Here are some of the things I think I think for the month of September 2023.
- The steak breakfast at McDonald’s is surprisingly good – indeed, it’s a serviceable alternative when I don’t feel redneck enough to visit a Waffle House. The steak is good and tender, enough so that you could eat it with just a fork if you wanted, but you can tell it’s a cheap cut of meat. The grilled onions rival the ones I make for myself when I have steak and onions, liver and onions, pork and onions, chicken and onions, or any other dish where I sauté onions and eat them as a side dish. (I love onions.)
- Retroflex consonants are hard if you didn’t grow up with them, and being bad at them makes it hard for me to speak good Mandarin.
- Rolled R’s are hard for my lazy Anglo-American mouth, which makes it hard to have a good accent in Spanish… unless you’re Costa Rican, apparently.
- The fiendish orthography and complex phonology of Polish makes it hard to speak even if you’re Polish, as many Poles will proudly attest.
- Am I the only person who feels like Melissa Etheridge’s music is horrifically underrated? I’m starting my day off from work with America’s second-favorite lesbian (our favorite is clearly Ellen DeGeneres), and I always forget just how robust, yet tender, her voice is in her earlier work.
- “Your Woman” by White Town was the best song of 1997. Fight me.
- Knoxville is an incredibly boring city with less culture than rotten yogurt. Having said that, there is one redeeming factor: it’s enough of a cultural melting pot that there’s a shockingly diverse array of ethnic supermarkets – by my count, one general international market, a Turkish grocer, an Indian grocer, a general Middle Eastern supermarket, and no fewer than four East Asian supermarkets.
- While I think it’s a touch premature to proclaim that rock and roll is dead, I think it’s certainly a genre past its creative and commercial prime. Even rock bands that I like aren’t making music that I would conventionally consider “good;” a lot of modern rock feels extremely derivative, as though the genre has exhausted its creative potential.
- Butterbrot is the devil’s food. It’s way too good for the likes of a mortal human such as myself, especially when it’s made with Irish butter.
- Starbucks Blonde Roast is kind of like American macrobrewed beer in that it’s like having sex in a canoe: it’s fucking close to water. It has a pleasant flavor despite having less body than a ghost.
Earlier this year, I announced, before retracting the announcement, a blogging project called tnwae Academy, whose primary goal was to serve as a place for me to write about things I’m studying and learning about. I abandoned the project due to lack of time, but now I’m at the point where I want to make the time – and as they say in England, I bloody well plan to.
The idea behind tnwae Academy was to learn publicly about topics that interest me, sharing my learning so that others can hopefully get something out of my educational journey. I’m making posts specific to linguistics, computer science, data science, and natural-language processing on my new blog, DataDrivenTongues, which is online at https://datadriventongues.com. DDT is all about the intersection of linguistics and computing by someone equally fascinated with both. Other posts under the tnwae Academy umbrella, about general topics like math, science, philosophy, history, and foreign language, will be posted here as time allows. I took a mental health day from work yesterday, and it has served to teach me that even if I work 10-hour days, a four-day workweek is of immense potential benefit to me, and it’s something I plan to explore once my circumstances allow for it.
I’m hoping to make tnwae Academy posts at least biweekly, which coincides with the posting frequency of DataDrivenTongues. Juggling two blogs, continuing education, a full-time job, a part-time job, the keeping of my home, and the general responsibilities of adulthood is, itself, a full-time job – but it’s a challenge I’m willing to meet head-on. Yesterday’s mental health day was a tremendous gift to myself and I got so much out of doing just this side of nothing.