Peridotlines

We’re not even a full week into the month and October is already proving to be a little much: we’ve welcomed a new nibling into the family, it’s been a year since Ivory’s father was laid to rest, and this weekend we celebrate our first anniversary as a married couple.

If there’s anything I’ve learned to appreciate as an adult, it’s the bittersweet nature of events. I’m assuming it comes with time, because the longer you’re on this planet the more likely you are to lose someone, and to think of and miss them during big moments. So, here we are, looking forward to meeting our niece in person, celebrating a year of love and commitment, and at the same time faced with the reminders of loss.

Last week, I pulled out the ham bones we’ve been saving and made some split pea soup. It was appropriately cool at the start of the week, and the idea of a pot of soup seemed soul-warming, especially thinking of my Grandma Marie, since I use the recipe she gave me to make it. But then, I was surprised to end up dreaming of my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, the night after I made the soup. Grandma Doris was also a wonder in the kitchen, especially when it came to delicious baked goods, so it probably wasn’t much of a stretch to be thinking of her, but it’s been so long since she was in one of my dreams.

I can’t say I really put much stock in it meaning something to dream of someone you’ve lost, it’s not even something I really clung to or thought of as important; I’ve always considered that to be what memories are for. Still, in the last year, I’ve found relief the mornings I’ve realized I had a dream of Moxie, even if it was just something brief and inconsequential. There was an equal amount of relief to have dreamed of Grandma Doris, especially because we were having a conversation about how people show you they love you, and that not everyone shows it the same way. She also demanded I give her the biggest hug, and the last time I would have done that was probably close to 20 years ago at this point. The dream ended with a bunch of bumble bees the size of canaries showing up around the tree in her front yard, so things really took a turn…

I’ve thought back to that dream a lot in the past week, probably because of some of my internal frustration when it comes to communication, and the emotional distance that seems to widen between myself and certain people. When I wrote about saying goodbye to Grandma Marie, I mentioned how glad I was I got to know her as an adult, and that’s very much something I missed out on when it came to Grandma Doris. I wasn’t even out of college when she died, and there was a lot I didn’t know about myself then. I often wonder what she would make of my gender and sexuality, would it be something contentious? I can’t lie that I’m glad to have skirted the “difficult” talks with my grandparents, helping to maintain a little more sweetness in my memories instead of some of the bitterness that could have been there.

It’s about to be a busy weekend. We’re attending a Yarn Tasting tomorrow, and have family coming from out of town. So, I’m about to shut my brain off for the next few hours after what was a pretty busy week.

I’m hoping I’ll be able to post a bit more here next week. As my scrolling of Bluesky increases, my need to pour words onto a page decreases, so that’s something I definitely need to keep in check.

I take for granted having grown up learning and speaking in English. As a language with a reputation for stealing the good bits from a bunch of other languages, there’s a part of it that could almost feel universal. And then, I hear a something that’s not entrenched in the realm of English as I’m familiar with it, and it feels like such a stupid thing to know. Especially when there are prettier and somehow more evocative languages.

Every year in elementary school, we would have a week or two with students from the high school who came to teach us German. It was always German, which was my secret frustration as a kid. For a long time, I think that was the only foreign language offered at my small K-12 school. At some point, Spanish entered the ring, and then I would live in hope that we’d get Spanish II students in our classroom for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t ever to be. When it came time for me to pick a language in high school, I chose Spanish out of pure spite; I wanted nothing to do with German.

I think I also chose Spanish because on some level, I could see such clear lines between it and English. Our first day of class, the teacher did that immersion thing, where she spoke in Spanish the entire time. I’m not sure how the rest of the class felt about it, but for me personally, it was fascinating. I still think back to that first day of class sometimes, because it was probably the most fun I’d had with pure learning in a very long time. It was so easy to do high school by rote and memory, and for some reason it felt like that practice went out the window for the final hour of that first school day.

