“So can you handle that?”

“Just run it by me one more time.”

“You’ll have to mark the breaks between words, like before…”

“But…”

“Right, but it’ll just be your voice.”

I have been doing research for a phonetician at the university. For the most part I have found the research very interesting and the professor is extremely open and helpful. This is a great deal different from professors many of us have experience with, who not only have trouble bridging the gap between their content and the students, but cannot conceive how everyone in his class is not fully fluent with their course material. There have been some dry articles that made me want to build a bridge just so I could jump off of it, but that’s all part of the joys of academia.

Part of that research has been listening closely to people speaking and marking where they take breaths. This more current task is to mark where they pause. These can be virtually imperceptible and rather difficult to pick ups, so a close focus on the speakers is necessary.

Until today, it has been speakers I did not know. Nameless and faceless men and women whose only important features as far as I was concerned were how much they said in between breaths. But now it’s me. Two hours of listening closely to my own voice and trying to mark borders instead of gouging my ears with a pencil.

I asked the professor if listening to his own voice drove him mad. He nodded in a commiserative way and said, “Not anymore. I’m used to it by now.”

I came home and did what I often do when trying to get through my daily trials: I found someone who has it worse. In this case it was a bunch of Vikings.

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In one of my courses last year we were prepping for the state exam, which is the exam the students must pass to complete their university careers without tears and a lot of explanations to their parents.

One day I had the students do mock oral exams, in which the students gave other students questions and follow ups. At the end of each student’s turn I had instructed them to give feedback. The first student finished, and he was rather excellent. His English is better than mine, he was thoughtful and concise, and even used some of the strategies we had discussed.

When the students gave him feedback I quickly became aware of the fact that it was all negative. Mind you, it wasn’t aggressive or mean-spirited, it was just focused on the few things he didn’t do very well. He took it in stride and got up to leave and I said, “Any positive feedback?”

“Oh,” one of them said. “Yeah, your English is incredible. And you hit all of the points you were supposed to and you used lots of the tactics we talked about in class.” The second student on the board got involved as well and focused on his lovely use of stress and intonation to convey emphasis. He left and he was smiling as he did so.

I was reflecting on that morning class from last May last week while talking about feedback with a colleague. It seems he had done a presentation for some visiting students last month and had not received any feedback. He spoke to the administrator in charge who mumbled that they had loved it.

“Loved it?” he asked.

“Yeah, they were very happy with it. They liked you very much.”

“Oh. Nobody told me.”

Shrug.

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A friend of mine related a story in which one of his characters was engaged in the activity of reaching out. It was something like “John reached out the other night.”

I said, “Oh no, what was the problem?”

My friend looked a bit confused and said, “There was no problem, he just wanted to talk.”

Sometimes I am faced with evidence that I am old and this is often at the hands of language. “Reaching out” is just one little part of an alarming trend I’ve noticed wherein I don’t understand what people say or what they mean by the words they use to convey ideas. I think I used to understand. When I do understand, I am annoyed by what I understand. It’s understandably vexing.

For example, some time ago in the past, when I wasn’t looking, the term “reach out” replaced the words “call” or “contact.” Despite the fact that I have heard it enough to gather its updated meaning, I still can’t shake my initial impression of the term, which implies that someone reaching out is in dire need of a therapeutic talk. If he’s reaching out, he better be Neil Diamond and he better then be touching you and then touching me, and if he’s not then I am annoyed.

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During one of our Sunday conversations my dad mentioned that my aunt had gotten a DNA test done. It’s one of those where they scrape your tongue and tell you down to the detailed percentage the nationalities you are made up of.

“We are part Albanian,” he said, “isn’t that neat?”

“Yes, it is neat,” I confirmed.

But being Albanian troubled me, because I had no idea what that entailed.

I’ve always known a lot of people who put a great deal of effort into identifying with their cultural heritage. I knew people who’d never left Lansdale, Pennsylvania and who proudly sported tattoos of Ireland maps on their forearms. Other men wore shirts with Italia printed across the front. I worked at a bookstore with a man who spent his breaks leafing through a Czech dictionary and would speak in Czech to people with remotely Slavic sounding names.

I was sitting on a tram last week when I overheard a conversation between three men. Two of them were obviously American, the third was I think Polish. The Pole asked the two Americans where they were from and without skipping a beat one of them said “Italy” and the other one said “originally Israel.” I glanced up at this point to see that the Pole had narrowed his eyes and was trying to understand what was happening.

He said, “Oh I thought you were from America.”

In unison they hedged: “Oh well, yeah, that’s where my family lives…”

Translation: I was born in America, I grew up in America, I went to kindergarten, grade school, high school, and college in America, I got my driver’s license in America, I have lived in East Orange, New Jersey my whole life, so did my parents, whose parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ parents’ came there from somewhere across an ocean. But I’m Italian.

Though I did an inward giggle and suppressed the eye-roll of the century, I did understand where they’re coming from. America is a mishmash of cultures and because of that we are somehow encouraged to identify more with those cultures than with America. I sure did.

