go go thanksgiving and lets skip directly to one of my favorite of the family archival photographs:

(it is worth clicking on the link to see it larger)

i turned 22 today. my father took me to r.e.i. to buy a backpack. a travel-around-the-world-for-two-years backpack.

what am i doing, man.

making persimmon pies from the tree out front and taking a lot of pictures; i know i'm doing that much. and i'm happy; i know that too.

miss kelly drove and i got to snap-snap-snap

last winter.

my sister stuffs a giant, red-eyed fake rubber rat into our neighbor's mailbox. this thing probably approximates the size of a small bobcat, and when our neighbor lady goes out to check her mail, the rat pops out like soda after you've shaken the can.

okay, maybe not that violently, but it definitely had a certain amount of forward motion.

the neighbor lady freaked out, called my dad, and trashed mister red-eyes. she and my sister are still not on speaking terms, even after the latter was forced to apologize. (which she did only under duress.)

"i'm not saying it wasn't funny," my dad explained to her, "i'm just saying that you need to apologize."

my goal in life is to grow up and be the kind of person my dad is.

today i gave a presentation for one of my classes on the subject of language diversity in california. it was one of those classic experiences where, the night before i was to present, i found myself much more interested in delving into auxiliary research than actually putting together the presentation. the end slide show was probably one of the world's ugliest and least font-contiguous powerpoints ever. i gave it a mock run through which clocked in at 23 minutes. i would only have 10-12.

this was when i decided to pull what i realized in retrospect was a classically emily-maneuver. instead of focusing on one idea, or reducing myself to skimming the surface even more painfully than i was already doing, i consciously decided to simply speak as quickly as i could in order to get through the material. douchey and ineffective, yes, but still.

let me back up.

there is this guy in the class. this guy is in about one third of all of the classes anybody ever took in college. he's about 7'4'', walks/smells like an ogre, speaks like a lumber mill, and ports his aesthetic in a way that makes one suspect his mind hasn't totally finished the fantasy-novel or clicked out of the rpg window. no, you did not just +2 charisma, asshole, but you did just +400 douche. he's the kind of guy that makes people with glasses take off their glasses so they dont have to look at him, and people without glasses to rub their foreheads as if it might make him stop talking or disappear entirely. he's the kind of guy that makes you afraid to say anything aloud in any class ever. because then he might respond. and nobody wants that.

so i'm coffee'd-up waving my hands flying through an inappropriate amount of information about a thousand miles an hour like some red-eyed tweaked-out lab rat towards the peanut butter at the end of a maze and the mill ogre doesnt even raise his hand in polite interruption, he just starts talking. "i just wanted to say--"

"what." i dont phrase it as a question. i phrase it as a dont you fucking dare.

and then he starts talking. he starts talking about australian english, which has nothing to do with chinese immigration routes. i am immediately made aware of the difference between our respective rates of speech. this shit is cutting into my presentation time; this is why we take questions afterwards. it's like that terrible moment in a crowded foot race where somebody nearby to you falls and grabs at your ankle. in slow motion. i'm watching the clock. it takes him 45 terrifyingly slow seconds to grab at my ankle.

when he's done i just keep running. nobody else responds to his interjection. people are learning.

head down. focus. carry on.

i have never been this continuously happy ever, a bone-deep "i got this" feeling, for quite a while now, i am happy, i am so happy and i am happy to be growing up and happy with who i am, the things i'm doing, the places i'm going, everything everything my heart is wonderfully full and quiet.

i've dived into an unnecessary and senselessly huge project -- trying to determine if the verb "do" can be considered a class indicator in shakespeare's comedies. probably not, but the project is wonderfully consuming: "do" has a tremendously interesting and often overlooked role in the history of english. one particular historian (john mcwhorter, whose emphasis is in pidgin and creole languages) contends that the only other languages in the world that have such a verb are welsh and cornish. routine usage doesn't rear its ugly head until early modern. you can fill in the rest.

trying to explain this to my roommates/girlfriend:

"as in, i want to do your mom? past tense: i did your mom."
"i will have done your mom."
"or! your mom is as wet as the morning dew."
"ooh -- your mom has more numbers than the dewey decimal system."

good.