I Know It's TikTok, but I love this Poem

 It's by a guy named Lucas Jones:

@lucasthejones Books in bio 🥀 Poem: ‘I’m doing this thing where I’m pretending to be nice to women’ #poem #fyp #spokenword #foryou ♬ original sound - Lucas Jones

Alternative link

Paying Taxes

We paid our taxes today, plus a $319 fee to TurboTax.

I don't mind paying taxes, though I do mind that so much of what I pay goes to billionaires and to this ridiculous war. 

I do mind that the process of paying taxes is so complicated that we need either professional help or this extremely expensive program to pay them. Other countries manage without this bullshit. Why not us?

(I know why not us, it's a rhetorical question. Why not us because tax companies bribe the government to keep the system in place.)

Passover 2026

Dr Skull got sick shortly after I did, but we both recovered in time to have the Seder last night.

I had to do all the cooking, sadly, but mostly everything turned out well. Though I forgot to make the asparagus, and the horseradish I bought was painfully hot.

My carrot tsimmes was a big hit. I put the recipe on my cooking blog.

We also had matzo ball soup, boiled potatoes with dill, roast chicken, matzo, and various desserts of affliction, including chocolate-covered matzo, fruit slices, and coffee cake.

Dr Skull, Uncle Charger, and the kid had slivovitz at the end of the meal, but I was too tired.

Chag Pesach Sameach!

Making Progress

I feel much better today but I had terrible fever dreams all night, waking up several times feeling deeply awful. It was like the dreams were telling me I'd wasted my entire life and it was too late to do anything about it. 

This is not at all true, of course. I've done pretty much exactly what I wanted with my life, married the perfect person, had a wonderful kid and a great job, and am continuing to live precisely how I like: reading books, writing books, hanging out with my family, throwing a ball for the dog. I'm guessing fever and toxins made my brain think otherwise?

Anyway, no fever this morning, no body aches, only the usual headache. Let's hope that's all over.

Ooof

Our Passover Seder was supposed to be tonight but I am down with either the flu or Covid. I haven't tested for either yet. According to the internets, it's probably the flu.

We've rescheduled for Saturday.

Ugh.

Dialects of English

You'll remember I wrote a post about the insistence on only one dialect of English being "real," or an actual language; and how this foible is because Americans love to have what they consider legitimate reasons for bigotry.

Here's evidence that this is an actual problem. White Americans -- especially conservative White Americans -- are either unable or unwilling to understand AAVE in courtroom settings, which is contributing to unequal justice under the law. 

Court reporters have to be able to transcribe what is being said in a courtroom with at least 95 percent accuracy. According to this article, court reporters tested on AAVE can only transcribe what is being said with less that 83% accuracy. 

In 31 percent of the 2,241 transcriptions, researchers found, the court reporters’ errors changed the content of what the speaker was saying, misinterpreting either who was involved, what was happening, when it happened, and/or where it happened.

Further, juries either can't or claim they can't understand what black witnesses are saying in court.

As the article puts it, there's a real lack of "willingness" to understand AAVE.

This might be an actual lack of comprehension, of course. When I taught World Lit, I would often teach Frederick Douglass's Narrative of a Life, which is written in perfect SAE of the time. That dialect was often well above the literacy level of my students, who could often barely read what they called "modern" English (English written since the year 2000). Still, they never complained they couldn't understand what Douglass was saying (even when it was clear they could not). 

I would also give them half a dozen narratives from the WPA slave narrative collections in the Federal Library. The WPA collectors deliberately transcribed these narratives in the language, the dialect, spoken by the former slaves -- in AAVE, in other words, from the 1930s. (There's a pdf collection here.)

When I would assign these, some of my students (I won't say conservative, although they probably were, being this was a freshman class in Arkansas; they were definitely white kids) would insist they "couldn't" read the narratives. "They're not in English," they would insist.

