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Sharapova is dripping with awesomeness.

I like her… a lot.

I want her to win.

In a nutshell, I think that I've determined the essential differences in the branches of Christianity that seem to exist across the denominational divides:

• Fundamentalist — Follow and observe every rule.
• Evangelical — Forget all of the rules.
• Liberal — Break every rule.

I'm craving a banana right now — either that or a McDonald's cheeseburger. I guess that it's hard to tell these urges apart.

Anyway, is it right to accept a privileged position with an organisation that you have no respect for?

Taking a little walk around the campus here at UND, I'll often see things that seem out of place on a college campus. Then again, the university that I normally go to is pretty much a lame excuse for a university anyway.

Rabbits! Walking along the sidewalks that go across the beautiful, scenic campus here, you're bound to see a few of these cute, furry creatures. It makes me think of the time when we had rabbits at our old house in Broomfield. There's really no deep meaning to this post except to say that I like rabbits and wish that I had some.

Funny how everything that we consider second nature might be the complete opposite to someone else.

I am shocked by the crap that passes for jazz these days. It is a disgrace to call one guy playing guitar in a coffee shop jazz. Number one, jazz can't be played by just one person; it's a team effort. Someone's got to supply the beat, and someone's got to hash out the improv. Two, the guitar is a jazz instrument as much as the banjo is a rock instrument. Of course, you'll see the banjo pop up here and there in rock music, but one man rocking out on his banjo hardly constitutes rock music. Similarly, a guitarist playing a riff doesn't constitute jazz. Jazz requires drums, a piano, a bass¹ and a trumpet, but you can sometimes substitute a saxophone for a trumpet. Notice that there's no guitar in that list. Of course, that's not an exhaustive list. A full jazz band might include a trumpet, saxophone, clarinet, trombone and sometimes the guitar, but jazz never revolves around the guitar.

Anyway, I'm going on this rant because someone said that there was going to be live jazz at a coffee shop in town. I skipped an academic lecture on morphemes in sign language so that I could witness jazz.² When I got to the coffee shop, I was disappointed to find a single guitar player playing some lame riffs. I had this feeling of combined disappointment and fury. I left the coffee shop feeling totally disgusted, but I went to a bar instead and felt better.

1. The bass is not a guitar. A bass has four strings; a guitar has six.
2. I would skip a week of class to go to a Wynton Marsalis concert if he were in town. I would also skip my own wedding if I had the chance to see Glenn Miller resurrected from the dead.

Linguistics exists in its own little world. It has its own jargon, humour and general culture. Right now, the SIL people are taking suggestions for this year's T-shirt design. The proposals from the students generally consist of numerous inside jokes that are outright hilarious to us but wouldn't make sense to you.

Linguistic topics of course will boil over into our normal conversation. The dinner table seems to be the normal place for the discussion of such. I struck up a conversation with the women who I sat with at dinner this evening. Somehow or another, the topic steered to Spain under Franco and his language policy.

Let me fast forward to today. In America, there are a number of people fed up with people immigrating to the United States and then not speaking English. They start going on tirades to have English made the official language, forbid other languages from being spoken in schools and only providing services in English. The main reason for their argument is that if this nation cannot speak only one language, it cannot remain united.

That's a load of crap! Look at Switzerland. They have four official languages there, and there's no national disunity there. Of course, you go to a place like Spain, and language is what divides the country. It's interesting to note that in Spain, there actually was a time when Franco tried to enforce a single language policy. It kind of spawned this thing called the ETA. If you know anything about the ETA, well… they kill people. Even thirty years after Franco died, the ETA is still killing people.

National unity really has nothing to do with the language spoken in a country. Unity can be achieved with diversity just as well as with conformity. In other instances conformity and diversity can breed disunity as well. I'll go ahead and stand on the side of diversity. I kind of like being me, so I might come in handy to be able to say that I said that when someone says that I can't be me.

At one time, I used to not believe that it was a real language. When I said that, I didn't mean any disrespect towards it. I believed that it was both very useful and truly necessary. However, I just didn't think that it belonged on the same plane as languages like English or Russian or Arabic. The best way that I would have described it would be to call it a close analogy of languages.

This is one of those times that I was wrong. I eventually realised that it was a language in its own right. Still, coming to SIL and being around users of this language has given me a really great admiration for it.

I'm talking about sign language.

Technically, when I say sign language, I'm talking about sign languages. There are many different sign languages from many different places on the globe. While the United States and the United Kingdom use the same primary language (technically, English is two languages: a written one and a spoken one), their sign languages are completely different. In fact, American Sign Language has more in common with French Sign Language since they are both derived from a common source.

My first week here at SIL, I was slightly surprised about the number of deaf people studying here. When someone thinks about linguistics, we think about the written and spoken forms of the language. It doesn't really occur to the majority of us to think of the signed aspect of language.

At the all-SIL kickoff shindig, I met a women named Kelly Jo who had with her a message pad. However, instead of having the normal “From”, “Date” and “Call Back” fields, the entire was was in Sign Writing notation. I asked her if I could have a sheet of the pad to keep. Instead, she sent me an entire pad in the mail. Once I looked into how to duplicate the signs for myself based on the notation, I found that the language is somewhat intuitive.