Before this Albanian affair, I had spent most of my life used to the idea that I was half Italian and half Irish. It was simple and clear. Half and half. I was familiar with those places – Italy and Ireland. Additionally, both of the places, their culture, and their people had charm. The Irish came from an emerald green island and her people were friendly and fiery and had adorable drinking problems. The Italians were from an exotic place where Caesar used to live, they were warm and had tempers, but they could make a pasta dish that you’d sell your soul for.

While my mom looked (and looks) like the textbook version of a round-nosed Irish Leprechaun, she didn’t push her Irish heritage on her kids or anyone else. Sure, we had corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick’s Day and New Year’s, but we didn’t sit around doing a family rendition of Danny Boy or telling Irish fairy tales. In fact, due to the demographics in our neighborhood, by my teens my mother had undertaken the culture, the speaking patterns, and the habits of a middle-aged Jewish housewife. This, it could be argued, culminated in her purchase of a delicatessen in Jenkintown.

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It’s Halloween, one of my favorite days of the year. I know it’s campy to all you haters out there, but I have always loved it. It’s the creepy time of year, the time when the line between the dead and living blurs and beings from the other side visit ours. For me, there’s no better month than October to curl up on your couch with a book of MR James stories. And no better day than Halloween.

It is this plan that I intend to fulfill upon my arrival home this evening. MR James is such a standard-bearer of ghost and creepy stories that his protocol are referred to as Jamesian. You know the ones, too. Stories set in a small town, an abbey, a university, an provincial cottage. The main character is a vicar, a headmaster, a naïve country gentleman who’s bought a house. The menace is an uncovered secret in a churchyard crypt, a long held secret coming back from the grave to exact vengeance, or the discovery of an artifact, a manuscript, or some other antiquarian piece.

I love stories like these. The settings are quaint enough to induce a faux comfort, yet somehow upsetting and desolate enough to keep me on edge. Brilliant. I have the book downloaded on my tablet and I’ll read it as soon as I’m home. Not that I’d be short on Halloween reading material, as several people on Facebook are sharing story links associated with the spooky and the ghoulish. Tis the day to indulge in the quilt-covered kid inside.

And yet, there’s something not quite right this year. I can’t put my finger on it, but the spirit of creepy is not the same. I finish writing in the mid morning and walk down to the swimming pool. I find no better place than a pool for meditative thought. As I go back and forth in my metered breaststroke, I contemplate this.

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You speak the truth, grumpy cat.

Last Wednesday morning, I came out of my bedroom to a hostile hallway. The cat’s moans filled the room and as I groggily tried to sidestep her, she entangled herself in my slippers, tripped me, and then screeched at my clumsy infraction. While deciding whether filling her food bowl or boiling water for coffee was the priority, she yelled at me from her dish. Instead of eating she huddled under a chair and let out great long meows at me.

“What is your (colorful language here) problem?” I hissed into the dark morning. She turned in circles, chirped in aggravation. “Eat your (unpublishable expletive) food you little mother-(guess the second part of this compound noun).”

My cat has been seriously grumpy for a couple of weeks now. She’s been bad-tempered and prone to throwing fits and tantrums. I was at wit’s end and, because I toe the line between sane and its opposing cousin prefixed with in, I told her this.

“What’s your problem, buddy? I feed you, take care of you, I let you sleep wherever you want. I find it charming when you poop on the floor or leave me dead offerings of worship in my bed. We watch TV. I give you tuna. Your life is good!”

She screamed the word “Noooo!”

I sighed and averted my gaze. I made my coffee.

I had my own problems to deal with. School had started with a serious bang and I was being dragged in five directions by research, teaching, prep, writing, and projects. Just walking into school gave me heartburn. Each step up to my office elicits another sigh of prescient exasperation and frustration. So I really had no time to pull up a couch and play psychologist to my cat. Perhaps I’d introduce her to catnip, get her some snacks, and throw on a Cheech and Chong flick.

Things boiled over on Friday. A time consuming extra task was thrown my way and I saw red for an entire morning and afternoon. I dragged my feet, slammed books on my desk, spent most of the day muttering creative expletives under my breath. Had a third of these expletives been heard, I would be in the local asylum learning to eat guláš with my arms bound into a personal hug.

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It’s Wednesday. My desk is buried under books and notebooks, folders, and course sheets. I am overwhelmed. A glance around the room suggests that most most of my colleagues are in the same boat. The day is not close to over.

I have become aware of a low murmur, no, a mutter. It’s as if someone has left a radio on low under some shirts. It’s a moment later when I realize that it’s me and I am saying the only thing I can:

“I have so much to do, I don’t even know where to start.”

Everyone in the room commiserates with tired acknowledged mutters of their own. School started two weeks ago and I feel as caught off guard as one of those unlucky gents in Tom Hanks’ Higgins boat at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. Language and composition teachers are heavy on the teaching and light on the research, which means that the beginning of school puts us into a world of hectic busyness that just sucks.