Mind you, these are Arkansas kids. Most of them grew up speaking Southern English, which has its roots in AAVE. I'm not saying they were all liars. At least one of them I know for a fact just wasn't too bright. They could barely read SAE written in the 21st century, so maybe they actually couldn't understand this text (a sample):

I wuz 'borned in Orange County and I belonged ter Mr. Gilbert Gregg near Hillsboro. I doan know nothin' bout my mammy an daddy, but I had a brother Jim who wuz sold ter dress young missus fer her weddin. De tree am still standin what I set under an' watch ' em sell Jim. I set dar ant I cry an' cry,  specially when dey puts de chain on him an carries him off, an' I ain't neber felt so lonesome in my whole life. I ain't neber hyar from Jim since an' I wonder now sometimes if'en he's still livin.

But maybe they and the other students who complained were just not willing to understand what they saw as "not English." Maybe their point was Black people who couldn't speak in the standard English of the time had no right to be heard.

I also remember a smart (white, conservative) kid, very likeable, from my History of the English Language class who wrote, very nicely, in my end of the semester evaluation that as much as he realized I was educated and intelligent, I was wrong when I taught in the class that different dialects of English were just that, different dialects. Speaking proper English, he said, was moral issue. 

Speaking anything but standard English, that implies, is immoral. Is a sin.

You can see why this might be a problem when people who don't speak SAE show up in court seeking justice. (It's not just Black people who don't speak SAE, and of course some Black Americans do speak SAE. That's not the point here.) When we speak about systemic injustice, this is what we mean. This injustice is baked into the system, and it is approved of and enforced by a sizable percentage of our population, some of whom are lawyers, some of whom sit on juries, and many, many, many of whom are police officers. 

Or ICE agents, but probably that's less important, since ICE agents aren't really interested in what anyone has to say, in SAE or AAVE or the dialect of the Intermountain West or whatever.

My kid is Flying Home

So far no trouble with TSA or ICE in the airport, but then they both pass as white cis males, so.

We've been taking care of Rosen, whom Dr Skull loves so much he wants to adopt her. But Jasper is afraid of her, so much so that she won't go in the room where the litter box is. (They've had two fights so far, both of which Jasper lost.) 

So unless I figure out a place to put a second litter box, that's probably not a solution.

Also, the kids love Rosen and don't really want to give her up. It's too bad, because Rosen is a great cat and she does indeed really love Dr Skull, who misses Junti (who was his cat) terribly.

Dr Skull with Rosen

Rereading Books

Apparently some people think you should never re-read books, because, and I am summarizing, there are so many books out there to read, why would you ever waste time re-reading?

I do read a lot of new (or new to me) books, but for me one of the pleasures of reading is re-reading. I especially like to reread a book that I haven't read in years. It's kind of like parallax vision, maybe? I remember what I thought or how I understood a book when I was 20 or 30; how will I see or understand the same book now? I'm a different person now, so I understand the book/see the book differently.

I'd go so far as to say you haven't really understood a book if you haven't read it more than once. This is especially true for me, I think, because I read really fast (though I don't skim unless the book is terrible and I'm trying to see if it's worth finishing). When I'm gulping down a book because I want to know what happens, I don't always spend a lot of time thinking about what's happening. Re-reading lets me do that.

I also like to reread a book I've read maybe a dozen times. It's like watching your favorite movie or listening to a favorite song. I enjoy the beats and the scenes because I know them so well.

Recently I've discovered the joy of listening to a book that I've read a dozen times. The audiobook of Nobody's Fool, for example -- listening to that was such a different experience from reading it. Same for Jo Walton's Thessaly trilogy.

What about y'all? Do you re-read?

Spotted on Tumblr

If y'all aren't on Tumblr, by the way, you are missing out. It's the internet the way it was meant to be.

ANYWAY.

A German Tumblrist asks why Americans are so obsessed over "whether something is a word." Why are we like this, they want to know. They're talking about how certain speakers of American English get angry when a dictionary includes words like 'ain't' or 'irregardless.' Why? Why? they demand. Those aren't real words!

As a professor of the language, I have the answer to this question: It's because Americans love any excuse at all to be a bigot. 

I used to teach History of the English Language as well as English Grammar and one of the things I had to teach my students was that their "correct" English was a dialect of English, like any other dialect of English. It wasn't "better" than African American Vernacular English, or Bronx English, or Mississippi English, or working class East Coast English.

That is to say, Standard American English (what they counted as 'correct' English) does not communicate its meaning any better than, say, AAVE. In fact, in some ways, SAE communicates less well -- AAVE is really good at communicating aspect with its verbs, for example, which SAE mostly ignores. 

