Seasonal Musings

Snowpocalypse: a study in self

Words are a magic of their own, you know. I don’t think many people around me think that way, or if they do, it’s most likely in that nonchalantly dismissive manner we now regard flying from place to place. No matter that it used to bring such a jubilant sparkle to people’s eyes, it’s become so commonplace that any wonder at it comes and goes as quickly as the carbonation of a fizzy drink left open on a hot summer day. Language is like that in how you never think about the whys and hows and the sheer brilliance of it; all of it is just taken at face value and absorbed into that pinkish-gray sponge we call our brain. No, I would not have given any of it a second thought either, except it couldn’t really be avoided as I muddled my way through the English language. Did you know that English is one of the most difficult languages to learn in a classroom setting? There are so many irregularities and exceptions when it comes to practically everything that it makes for a rather horrid learning experience. Luckily, or not, I learned it all on the go so the rules and such never really came up. To be honest, I don’t really know how it happened. I woke up one day, a year or so after my arrival to America, and I just understood what people were saying. Of course, knowing the meaning of a word and knowing the meaning of what someone is trying to say are completely different ball games. Whenever people ask when I obtained fluency, I refer them to the first Family Guy episode I watched where I understood and laughed at all the jokes. After all, there is no true fluency in a language if the idioms, proverbs, puns and other such colorful literary devices are not comprehended, because they are so ridiculously common in use that they’re a language of their own making. So, it was after that milestone that I could finally loudly and proudly proclaim from rooftops that I know the English language.

Unlike my face-value absorption of the vernacular of the language, however, the colloquial aspect of things required a certain amount of thought on my part. I would find myself trying to puzzle out what a certain phrase means, how it is meant to be used, and why in the world does it mean such a thing? I remember “By the skin of your teeth” gave me particular trouble because it makes absolutely no sense, and I almost came to the conclusion that Americans must have skin on their teeth! Good time, those were. Eventually I figured things out through trial and error, and by reading everything I could get my hands on. Oh there were so many benefits to my voracious consumption of books, most significant of them all being a fixation on words, or more specifically, the study of word usage. It’s sort of like code, where you look at the sentence structure, what words are used where and in what order. This of course helps understand what they are trying to communicate, but conveys so much more about what kind of person someone is; a bit like body language of the mind. For example; when someone is left to ramble on and on about whatever they want, are they impulsive and incoherent, throwing words in left and right with no discernible order? Or are they cautious deep-thinkers, with each incoming word building into an eloquently cohesive masterpiece? Is any conclusion ever reached? I must confess I am slightly exaggerating my own prowess in the arts of linguistics, but I assure you, a true professional would have no problem doing all that and so much more. Gradually, you just begin to start knowing things about people and cultures and society from these observations, and that’s how I found myself intimately familiar with American culture through obsessive study of the English language. It’s amazing, the discoveries one can stumble into just by paying attention.

It’s a bit strange, the train of thought my mind follows when it goes off on a tangent, and that I should find myself thinking about such things now of all times, laying in this field blanketed with so much snow that it resembles a white-powdered vanilla wedding cake, with myself, pardon my vanity, looking like a rather attractive abominable snow lady cake topper. We don’t usually get a lot of snow up here in Chapel Hill, so it’s all been surprising in that “Oh I need to take pictures!” way. There are these two open fields near my house, and I walked to them both when it began snowing, laid in the middle, and made some serious snow angels. My goodness, it is just so beautiful, with the flurries falling like crazy, all big and fat like icy cotton balls sent from heaven. As the snow started seeping into my clothes, I looked up and tried to sort of stare at the sky without getting an eye-full of ice water, you know? I don’t really know how to describe the sight that met my eyes. The sky is always sort of really high up there in the heavens, and you can always sort of feel that distance, yes? But lying there in that silent winter wonderland, with my butt wet and face full of ice, it appeared as though the sky had descend so far down that I could touch it as surely as I could feel the snow melting in my eyelashes. If I squinted in just the right way, the whole of the sky looked curtained in a celestial blanket that swayed in the breeze, so disjointed with every snowflake moving in a different direction and unique from the ones around it but all dancing to the same invisible tune, unified in their common purpose. For that one instant I saw it all, and it no longer felt like the snow was trying to bury me under. No, every flake on my face burned hot like a kiss, and the ever-growing layer of snow on my body was a welcoming embrace that said “in this moment you are as much a snowflake as you are a human, because you have stayed and watched and seen, and that is enough”. I blinked in shock, got an eyeful of ice, and it all blew away in a flurry of flakes.

It was exquisitely awesome, in the original meaning of the word, “inspiring awe”. If I could experience such a powerful connection with nature accidentally, in the middle of a city, surrounded by suburban houses with the ruckus of traffic buzzing in my ear, can you imagine what people living in the wild and actively pursuing such encounters must experience? I’ve of course read about the William Wordsworth-esque Romantic communes with nature before, but never have I understood the, in a completely non-sappy way, magical nature of it all until now. Ah, there’s the beginning of that tangent I was talking about!