Stuck here

Well, I'm stuck in America, and indeed in this town, for the foreseeable future. This is a Bad Thing. I wanted to study Historical Linguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany, and short of that, to study the same subject in the US. I still want that, but without a scholarship (I've been rejected by all of the institutions to which I applied), it is impossible.

I do of course want to be in a foreign land, surrounded by exciting and exotic things and people, conversing in strange tongues with ease, but the exoticism will only get me so far, I know. The novelty will wear off, I will be in need of friends and familiarity, and I will experience real loneliness.

But the thrill of living in Europe is only one reason I want to go to Berlin. I want to feel like I'm working toward my dreams. I need to know that even if I'm struggling, even if I stumble on my metaphorical path to wherever it is I think I'm going in life, at least I will know enough about the nature of my quandary to be able to work toward a solution. I guess I'm saying I need my problems to be ones I understand and can solve, rather than ones that I neither comprehend nor feel capable of solving.

I've felt for a while now that I am not really good at anything anymore. I was always a really good student and excelled in school. That was fine until I graduated and found I have no idea how to put my studenting skills to use outside of an academic setting. I've been taking a course or two at a local university these past few months, and in addition to giving me something to do besides wallow in my inadequacy at acquiring and retaining jobs, it has reminded me just how good I am at being a student. I had forgotten that I was able to do anything well at all.

The realization that I am not in fact a complete waste of space (that is sadly not facetious) has done wonders for my state of mind. I've stumbled on a secret to a happy life: do what you're good at. I'm sure I'd been told that before, but it didn't quite sink in until just recently. As I was growing up, I was in school, and since I excelled at school, I was happy, but once I'd graduated from college, I was lost. I have either been unemployed or had jobs I hated. I hated the jobs I've had since college because they made no use of my real skills and required me to be strong in exactly those areas where I am weakest.

Thus it is all the more important for me to get back to my education. In order to spend my life indulging in my strengths (learning, explaining, making connections), I need to get another degree or two. And, conveniently enough, the very pursuit of further education will help my self-confidence immensely, for reasons I have explained.

That is why the news that I won't be starting any degree program at all this fall, let alone the one in the world I really want, was so particularly soul-crushing. I've been hesitant to post about it, because I generally don't like pouring my negativity and depression onto the internet for all to see (although I can't imagine my audience is very large; I don't tell anyone I have a blog unless directly asked since I'm not sure it's really worth reading).

I suppose the way to get through this must be to view this coming year as an opportunity for growth rather than another year wasted before I can begin my real life. We all make our own luck (I heard on the radio recently that people who see themselves as unlucky do less to avoid risky situations [they figure terrible things are going to happen regardless of their actions] and are less likely to survive serious illnesses), so it's crucial to see things in a positive light. As the venerable Ace Ventura once said, it's all psychological.

And truthfully, I'm doing better than I would have expected.

A resemblance

Jon Hamm

Gary Cooper

Semantics

I'm tired of people saying 'that's just semantics' in disagreements as a way to lessen tension. It's basically saying 'oh, it's only a matter of what you meant by those words you said.' Semantics is all about what words mean, so clearly that's going to matter when people talk.

Semantics: a big deal, whether we admit it or not.

That'll be the title of the next book about semantics that I write.

I'll write that one right after my Sue Grafton/Isaac Asimov mashup novel I is for Robot.

Lambda is not the same as Alpha

I often wonder how Kia cars are marketed in Greece. After all, their logo uses a Λ instead of an A. Λ is the Greek L. In my head ΚΙΛ sounds like 'kill', although it might be more like 'keel'. I don't know modern Greek.

Anyway, this happens quite a bit all over the place, though usually it doesn't make a pronounceable word. But it's always a little irritating. To me.

Lay off JFK

People keep blaming John F. Kennedy for "killing" the hat in popular fashion. This is either slanderous or libelous (depending on the medium), because the hat was already in decline in the 1930s (I've seen hat sellers' publications from that decade that had suggestions for convincing people to wear hats again), so I tend to blame Cary Grant more than anybody else. He was charm itself, but didn't look that good in hats, so he didn't wear them much, thus beginning the decline of the dress hat. This opinion is, of course, no better researched than the one I'm discrediting, but at least it's believable. Cary Grant did look a little silly in hats, and there were definitely fewer hats (at least in the movies) in the 1950s already, well before J.F. Kennedy's time in the White House.