(I remember when I was first studying Greek. Greek verbs also pay a lot of attention to aspect, and my entire class could not wrap their heads about what this mean -- for us, 'perfect' was just another sort of  past tense, and what even was aorist? Raised speaking SAE, this was a concept we had real trouble grasping.)

Why then do so many people believe that SAE is "real" and everything else is 'slang' or ignorant or not even actually English? 

Because it lets them feel superior. It allows them to look down on some group -- to be bigoted in a way that feels approved of by their culture.

Let me tell you, I too used to wince when someone said something like, "I have already ate," or "Mom took Tim and I to the state fair last week." That was before I actually knew something about how language works. Now I find these regional difference -- like "Anymore you can't find eggs for less than ten dollars a dozen" -- fascinating.

Anyway! My point, and I do have one, is that anything which communicates meaning is language. For example, I love saying things like "irregardless" and "ain't" and "we might could finish this tomorrow," just to jar people a bit.

"Ain't?" they will exclaim. "Irregardless? Those aren't words!"

"But you know what it means," I point out. "If I say, I ain't eating no more pie, you know exactly what I mean, irregardless of what you claim."

And they do. So why does this upset them, someone with a PhD who says irregardless? 

It's cognitive dissonance. They know I'm educated, they know they can't treat me like trash, and what does that mean about this thing they have been counting on, that their ability to speak SAE means they're better than people who say things like "I seen her at Walmart"?

It's like people who think being an American makes them better than people in other places. When they find out that people in other places actually have good lives, and are good people, some of them better lives than many Americans in fact, cognitive dissonance. It was the one way they could feel superior. Now what do they have?

See also people who think that being a certain religion, or having a certain skin color, or being a certain gender makes them 'better.' When anyone suggests otherwise -- that tantrum they throw, that's cognitive dissonance. If they don't have this way of being superior to other people, then what do they have?

I mean, they could accept that being superior to other people isn't something they need, or even should want, but it takes a great deal more enlightenment than most of them will ever have to come to that realization.

Headaches Again

 As I think I mentioned, I pretty much always have a headache. Usually it's a low-grade ache around my temples or behind my eyes. But -- as now -- when the weather is changing, I have a first-class banging headache that makes me want to lie in bed and whimper. Nothing really helps. Sometimes a shower does. But not usually.

I have taken Motrin and a Tylenol. We'll see how it goes.

Retirement

Dr Skull and I had a lovely outing last night -- we ate at one of our favorite restaurants and then went to the bookstore and bought more books. We discussed traveling to various cities, which he wants to do and I am less eager about. As y'all know, my favorite thing to do is stay home, read books, and write books.

A day trip to Tulsa I could probably manage. 

Though I am slightly jealous of what the kids are doing in Maryland -- day before yesterday they went to the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and yesterday they went to the Smithsonian zoo. I think today they are driving to Philly to visit an art museum.

Spring Break

This town is deserted during Spring Break, which I have to admit I'm enjoying. No lines at the grocery store. No traffic on the roads. There are fewer dogs at the dog park, which I'll admit is a drawback.

Dr Skull and I are having our long-delayed anniversary dinner at the Southern Food Company this evening, that's our celebration for the Break.

The kid and his husband are having a great time in Maryland, and Dr Skull has decided to steal their cat. "This is my cat," he keeps saying. "I'm not giving her back."

Rosen, the Cat in Question

Babysitting the Grandcat

 There are actually two grandcats, but they're not getting along, so one is staying with us

and the other I visit every day.

The kids are in Maryland, visiting their friends who live there. They'll make a sidetrip to Philly. I'm hoping they don't get caught up in all this lunacy with Trump and the airports.

Whaaaat!

Okay, I'm interested.

It doesn't seem entirely accurate, since Odysseus could honestly have given a fuck about his men, but other than that it looks epic. I might even see it in the theater. 

UGH

It was 72 degrees when I took the dog to the dog park at 7:30 a.m. High of 90 is predicted today.

Tomorrow is supposed to be cooler, but I'm already in my dread-summer mode.

Brought to you by Global-Climate-Change-is-just-a-Myth.