Thoughts......

So the other night, I took Connor to Red Lobster. Boy, do I hate that place. I always have. Not because of some faux-elitest sense of what "real seafood" tastes like. No, it's more basic than that. I detest seafood. I hate it. I've tried, believe me. But still, no thanks. So being at Red Lobster is a bit like being at a Mexican restaurant looking at the paltry non-Mexican food list they serve for morons who come to a Mexican restaurant wanting a grilled cheese sandwich. The waiters are surreptitiously rolling their eyes at the fool who would come to a seafood restaurant desperately looking for something on the menu NOT seafood. Connor, on the other hand loves every kind of sea food. (Thank you, Awake! magazine, for the suggestion that we not be vocal to our children about our food dislikes, lest we bias them against certain foods.) So he went to town on some Snow Crab and shrimp. And played with the claw, and the tendon that sticks out of the claw, making his own cla...

Language. Yeah. We all speak them. We need them. But when you really get right down to it, what a mysterious (even divine) thing they are. I'm not gonna get all Noam Chomsky and start talking about semantics and perceived meaning and the like. But at the same time, what an utterly amazing vehicle to communicate information, ideas and feelings. They are sounds, after all. Just sounds- noises, if you will. Try saying a word, any word. "Cat". "Cat". "Cat". After a while, do you notice how strange the word sounds? Suddenly, you're mind begins to divorce the aural component from the actual meaning. And then it just seems meaningless. And yet there is a meaning inherent in the word. That may not seem amazing by itself, but putting words in sentences is not simply a matter of stringing meaningful sounds together (even following a syntax- which is, again, a whole other subject). As any of you who’ve ever studied another language can attest to, even knowi...