I didn’t have any more immersion in Spanish until I took a lone semester of it in college. In retrospect, I should have taken more of it, because there were days when I would be walking back to my dorm room and it was like my brain had jumped to a different track and my thoughts were in (admittedly jumbled and jerky) Spanish, and I enjoyed that feeling. I didn’t have that happen again until I went on an extended Duolingo jag; coupled with stumbling into a telenovela. There were some weird dreams in there, and I would wake up in the morning with the idea that my subconscious was doing a lot of work to internalize this other language… and all of the drama in the life of Ana Leal.

That accursed Duolingo owl entered my life a decade ago, and has routinely guilted me into maintaining our relationship ever since. Has it made me a better speaker? Absolutely not. In terms of reading, writing, hearing, and speaking Spanish, I would say I’m most proficient in reading and writing (with the assistance of Google’s multi-language keyboard). Listening is best accomplished with subtitles (because: reading), and I’m a reluctant speaker; I loath the awkwardness of being bad at something. Also, until pretty recently, the app was terrible at understanding anything I said in Spanish.

I tried using Duolingo to learn Portuguese, because “it’s a romance language, it’s not the same as Spanish, but it’s close, right?” That lasted maybe 3 days and I was so annoyed at all of the different branches the language took in sound and spelling that I gave it up. Before Duolingo, I had a brief flirtation with French, because I found an online friend who is French Canadian. We exchanged some mix tapes, and she sent me a CD full of music in French. I’ve never tried to get the owl to teach me French though, I’m not sure it would go well.

The closest I will ever come to learning a different romance language is Italian, since my first 6 years of piano lessons involved a lot of vocabulary lessons and identifying what the random italicized words mixed in with the notes meant. It’s very specialized, entirely sporadic, and basically not useful to my daily life until I decide I need to start sitting down at a piano everyday.

Instead, I’m making tentative steps to learn Irish (Gaeilge), because it just sounds interesting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about language lately. Some of that is down to Hozier’s new album, and the inclusion of Gaeilge in the lyrics of “De Selby (Part 1).” But, it’s clearly not the first time music has pulled me towards a language, or that listening to music with something other than English has been a more emotional or meaningful experience to me.

In the days when I listened to nothing but music podcasts (when I wasn’t listening to actual music), All Songs Considered turned me on to Sigur Rós. Before then, I think I had maybe listened to a handful of their songs, always the very ambient ones that played over random moments on TV shows. When the brass started at the beginning of “Inní mér syngur vitleysingur” I was taken aback, and then more thrown by how joyful it all felt. I tear up listening to the song, because it’s so intrinsically happy. I don’t know why happiness makes me cry, but that’s true of pretty much any intense emotion in my experience. To listen to something that sounds like distilled joy is going to bring it out in me, especially if I haven’t heard to it in a while. I know none of the lyrics to that song. I’m familiar with all of the vocalizations, because I’ve listened to it for 15 years, but I couldn’t tell you what any of it means. Sometimes, I wonder if what I’m hearing and identifying as words is correct. But, I also know that this group plays with their lyrics, and some of it is actual Icelandic, and other parts are… something else. I remembered it being referred to as Hopelandic, I guess in Icelandic it’s known as Vonlenska.

I can’t say which language in music will hit my guts and which one won’t. So much of it comes down to my mood I suppose. It doesn’t all have to make me cry for me to want to listen to it again, because I certainly had fun overplaying “Dragostea Din Tei” in its heyday on the internet.

But, not every piece of music featuring a foreign language will strike some hidden chord inside me and turn my brain into a sponge for the language. It would be nice if it resulted in me being multilingual, but mostly my memory contains snippets of lyrics I may or may not be able to translate. If it’s in Spanish (and I’ve listened to it enough times) I can probably figure out the words, anything else… maybe I listened to it on repeat and ran the lyrics through a translator enough times that I memorized it?

This post has gotten away from me… it sat in my drafts folder for a week, precipitated by listening to “De Selby (Part 1)” and then marinating in the back of my brain while life went on. There are so many languages I want to know, but can’t find the right avenue to learn them. I live in Northern Minnesota, where an effort is being made to include the Ojibwe language throughout our community, and the only avenues I find to learn are the content creators who take the time to share it. It seems fanciful to think that learning to understand those words might give me a greater appreciation of where I live, but I look at how much appreciation I get from other things where I’ve been able to see the influence of the language, and maybe it’s not that much of a stretch.