JFK definitely wore a top hat to his inauguration, too. So don't believe that ugly rumor either.

"Classic" style

I'm tired of men's style blogs talking about classic style and how wonderful it is. They seem to think that because the suits they wear now might have looked normal in the 1960s, they would look normal in any decade since the modern suit came into fashion. The writers of these blogs are fooling themselves.

I believe I've written before that we're in a time of backward-looking fashion (call it retro if it makes you feel better), and that fashion has looked backward more than forward these fifty years. This doesn't mean that men's style is timeless--today's suits would look silly in any past decade except the sixties--but rather that the drivers of men's fashion have been paying more attention to their rear view mirrors than the road ahead.

These praisers of "timeless" men's style often throw in references to the quite different world of women's fashion, which they see as trend-driven and mindlessly obsessed with the latest thing, whether that thing be figure-flattering or fugly. The worst of these wander into vaguely misogynistic suppositions about the nature of women themselves considering this propensity for following the herd.

What they fail to realize is that they themselves are following the current fashion in menswear: wearing sixties-inspired suits and calling them timeless. The sixties silhouette would not have looked timeless in the seventies or the eighties or the nineties; it would have looked ten or twenty or thirty years out of fashion. The icons of classic cool (Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando, Fred Astaire, Cary Grant) were not concerned with posterity but with the moment, and the only reason they still look good now is that they were so successful at blending what was current and what looked good on them.

Name games

I'm tired of my name. My last name is good and I like it. Sometimes I wish it were still spelled with the extra n the way it was before my ancestors came to America, but it really is a noble name.

No, my problem is with my first name. Most places on the internet, I spell it "Dschonn" in an effort to make it unusual, but it's really just my real name, John, filtered through German phonetic orthography. John is not a bad name in and of itself, and I know its complex history, but it's such a very common name and its meaning does nothing to tell me who I should be, since so many diverse people have borne it. It comes ultimately from a Hebrew name, commonly transliterated Yehochanan, which means something like "Yahweh having given graciously" or "Yahweh's gracious gift". This was shortened to Yochanan (it was against the rules to say Yahweh's name, and so I suppose eventually people realized that making it part of a name given to a person might cause it to be spoken at some point), then transliterated into Greek as Ἰωάννης, whence Latin derived Iohannes (My theory is that the Greek name still had an h sound in there, although they couldn't write it because of their alphabet's lack of a letter for that sound, but Latin did have such a letter and they used it. This is based on almost no evidence at all.). This then was spread to the Germanic tongues, who eventually spelled the name with a J, and after a number of generations shortened further in English to John, most likely because of the influence from the Norman French form Jean. The fact that it doesn't start with that y sound anymore is probably also the fault of those crazy Normans.

John has been the name of many, many people. King John signed the Magna Carta (this document was a big deal for England because it gave power to the nobility that had previously been concentrated in the office of the King), but was otherwise such a bastard that since his time nobody who has had the slightest chance of becoming the king of England has been named John (as I recall he only signed it under duress and this duress was necessary because he'd been abusing his power like nobody's business as well as spending too much time trying to catch Robin Hood when anyone could see that Mr Hood was actually the good guy). John Lennon was a musician in a little band called The Beatles. He wrote and co-wrote some pretty catchy tunes. John Smith was an explorer who went to America looking for a way to India and found Pocahontas instead, and if we can believe the movie he looked quite a bit like Colin Farrell. Johnny Depp is an actor with incredible cheekbones and an enviable ability to attract people rather than repel them with his extreme eccentricity. The list goes on.

So I've been considering changing it. I could simply go by Jack (this came from John + -kin, a diminutive suffix, and it evolved through Jankin and Jackin to become Jack), which would be fairly easy to explain, or I could make up a completely different and preferably unique nickname and pretend to new acquaintances that it's what people call me, and hope that the nickname sticks. The problem with this second plan is that such a name is really best given by someone else rather than chosen for oneself, since it should indicate who I am to others rather than who I want to believe I am.

I have played around with Germanic roots to see if I can come up with something with the same etymological meaning as John, but so far I've had no luck. I mean I can put roots together, but I haven't made anything that sounds like anything I'd want to be called.

Anyway, I am pretty sure that the reason I've spent so much time thinking about this is that my situation is so uncertain. I'm unsure about most everything to do with my life, and somewhere in my mind I believe that having a truly unique name will tell me who I am supposed to be. The rest of me tends to doubt that it would work that way, but alternative ideas are in short supply.