It seems that whenever I eat lunch here, there is always opportunity to sit with someone who is deaf. The first week, I sat at a table with some signers at it. One was the daughter of a missionary from Japan who was translating the Bible into Japanese Sign Language. The woman knew virtually nothing of American Sign Language despite being an American. The other was a deaf woman named Nathalie from Sweden who used Swedish Sign Language and had only been learning American Sign Language for the past few weeks before coming to America. The two were still able to talk to each other and the MK was even able to translate for me. I was actually surprised that I was able to understand the deaf woman when she asked me what my name was. I was equally thrilled with myself for being able to answer her without the help of a translator with my meagre knowledge of sign language.

Another time, I sat at a table next to a deaf man named Bob. Some of the others and I were asking him what the signs were for several items that we had with us like tea, soda and water. We started up a conversation. I found out that he had studied in New Orleans before coming to SIL. I instantly had to tell him of my profound love of New Orleans. He then asked me what my favourite part of New Orleans was. I didn't even have to think about that one: jazz! As I watched the translator translate what I had just said, I noticed that she was spelling out jazz. In sign language, if the sign for a word doesn't exist or if it just isn't that common, it's usually spelled out in English. Now, my being a person who loves jazz more than live itself, I was shocked that there was no sign for jazz. I tried to ask what the sign for it was, but the response that I got back was that I was surprised that there was no sign for that. Finally, the translator just had to say, “Deaf people don't care about music.” I kind of had one of those moments where I had to utilise one of my favourite words: schmuck as in the phrase: “Well, don't I feel like a schmuck.” Still, that let me realise that signed languages are just as prone to being affected by culture. I heard it been said that some Inuit languages have six or seven words for snow, and it makes sense: the Inuit live in the Arctic region where snow is abundant. In another instance, Hawaiian has three words for lava. Generally, the birth place of the English language, England, lies in a temperate climate with very little volcanos. Naturally, we only have one word for snow and one word for lava… not counting the loan words that we stole from Hawaiian and Inuit. It makes since that since deaf culture doesn't include music, it was unnecessary to include signs for it.

With all of this, I'm reminded of my time as an employee at Noodles & Company. When I worked the register, I got the occasional deaf customer. I tried to be accommodating, but while my boss could communicate with enough ASL to cater to the customer, I was reduced to having the customer point to the item that they wanted on a menu. Sure, it worked, but there's just so much more that being able to communicate in sign language would have provided. At that time, I probably just thought of sign language as a means to communicate with people who couldn't hear or speak. Now, I have these desires to learn as much as I can about it. I don't identify myself as deaf despite being deaf in one ear, but I really don't identify with any of the cultures of the languages that I speak anyway.

Anyway, tomorrow, I'm starting Introduction to Sociolinguistics. It basically covers all of the aspects of language that don't involve talking, writing or signing. That's probably the aspect of language that I love the most.

Paul always was my favourite of the Beatles. He still is despite the ridiculousness of walking down the street in a nice suit wearing tennis shoes and not really caring about what anyone thinks. Actually, that sounds like something that I might do.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD2mS4GAVBc

SIL is amazing.

I cannot ever think of a time when I was having more fun studying a topic or studying with a finer group of people. I think that I've finally found an academic corner of the world that I belong in. It's like I don't even know these people, but we all already have our inside jokes. We have our own brand of linguistic humour.

I really feel that I've been wasting time at JBU. I'm really starting to hate that place, but what can I do about it? I'm half ashamed to tell people up here that I go to school down there. Well, I can't change the past, but I can talk about it in past tense.

Okay, despite my first impressions that North Dakota is a worthless, boring state, I was wrong.

Pretty much, the University of North Dakota is my idea of how a real university should be, and the town of Grand Forks is my idea of how a real college town should be. It really makes JBU look like a wannabe school.

There's just something more collegiate feeling about here than there. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's a campus that has streets crisscrossing throughout it or the presence of frat houses or an actual athletic program. The point being that I think that I missed out on a lot going to JBU instead of a prestigious institution. In addition, the town of Grand Forks is really awesome. Even though it's only half the size of my home town of Arvada which itself is only a suburb of a much bigger city, it's all right. The town actually has two malls where Arvada has none. I made a point to walk about it this evening. The downtown is a pretty tight place. It was filled with bar-and-grills and small shops. Indeed, it would be the perfect setting for an art festival of some sort. Not surprising, there was an art festival down there.

Anyway, my comparisons of the town aside, I need to make some decisions coming up here. As a part of my coursework, I have to acquire another language. My choices are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Georgian and some sort of south-Indian language. They're all languages that I'd like to learn, but I only get to pick one. O well, I guess having too many to pick from is better than having not enough.

Actually, I can think of an instance where that's not the case: churches. I have to pick a church home for the next two months, but I don't even know what denomination to start with. I both hate and admire the Pentecostal and Catholic traditions, so I'll probably have to pick somewhere in between like Lutheran or Presbyterian. I would go on a rant of my view on Catholicism and Pentecostalism, but I don't want to right now.

Pray for me!

Today was World No-Tobacco Day. So, what would be the best way to end it?

I'll give you one guess.