Ahhhhhh...

That is a happy, contented sigh.  My goodness, I feel positively lovely right now.  What a fantastic day this was.  I spent more of the morning than I would have liked reading and re-reading my poster, changing a word or two here, adjusting the formatting a tiny bit here and there, and then finally around 1:30 I decided it was time to be done with the thing.  There comes a point in time where there's just no way to make substantial improvements.  You've really read and re-read the thing so many times, and there are maybe a few tiny things that you're not altogether satisfied with, but it's really a matter of diminishing returns.  You get to the point where no matter what you change, it's not going to improve the thing.  And at that point, you're just wasting time and driving yourself crazy.  So I sent it to the printer on campus, which means it's literally out of my hands, and promptly started checking Facebook every 15 minutes or so.  That got old pretty quickly, and a friend of mine and I were essentially having a conversation on each other's Facebook walls, and come on, that's a little silly, especially when he lives about a 15 minute walk from here.  So I texted him and we went to this little tea shop on College Avenue in Berkeley.

I may have mentioned it before, but this place is so cozy.  So ridiculously, perfectly cozy, with these little tables and chairs and cushions scattered about, with houseplants and photographs and paintings on the walls, and little bookshelves with books and tea and tea settings.  It's like going over to your grandma's house, if your grandma were a spritely little Japanese woman with cupboards full of different kinds of teas who put interesting subdued music on in the background and left you to your own devices.  They have a huge tea menu - overwhelmingly huge, really - but we settled on a green one, and you don't even pay when you order.  You just pick a tea, find a corner to park yourselves, and they bring you all the tea equipment on a platter.  Every table has this cool Japanese tea hot plate thing, so you turn it on and set the kettle on, and it keeps the water at the exact right temperature.  Then you can just keep re-infusing your tea for as long as you like, or until it's really spent, and then you can ask for some more.  It's way easy to spend a few hours there, sitting on the floor Japanese style, shooting the breeze and figuring out the best English-French/French-English translations for things.  It is so nice to be using my French again - it's like a long lost friend!  It's like a part of me has been missing, and it's been missing for so long that I even forgot that it was missing.  It probably sounds silly (and you're probably sick of hearing about it, but this is my blog, so I can beat a dead horse as long as I want to), but I really feel more like myself now that my second language is coming back.  It's like I spent so long acquiring that thing - really sinking several years of my life into learning it, and getting to the point where I felt comfortable using it, and making it a part of me, and of my brain - that it's a non-negligible part of my identity.  This sounds... snobby... and oh-look-at-me, and whatever (but again, my blog), but there's something really cool about feeling like a real honest-to-goodness bilingual again.

This is a term I've been thinking about a lot lately, due to the direction my research is taking.  What do you call a kid who grows up speaking only Chinese at home until age 4, and then starts preschool and acquires English at breakneck speed for a few months?  By the time he's 4 1/2, he can have a pretty decent conversation in English, let me tell you, but he sounds a little weird and there's plenty of stuff he says that you have no hope of understanding.  Is that kid bilingual yet?  He'll certainly be bilingual very soon, and if he grows up in the US, by the time he's a teenager, he'll probably be far more comfortable in English than in Chinese.  He might even not claim to speak Chinese.  But he's certainly not a monolingual English speaker (although I would consider him a native English speaker by that point... just not a monolingual one).  What about me, do I count as bilingual?  I don't usually feel like one, because we think of bilinguals as people who grow up speaking two languages at home, I think, and I definitely haven't felt very bilingual for the past few years, since I got back from France.  And yet when I'm having a perfectly normal conversation in French and even get to the point after a few minutes or so where I don't notice what language is being spoken anymore, I can't help but think back on it and realize that that probably qualifies me as bilingual.  If I think of a non-native English speaker who had my level of French when speaking English, I would consider them bilingual, to be fair.  This is not to say that I'm anywhere near a balanced bilingual - that's another story completely.

All of this is so interesting to me on a scientific level, too, really, and it gives me insight into the types of questions I want to ask in my research, going forward.  I experience all these weird phenomena that make me think about how the brain works, and that make me much more aware of... the nuts and bolts and machinery behind language processing, in a way.  When you only have one language (and also when you're a normal person and not a linguist), I think you're not very aware of Language in general.  You just talk.  And it usually comes out fine.  And you think about ideas and conversations, and not all the backstage calculations that go in to making a conversation work, because they're so natural.  But at least for me, when I have two languages to juggle, it's just really interesting to see what my brain does with it.  There's this one extremely bizarre and jarring phenomenon where my brain freezes up and I can't come up with a word in any language.  It's not like the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon, where you know there's a word you want, but you can't quite think of it.  This is like being some primordial infant who has only a vague concept or feeling and no way to express any aspect of it.  It's like someone pouring a bucket of ice water on your head, and all you can do is gasp and sputter and wait until things start working again.

Anyway, tea.  The tea was really great.  And then I wasn't even hungry, but we were in a very lovely part of Berkeley, where there are lots of cute and yummy restaurants, but where I don't normally go because it's a bit of a trek to get up there.  Maybe 30 minutes by foot, so totally do-able, but far enough that I don't do it very often.  But we were right by this Italian restaurant that one of my other friends always raves about, so we thought about giving it a shot, and we walked in to ask how long the wait was and were just bowled over by the smell of roasted garlic and warm bread and everything delicious in the world.  So it was kind of like, well, we obviously have to eat here now.  And we did.  And oh my god.  It was so. so. sososo good.  Probably a good thing it's a bit of trek from my house, because I definitely don't need to be eating there as often as I would like to!  Easy way to go broke and gain 10 pounds!

Well, it is late.  And I am full, and starting to get a little sleepy and maybe ready for bed soon.  But my oh my, what a nice day this was.  Spring break is off to a great start!

(Post re-edited slightly on Tuesday morning, just for kicks.)