Mar. 1st, 2012

muckefuck: (Default)
Well, if all went as planned, [livejournal.com profile] monshu's former coworker should already be on his way to the UAE. Last night I was too elated from the alcohol and the successful dinner in his honour to miss him, but now it's all sinking in. I'm very proud of him and a little bit envious; never would I have predicted that a geeky kid from the backwoods of Wisconsin whose took his first trip outside the country only last year would accept a two-year contract to work in the Middle East. But it was a good opportunity, and if he can overcome his social anxieties there no reason to think he won't succeed.

His departure from our house was a little shambolic, thanks to the incompetence of Yellow Cab, which unaccountably cancelled our first request and took so long to fulfill the second that I actually walked to Devon, grabbed a taxi, and directed it to our door. (Almost twenty minutes later a call came in telling us that our cab was outside, and I did my best to tell the dispatcher to stuff it without being overly rude.) But I told him the tiny balls of frozen rain falling in his hair would make for a great story tomorrow when he's greeting his new colleagues in 30℃ heat. Between the day-and-a-half of travel ahead of him and the 160 proof rum in his drink before dinner, I wonder how much he'll remember of the evening anyway.

I'll remember it for a number of reasons: for the presence of JGT and his two precocious sons, who regaled us with their store of grade-school jokes featuring elephants and chickens (and prompted us to dredge up some of our own). For the near-disaster that was my last-minute dessert-baking and the impressive aplomb with which the GWO tolerated the situation and even managed to laugh about it. But mostly I'll remember being able to give a good buddy a few moments of solace in the middle of a mad whirlwind of life-changing preparations.
Tags:
Mar. 1st, 2012 09:07 pm

Stymied

muckefuck: (Default)
I wish I were writing today's entry in rather than simply about Welsh, but I just don't have the stamina. I'm so out of practice that every time I try to compose a sentence, it gets hijacked by Irish. I have to keep reminding myself that Welsh is a language you "speak", not one that is "at you" and that I'm not failing to recall the distinctive form of the Welsh copula because there isn't one. I am, however, regularly forgetting that be takes a special form in the present tense when it represents a verb of existence. And on and on.

Sometimes I feel like I'm losing ground in all my languages at once. Even my German isn't as fluent as it was a few years back. It's not that I lack opportunities to exercise it, it's that I lack the discipline. For a while there I was at least keeping my passive facilities alive but then I chose to put one kind of accomplishment above another and where formerly I made an effort to ensure that at least one of the books I was reading at any given moment was in a foreign language, now I'm content to surround myself with English.

Theoretically, I guess, I'm still reading Dúil, but in practice I've only finished one of the shortest stories in the book and part of another. I keep it by my bedside since I really can't make it through a paragraph without resorting to the dictionary but I find myself too tired of an evening to pick it up. Instead, it's more (Hiberno-)English: Mary Lavin, Seán Ó Faoláin--nothing so taxing as Annie Proulx or even George Washington Cable.

On that note--and because it is St David's Day today--it occurred to me that I've presently got almost a dozen collections of stories by modern Irish writers (Joyce, Ó Faoláin, O'Connor, O'Brien², Ó Flaithbheartaigh, Kiely, Lavin, McGahern, two anthologies) and only one by a modern Welsh writer: Dylan Thomas' Collected stories. I suppose it's no wonder given that the modern Welsh genius seems to lie in poetry rather than in prose, but still I find it telling and a little depressing that if you ask me to name a living contemporary Welsh author and my mind simply draws a blank.

Profile

muckefuck: (Default)
muckefuck

January 2025

S M T W T F S
   1234
567891011
121314 15161718
192021 22232425
262728293031 

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 8th, 2025 08:21 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios