Both of My Parents have Cancer

There, I said it, out loud.

There are like 44 individual sounds in the English alphabet and another tens of blends. Millions of combinations, few sensible, often misunderstood and mispronounced by myriad humans trying to speak English or make sense of American ways. We’ve somehow rallied to convince a big and diverse beautiful planet, teeming with life and language and history and resolution, that this hodgepodge of Germanic tribute and romantic resolve is worthy of being taught in every nook and cranny of a wide world and so, even in remote villages in Sri Lanka; when I traveled there last year, students in American brand t-shirts would clamor to me and use English to ask for candy or cash, their curiosity running alongside the road and up against their needs.

This has nothing to do with what I’m writing about but it’s sorta interesting, on its own, I suppose, and even more if you’re better traveled, more diversified, intellectually acclimated to worldly ideas and sprawl and rage. Or maybe if you’ve ever climbed the Sisyphian slope of acquiring English as a second or third or ninth language and the sounds and symbols still stutter or get stuck on your well spoken tongue you can at least recognize and probably relate to the gross improbability that anyone should master this ridiculous, my mother, tongue. And yet we do.