongly dislike essentialism of any kind. People are unique. Who they are, where they were born, where they grew up, etc. can inform their lives but they don’t define them. I would never assume anything about anybody for what they are, because I don’t think those things are very instructive. It makes for lazy assumptions about people.

    Having said that, when my 4 year old nephew acts like a Foreman, I feel a palpable delight. We’re inevitable.

    Anyway, next issue will have a lot less navel gazing.

  • Rise and Grind, Dirge and Dance

    It’s time for a pep talk

    One of these days, I will dance again. I have danced a few times, but I have too much shame and a poor body image and other associated inhibitors to do so as often as I am dancing in my head. I love listening to dance music, especially anything that sounds like this:

     

    The original title of this was “A Dirge for the Dead and Dying” but I thought that was a little too morose for what I wanted to write today, and not reflective of how I feel and also not the kind of energy I want to pop into peoples inboxes on a Sunday evening. Be warned, though, I’m going to talk about death, because it’s on my mind today, especially, of all days. 

    Today is in My Calendar as Miles Day

    Today is the seventh year since my nephew, Miles, died in a car accident. He was alone but listening to music, and it was late at night. I have put myself in that car with him many times since. I sit with him as the end comes, and he’s not alone at all. 

    My brother, his father, memorialized him with a website of our memories of Miles and the gifts he gave us. I encourage you to visit anonymousish.com today and think about that golden-haired boy with us.

    This is a Dirge Day

    In accessing the mourning part of my tapestry of available feelings, I am reminded of my friend Elicia Parkinson, who also died young, and recently, and suddenly, and without telling anyone. Of course she didn’t tell anyone, she didn’t know it was going to happen, though I suspect if she had known she wouldn’t have mentioned it. I wrote about her when it happened and this is a part of what I said: 

    Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there. 

    Everything Happens At Once

    We are blessed to experience time linearly, at a rate of sixty seconds per minute. Everything that has ever happened has happened already, and is currently happening. Imagine a long string held vertically, as if to entice a cat to play. Every event occurs along that string, stacked vertically, from the beginning of the universe to its end. Everything ends, you see, even the universe.

    I take great comfort in this. Endings are built into the fabric of everything. Order and chaos are not opposed forces, they are best friends. Order knows that chaos wins in the end, but it still stacks up the blocks that it knows chaos will one day knock over. Even though chaos claims everything eventually, order keeps us safe until we can’t be safe anymore. Endings are inevitable, but the greatest glory is for those who fight for a lost cause.

    I Won an Award 

    Our office had a lovely little superlatives survey that culminated in a lovely little awards ceremony at the company picnic. It was a nice way to show our mutual admiration for each other, and more reasons for me to feel so lucky about where I work. Here’s my award:

    Believe it or don’t, I’m known around the office for my relentless positivity. Having been faced with some challenges of my own helped me get to where I am, but it does not originate in a hospital bed. My secret is that this positivity does not come from that stuff at all but, instead, comes directly from Miles.

    Miles and I both struggled with anxiety and depression. My tattoo is a constant reminder of the light in the darkness. It was pulled straight from a page of writing Miles had done. It stuck out to me because it was on a page by itself, as if he flipped over whatever he was working on and scribbled this down. It’s a mantra. It’s a prayer. It will be with me until my own story ends.

    Well, unless my arm gets bitten off by a shark or bear or something. I suppose I could also lose it to a necronomical infection and chop it off with a chainsaw, and then replace the lost hand with the same chainsaw, but I’m not really a cabin-in-the-woods kind of guy.

    Feeling Sorry For Yourself is OK, But Don’t Let it Last

    Last night I was deep in my feelings (the bad ones), and then I happened to look at what day it was, and I instantly felt like a very large ass. I smacked myself (mentally) and told myself to pull me together.

    It is tempting to dwell on the things we don’t have. It is easy to see another person enjoying what we wish we had and feel envy. It is especially infuriating to see someone squander something we value.

    The cure for this is to make a list. It doesn’t have to be a long list. In fact, it can be just one thing that you have: rent money, a healthy body, a partner or a pet who loves you, etc. There is somebody in the world, probably not very far from you, who would love to have what you have. If you’re alive and reading this, I can name at least one thing for you.

    When you next find yourself in your feelings and feeling down about whatever it is you’re down about, remember that you are alive, right now. Rejoice! Now is all that matters, and right now, you’re right here.

    That’s something to celebrate.

  • Foremania: Brain

    To subscribe to my current newsletter, go to The Collected Foremania, hosted on Substack. Below is a recreation of my favorite newsletter (I referred to them as Pamphlets then). I have put it here because my newsletter is now hosted at Substack.

    Pamphlet 8: “Brain”

    by James Foreman

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SEVEN: BRAIN

    If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Trepanning

    I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.

    This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.

    Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.

    The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.

    Malaportmanteau

    I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.

    Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.

    That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.

    The Most Difficult Language To Learn 

    Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.

    But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.

    The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:

    Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

    This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.

    The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:

    Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

    The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.

    Hot Snakes

    It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtakefrom Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).

    生肖

    Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:

    In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

    Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

    Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

    Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

    Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

    In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.

    As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.

    Recommendatae

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    James Randi on Nova

    Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.


    Snowmelt by Zoë Keating

    I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.