I don’t want to think about what I was doing 22 years ago. It feels cliche to rehash it at this point, because my story is the same as everyone else’s. It also feels wrong to think about it now. I think a lot about the obsession everyone had with the American Flag in the aftermath, and how that flag has been twisted and manipulated into propaganda of every kind now and mostly I feel disgusted. Part of that probably comes down to every civics-centered event I participated in between being 16 and 17 years old, and how much was hammered into my head about how you treat the flag. I watch what people do with it now and mostly I feel like an idiot for having so much reverence for an object everyone else has decided to manipulate rather than respect. So, that’s how I’m feeling about things today.

I’m also just struggling a little bit in general today. Being out is the most exhausting experience at times, especially because I just don’t know how to be out, for myself. I don’t know how to interject the correct pronouns into a conversation. It feels like I’m just too afraid, too unsure to take the chance. Most of it comes down to practice, but when safe spaces are so difficult to come by, that leaves a lot of awkward places to advocate for my pronouns, for myself, and considering how averse I am to conflict it just becomes “easier” not to say anything. It’s not actually easier, but it avoids the awkwardness of exposing all of my weak spots to people who may or may not understand, who might just choose unkindness rather than acceptance.

I’m resisting the urge to just pour everything into this blog like the journals of my adolescence. I’m hoping to start doing some morning pages again, so maybe there will be a bit more in the way of mental clarity for this place. Those pages are where it’s completely acceptable to say anything, no matter how taboo it might be. Technically, I know I can say whatever I want here, but some of the things I want to say… well they’re better off said directly to someone if they’re ever to be said at all. Or, I could just take a big chance and spill everything that’s bothering me out into the void and bank on it going unseen, remaining unaddressed until the end of time. It’s one of those bad habits I’ve had for… basically my entire life. Rather than have the tough conversation, I just wait out the immediate need to talk about whatever has come up, and then I can pretend to move on because everything is fine. It’s like I had the conversation, except I totally didn’t, and it just builds up as this invisible wall between myself and others, until it’s so tall and heavily reinforced that it’s seems insurmountable. It’s not healthy, but considering I don’t know how to properly have anything resembling a difficult conversation or an argument, avoidance is a skill I rely on, way too much.

Happy Monday, everyone. Apparently it’s going to be a long week.

You know the fable about the ant and the grasshopper? I’m feeling just slightly like the grasshopper right now. I’m not sure it’s possible to get to the end of summer and not have a bit of regret about the things I should have taken care of during the appropriate season.

Part of my regret stems from the fact that things are about to get busier again, after a relatively quiet summer. I’m not sure I’m ready for the busyness. There’s going to be travel, and more socialization than I get in a week, let alone in a day, and I’m going to be away from home for repeated stretches again. There are little plans all throughout September and October, and then Halloween will be here, and we’ve been discussing a costume for months.

It’s an odd echo from a year ago when we were scrambling to do wedding planning and it was as though somehow the big day had managed to sneak up on us (of course, our first anniversary is mixed into the “little” plans in October). Things were a bit more chaotic then, which I can’t really say is a comfort this time around, because there are still big ripples from that chaos coming through right now. Funny how time works like that (time blindness too).

With all of that busyness in mind, updates here are going to be pretty brief for the next few days, and it’s possible I will just make a habit of going quiet over the weekends or holidays. I’m definitely still building up my stamina to keep doing this on a near-daily basis. Weirdly, it’s easier to imagine doing posts for 31 days straight when there’s a goal post in sight. But just doing them to do them? That’s somehow completely different.

For some reason, it’s difficult to be mindful about this place on the weekends. Saturday and Sunday are pretty much always where I will struggle, because those days are without form and structure. It’s ironic (I think?) to have 48 hours completely at my disposal, no work, no major commitments, and to somehow be unable to remember to do this one thing for myself, even when I remember to do it 5 other days in the week, when I’ve committed large chunks of my time to work and the necessities of daily living. It’s not a habit yet, which it turns out are things I have to aggressively cultivate in order to get them to stick. Maybe by next year this will be more ingrained somehow. That’s a long way away though.