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It’s Saturday, and I have made a momentous decision. I am going to go left. I tell my dad and I tell Collin. I almost put it on Facebook until the cat gives me a sideways glance at this suggestion.

A Saturday afternoon means a huge breakfast, a walk into Prague, lunch, beers in the evening. Rather: a walk into areas of Prague I always go to, lunch at a place I have been to a thousand times, beers at a pub where the waiters know my bank details by heart. In any event, Prague is to the right and I am going left. To the left is Braník. A part of the city less than a three minute tram ride and which I have visited possibly three times in the eleven years I have lived in Podolí.

This, if you haven’t guessed, is big. If you are like me, then you are not a creature of habit as much as a Kool-Aid guzzling disciple of the glory of routine. I love my routine. I adore my routine. I am my routine.

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It’s about a half hour before my brother’s wedding and the wedding party is going through its last pictures and rehearsals before the big show. I was in a musical once in high school and opening night was a lot like this, retouching makeup, shouting orders, tears.

This wedding is set outside in a wooded cove on an early Friday evening. Late September, the sun was still out, the air was a friendly warmish coolish. The wedding party is dressed to the nines and covered in clammy shrubbery going undercover as corteges. Though I have never been one to extol the aesthetic values of a wedding (ooh it was soooo beautiful), I must say that this setting is as ideal as it can be without aid of a bourbon fountain surrounded by HoHos.

Also, we are ebullient. This might be due to the fact that we are about to celebrate a wedding. But for me, and I suspect a few others, it’s due to the fact that we are about to celebrate a short wedding.

Any dragged out church ceremony makes me want to join a cult of Lefty Communist Satanists out of spite. I would consider this, but I’m sure they’d be just as bad. Once any religious organization grabs the stage and the ears of the (a, any) congregation, there seems to be a whole lot of yapping that goes nowhere. The Satanists would be the same. Lefty Communist Satan is good, Lefty Communist Satan is not great, but he’s as good as you, the people, who are all the same. Please turn to Lucifer, 6:66 in your daily missal. Blah blah blah. In any event, this one is to be short. So I am happy.

My dad is also happy. I know this because I can hear his running catalogue of one-liners and puns coming from somewhere behind me as a man I have never met staples a large bush to my jacket. My dad possesses a humor no doubt specific to the fact that for forty years he has had most of his conversations wrist deep in people’s mouths. One might think my dad is happy because his son is about to get married, but, like me, there’s an ulterior reason for his joy. See, we spent two hours today learning how to and then tying bowties.

I won’t lie, we were both annoyed. My brother has a way of throwing in a last-minute demand whose entire goal seems to be to make life more difficult. No, we’re not having pizza delivered, we’re baking them underground like at a luau. Have you ever hand-kneaded low moisture squirrel mozzarella? Oh, well it’s your lucky day…

And so it was that my brother dropped in the bowtie thing. This is on top of me flying back to the U.S. to be at the wedding. If you’ve got no experience with these things, tying a bowtie is the polar opposite of clipping on a bowtie in that one of these is literally the easiest thing in the world to do and the other is literally the hardest. As a result, my dad and I spent the day watching YouTube videos, cursing at the men on them, and having a conversation that I never thought we’d be having.

Oh! I thought I had it that time! It’s that last part that screws me up! The loop. It’s the last push through I can’t get. Did you throw it over your shoulder? You’re not throwing it over your shoulder like the guy tells us to. Why? I don’t know, but he seems to know what he’s doing. Hey, I found a gay guy who’s much better, come on, the video is queued up.   

When we at last managed it, we both recognized that we had jumped at least one notch in our level of classiness, if a bit subdued. We weren’t wearing box-like bowties, we had tied them. At the end of the night, as we left the reception, we could loosen them and wear them around our necks as if we were stubby members of the Rat Pack after a show at The Sands.

We rewarded our listing success with a couple of hefty Maker’s Marks in the Monet Room, a room at the venue so cool and filled with smooth wood that it felt as though we (and our tied bowties) belonged there. Our success was thus magnified. I scoffed at the boxy atrocity mocking the bartender’s collar. At least he poured heavy.

You’ve been at a wedding before (if it was yours, then I am heartily sorry) so I don’t have to describe it. There are vows featuring a Dallas Cowboys reference, murmured comments and giggles from among the groomsmen. There are lots of smiles and tears. Like many of you, I daydream about the hors d‘oeuvres after.

And then, of course, I am overcome by the stimulant of weddings and marriage. I begin to wonder where it came from, whether it’s still a vital union, the philosophical idea of doing it for love, why we wear, and some of us tie, a bowtie. The whole shebang. Fortunately, the ceremony is short so I don’t get too far down the rabbit hole.

I do have time to confirm that it’s not for me. But if it were, you would all be invited to a very short ceremony presided over by the Lefty Communist Satanists of Greater Pennsylvania. Bowtie optional.