Just talking

I wish I had me to talk to. I don't know whether I'd like me, but we'd have a lot in common, amirite?

I have people I talk to, and that's fine. I enjoy talking to P, to A, to B (although I'd like it more if B got to the effing point now and then), to Z, to SS. Some people it's a chore to talk to, usually because they get more out of it than I do, and I realise when I say that that I am sometimes the chore. I am not very interesting to talk to, but I would be interesting for me.

Who else wants to know about what I want to talk about? If I had me, we could explore thoughts together, and I think we could work out whether what we want is possible.

I am going to tell you something that is easy to say but may not even be possible. I warn you that it's ferociously boring, but it's the thing I want to talk about more than anything else. It's like there's a jewel, but maybe I imagine it, maybe it's real. Here it is: can you figure out equity on the fly by knowing how a good shove is composed of fold equity and hot and cold equity? I don't just mean can I do it. If it can be done, I believe I can do it. I mean, can it be done? Is it what people do, even if they cannot articulate what they are doing?


See, you don't want to talk about that. But I would.

I think it is crazy that I enjoy trying to figure out the mysteries more than I enjoy playing. That's not really true though. I do enjoy playing a lot. I don't enjoy results. But my results are good! The problem is, I am so scared that they will go bad.

I don't know how to get over that fear. But I think I would if I could discuss it with me.

We would talk all night. We would not abandon each other.

You know something that really hurt? The guy who fucked me over because he couldn't work me for enough money an hour. It hurts to be worth nothing but dollars. I've never thought of people like that, and I'll make a pisspoor capitalist, because I never can. I like giving. I like sharing and seeing people grow. Even though they sometimes outgrow me, I still want to feed them and help them achieve what they can. I don't think I have properly articulated why I was hurt. I think it was that he simply did not treat me as anything other than a cash machine. Maybe it would not have felt bad to him to be treated the same way, but I can't help thinking it would.

I help people all the time with poker. I don't care that I could be making money instead. I like people to think that I've given them something. I like them to feel that their life, in some small way, is better for knowing me.

What else do we have? A scrabble for stuff? WTF, that is all we are, how many dollars we amass?

***

What I wouldn't talk about is the English language. I'm jack of that. I don't find it intriguing any more, if I ever did. I do find language on the whole intriguing (I follow links in Wikipedia from one thing to another, because language is one thing that is generally written by experts, or cribbed from experts, and rarely gets fucked up by clowns who know nothing but want to wield power in a multiplayer game). I probably don't find it intriguing in the way you do, if you do.

So the other night I was reading about Ulster Scots. This is because I was reading about Irish surnames and I wandered. So from there I got into Scots, and what was interesting for me was thinking about how a language (let's call it a language -- Scots proper is probably at least as different from English as Book Norwegian is from Danish) is dying, but its echoes, in accent and dialect, reverberate. The same is true for Northumbrian, the parent of Scots and the northernmost dialects of English, which is much further down the road to extinction (if not already arrived).

So now there is a Scots continuum: both on the ground and among the population. Some are bilingual: speaking Scots when among Scots, English when in contexts that require it. Some speak a hybrid Scots English; some standard English with a Scots flavour.

Interestingly, Scots was universally spoken, and was the language even of the courts and the intelligentsia, until the Enlightenment. Some of the Enlightened went on a crusade to stamp out Scots, and succeeded. The language of the Scottish middle class is standard English, the exact same language I speak.

I have perennially found it odd that people can have a language they speak and a language they write. I am thinking of Swiss German and standard German, Catalan and Spanish, Egyptian Arabic and literary Arabic.

And it's strange that Arabic is Arabic not Arabish, when Turkish is just the language of the Turks, but Turkic is a type of language, not one in particular.

***

So the other day I was playing poker, and I noticed someone was called TulsaTrent. And you know how it is, you can't stop yourself thinking, I wonder whether he really is from Tulsa.

No, really, I know. You don't have any problem stopping yourself thinking it. You don't even start. But I do. I'm curious whether he lives in Tulsa, or comes from Tulsa but lives elsewhere and is nostalgic. And on Stars, if you right click someone's name, you find out where they come from. So he is from Owasso, which right enough is an exurb of Tulsa, so Google Maps tells me.

So that's that, right? No, I follow a road out of Tulsa on the map, across Oklahoma and then joining Interstate 1, across Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Florida, meaningless names, places that are nowhere special, no need to know. But I know.

We have no reason for any of it. Realise that and you do not need to care what you do with your time.

posted by Dr Zen @ 7:59 pm