#I’m pro-linguists on this because guess what I know how language works and grows

[whalehouse1]

Grammar Stickler: -exists-

Linguist: And I took that personally.

[dantediscoversfic]

Chapter 16: Rules

One of the reasons I liked Ari so much was that though we differed in opinion about many things (like which are the best comics) and though we had what might seem from the outside as diametrically opposed outlooks on life (his was much darker than mine; in fact he once claimed that brooding was healthy because it was good exercise for his eyebrows) and though he enjoyed yanking my chain about a lot of things, when it came down to it he made me laugh more than just about any other person on the planet. We were like seatbelts: we just clicked. He might not have thought so himself, but he had a big imagination and was very thoughtful and philosophical and funny and sensitive and kind. There was also a sadness in him that he tried to hide from me, but I could see it in his eyes sometimes. We never talked about it, though. He was better at not talking about things than I was.

In truth, I liked it when he argued with me (though argue isn’t really the right word, since we never got angry at each other; debate would be more accurate). And I especially liked when I was able to win him over. I’d been on Debate and Speech teams since middle school so he must have known that he never stood a chance when I got into that point-counterpoint mode but he never got cranky with me. (Or if he did, I knew it was all for show).

One area where he eventually came around to my way of thinking was my thing about liking rules. I have a general respect for rules and discipline and technique. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a pro-fascist or anything like that and I like the idea of chaos and nihilism just as much as the next teenager longing for independence. And I also know that breaking the rules is fun, too, and often a necessity in creating art and living the life you want to live. But I can see why rules are useful, too, especially if they grant you freedom within structure. I think your brain starts working differently if you’re trying to compose a sonnet in iambic pentameter vs if you’re writing a stream of consciousness journal entry. Neither is better or worse, but rules can be part of the fun and the challenge.

My thing with liking to cuss, for example. I liked cussing but knew that I wouldn’t relish it quite as much if my parents allowed me to throw around f-bombs any old effing time I felt like it. Or my thing about not liking to wear shoes. Who was the puritanical jerk who decided that it’s a Western societal norm that everyone has to wear shoes everywhere they go, anyway? If I want to take my shoes off outside or on the bus or in church or in the movie theater and I’m not hurting or offending anyone by letting my toes feel the wind and sun and air, why should I keep my shoes on when they cause me nothing but torture and discomfort? When did taking off your shoes in public become as bad as breaking one of the Ten Commandments? And it’s a good general life rule to follow in Jesus’ footsteps, right? I just choose a literal interpretation of that since he didn’t wear shoes either.

But where things like games were concerned, I liked rules. I thought of rules as being like a container or a cup for water (in this metaphor water=fun and freedom). Without the container, what do you get? Just liquid spilled all over the front of your shirt.

I liked coming up with new games for us, with the caveat that we played by the self-established rules. The first game we made up together was the shoe toss game (or as I named it: Urban Javelshoe). It started out simply because I felt like throwing my shoes around (because shoes are a nuisance and may as well be walloped for all the good they serve). At first he griped at me because I wanted to measure with chalk exactly how far each of us could throw our shoes on the street. He said it took away the fun, which to him was the act of throwing. I argued that the fun was not just the throwing, but the whole system we created together: deciding how many tosses we made per set, using chalk and a tape measure to record each of our throws, deciding how many sets qualified for a win. Just throwing shoes around for no reason? Plebian. This was much more interesting and systematic and fun. He came around, eventually. And though I won the game, he ended up having the longest recorded toss, which I could tell he was secretly pleased about.

Here are some of the other games we made up that summer:

Tap-Out. One of us would tap or punch out the beat to a song on the other person’s arm and the other would try and guess the song just based on the rhythm. We’d decide on the genre (such as Top 40 or The Beatles) and if the person didn’t guess right after three tap-outs then the tapper could hum the rhythm once (with no varied notes, just the rhythm on one straight note). After five rounds, the winner got to choose which music we listened to all afternoon.

Lava Ground. We’d play this in the yard or up in my room. You’d have to leap from place to place and land on furniture, cushions, pillows, clothes, shoes or basically whatever you could maneuver to land on as long as you didn’t touch the ground (because it was made of lava). If your bare skin touched the ground you had to act out a horrific death. The loser also had to clean up everything that we ended up spreading out on the floor or grass.

