I’m going to pretend that I haven’t had a long hiatus, and just continue on…
In the morning I like a little zone-out time while I’m waking up and thinking about the day. One of my most long-running distractions is an iPhone word game app called WhirlyWord. The reason I say my relationship with it is dysfunctional is because I’m constantly talking back to it about the limits and quirkiness of the dictionary. Pet peeves: leaving out common words, redacting anything the least bit “unsuitable” or rude, and yet including obscure botanical and medical terms.
But I’ve been playing it since December 2012, and even though I accidentally reset my progress a while back and had to start over, the number of puzzles has keep me interested (and muttering under my breath) for all this time.
This morning during my workout at the Y I responded to something my trainer said with “claro que si !” This happens frequently and is quite unconscious; I can never predict when or where I might insert some stock French or Spanish phrase into conversations with people who I know don’t speak either of those languages. What the heck is that all about?
Today’s example at the gym left me wondering if I shouldn’t dig up some of the second-language acquisition studies we looked at when I was getting my ESL degree. I found the stuff about growing up bilingual particularly fascinating, and even though I learned both of my second languages after the so-called “age of plasticity” (puberty or so, when the brain starts losing its ability to just absorb stuff without any effort) there might be some insights there into my somewhat puzzling spontaneous utterances.
On the other hand, maybe I’ll just chalk it up to a harmless eccentricity, and move on to something else.
One of the important plot points in Tana French’s novel Broken Harbor involves an unknown animal or animals supposedly invading the attic of one character’s house, terrorizing the children and causing the husband to engage in increasingly irrational behavior.
While I was reading these sections we starting hearing rats in our attic again for the first time in four years. (We feed birds. We’re going to have critters. And they’re eventually going to get in.) We’ve called the exterminators and the bill is going to be a big one this time around, since it involves ripping out all the insulation and plastic in the crawl space. And I still don’t know what they’re going to do about the attic, and how they’re going to get past all that blown-in insulation.
This was all bad news. But seriously, the worst part of the whole experience was reading Tana French’s creepily evocative descriptions of mysterious animal noises in the attic while hearing them in my own house. No fair! Really!