Current mood:	content
Current music:	Death Cab for Cutie - Different Names for the Same Thing
Entry tags:	geekery, language, work

intellectual orgasm, so to speak
Ah, the thrill of understanding!
There is nothing better than it. Not love, not money, not sex, not anything. Standing there at work today, talking with German, having a conversation however slow and halting it was, in Spanish. Not in Spanish, translated to English, translated back to Spanish. All in Spanish. No inner translation involved. Just thinking in Spanish. Knowing what he was saying. Knowing what to say.

It's so ephemeral that as soon as I take a step back to admire it, it's gone. I lost the connection and a torrent of meaningless Spanish washes over me, and I have to ask him to repeat it, or I start code-switching and answer him in English. It takes a lot of concentration, and if you let up for one second you've lost it. I went to an ASL Live Lab for Sign Language class, where some Deaf people come in and tell stories and talk with students. One guy was telling a bunch of stories about where he worked, and I was catching most of it even though he used a ton of words I didn't know. I started to relax, and then realised that I was just staring at his hands moving, and wasn't taking anything in. I can't understand Spanish or ASL in the same way I understand English, effortlessly. It takes a lot of work, but with exceptional reward.

It's like the lightbulb going off, constantly. It's like when I'm the first person in my math class to realise that the volume of a cylinder is the area of the circle, times its height. Like an infinite number of circles stacked on top of each other. When I realise that the surface area of a sphere is the derivative of the volume of a sphere, because it's the change in slope and antiderivative is the area under a cuve. It's like a million little "a-hah!" moments for every word I hear and every sentence I say.

Of course the Mexican guys at my work are still mostly jerks, but you can't choose the people you have to interact with. And it was a little annoying, because German kept telling me to repeat the things that I said to his brother Nicolas. "Nico, Nico, preguntale que esta haciendo!" he would say, to get me to say again that I was tirando la basura. Oy. They're all really tickled to death over however little Spanish I can speak.

Anyway. One of the girls at school tells me there might be another little Spanish-speaking chiquitito at the elementary school that we could help tutor. Yesica moved away some time ago, and I need another dose of adorable, amirite?

*sigh* Sunday night. Where did the weekend go, hm? Who stole it from me? Am I really going to school tomorrow?

~Joy contemplates.