Passenger Palaver. We’d come up with stories about our fellow passengers during our afternoon bus rides. At first there were no rules but then I decided that one of us should make up a line or phrase for the story and the person telling the story would have to somehow include that phrase. Or sometimes we’d trade off after each line, making up the story together as we went along.

The Superhero Origin Generator. We’d go around my house and each of us would pick out two objects (such as a rolling pin and toothbrush). The other person would then have to make up how those two objects led to the creation of a superhero’s powers. For example: Mikey’s mother is a baker. One day her collection of rolling pins falls on her head and she tragically dies before young Mikey’s very own eyes. He grows up hating anything sweet. He despises cakes and donuts and cookies because they remind him of his dead mom. As a result, he becomes obsessed with brushing his teeth and never has a single cavity. But one day he has a mysterious tooth ache so he goes to a dentist’s check up. He doesn’t know that this dentist is in fact evil and while he’s in the dentist’s chair getting his teeth X-rayed, the evil dentist Dr. X turns up the machine to unprecedented levels. Mikey’s teeth become radioactive blasters. After that, every time he smiles, it unleashes a ray of toxic light more powerful than the sun. From that day forward he becomes: Gamma Tooth Man. If something we came up was particularly good we might make our own comic about it. Ari wasn’t much of an artist, so I’d draw and he’d come up with action, dialogue and concept. We made a good team.

Telenovela Lipread. We’d put a soap opera on silent and make up our own lines of dialogue. The only rule was that each character needed its own distinct voice or accent. Ari was surprisingly good at playing naïve love struck heroines (ironically, of course).

One day, after I’d just finished reading all of The Lord of the Rings books, I got the idea that Ari and I should make up our own language, like Elvish.

When I told Ari about my idea, he snorted and said, “So you’d rather make up an entirely new language than learn Spanish? You really hate Spanish that much?”

“If we had our own language we could write each other notes and letters and be the only ones who understand them. If they’re in Spanish our parents could snoop.”

“If you wanted to write in secret you could just make up a code, not a whole new language. That seems like a lot of work.”

“If Tolkien could do it how hard can it actually be?”

“How the hell do you go about making up a new language anyway?”

“I’m not sure. We might have to do some research.”

“Research? During the summer? For no other reason than you think it would be cool to undertake the massively insane project of inventing a new language?”

“Yeah. We’d be be like C-3PO when R2-D2 beeps and no one else knows what he’s saying.”

“Yes, but they’re talking in droidspeak. It’s probably just randomly generated gobbledygook.”

“Or maybe it’s as poetic as Shakespeare. But we’ll never know. Don’t you want to know what it’s like to speak a language only one other person on the planet understands?”

“It sounds exclusionary. I’m a man of the people.”

“You’re a man of the lazy. Come on, let’s go to the library so I can search the card catalogue about books on linguistics.”

So we went to the library. I love the library. I love the card catalogue. It makes finding the perfect book like going on a treasure hunt. While I was talking to the librarian, Ari wandered away from the desk and told me he was going to look around. No card catalogue for him, he was a browser.

It took awhile but I eventually located some potentially useful book on linguistics and went looking for Ari. I looked in every section I thought he would be, but he had vanished; I even looked in the bathroom and outside on the street. I went up to the 2nd floor and he wasn’t there. I looked on the 1st floor again. Nothing. I was starting to get worried. I went down to the ground floor level and that’s when I finally spotted him. He was sitting at the microfilm reader of all things. I went up to him to see what he was looking at.

“Hey,” I said.

He jumped. I guess I’d startled him.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing. Just old newspapers and stuff. I didn’t realize they had all these old articles on microfilm down here. The librarian just told me about it.”

“Anything in particular you’re looking at?”

“No, just browsing.”

“Just browsing El Paso Times articles from ten years ago for fun? And you call me the weird one?”

“Whatever. I thought it might be cool. Like a time machine or something. Are you done? We can leave.”

He pulled the film he was looking at out of the reader and returned it. I also saw that he had a book with him.

“What’s that book? You going to check it out?”

“It’s nothing. Just about the Vietnam War. I was just flipping through it while I waited for you.”

He put the book back on a return cart and we left. On the way home he didn’t talk much and I could tell something was bothering him. But he didn’t tell me what it was and I didn’t press him on it, even though I really wanted to. Like I said, he was better at not talking about things than I was. I thought maybe if we had our own secret language made up already he’d want to talk to me, but I knew that was wishful thinking. We’d only been friends for about a month, but I’d already guessed what most of his rules were.