Lost in...

Hola everyone! Hump day over! Well, almost. How did your Wednesday go? How are you? Have you tried talking to anyone face to face using the same language and yet you have different understanding?

Before you go through whatever is down there .. check these awesome people out..

July 14, 2021

First day high in the air. The broken block class starts chattering about how their previous class was, who their professor is for certain subjects. Who got the terror teacher in which subject. Some of them since they do not belong to the same block at the start of the school year were getting to know each other. They have common friends and all that.

Quietly, a man in white polo tucked in his khaki pants walked up to the white board unnoticed by the chattering crowd and wrote with the black marker…

           “…God is dead…”

These words were written large enough for the people at the back of the room to see without having to squint their eyes. Yet no one noticed yet. As far as the crowd was concerned, the professor is not yet in.

The man placed down the marker and slowly faced the noisy class with his arms crossed. Expressionless, relaxed, unannoyed and yet his presence slowly was felt and you feel the class slowly tensing up as one group after the other turn their head towards the board and the others get affected. Slowly everyone picked their seats and all eyes are now on the man, rather short, barely five-foot-two-inches in height. He is not intimidating. Just some average-height or small, you choose, but commanding respect as he stands there and waits for the whole class to settle.

Without turning to face the board, he picked up the marker again and tapped the whiteboard. There were some delayed and rather over-reacting reactions from some spots in the class and the professor started to talk.

That was my favorite college professor. He handled my Philosophy class. I remember a lot of quick after-class conversations with this dude. My other friend from the organization also loves this guy. One time my friend sat in on one of our class and that was one swinging enjoyable discussion - because my friend was brave enough to raise his hand and present his thoughts with our prof.

Though we were obviously on opposite ends on most of our topics, our conversations were healthy. His class has lots of essays. He said, one time, it is important to always “define your terms” before you go further into your writing. This way, your reader can pick up where you are coming from and lessen misunderstandings.

I think that practice got stuck with me for a long time in college. Which I started not practicing eventually. Lols. Anyhow...

The world we have now has a lot of ways of communicating and yet we still get caught misinterpreting a lot of things. We say there is a language barrier. Language barrier meaning that gap or that chasm or that blocker between people who cannot speak the same or common language.

I have this desire to learn lots of languages. It is different when you talk to other people and use their language. But it is hard. I tried learning Japanese and French. But without everyday practice and use you lose what you learn.

My friends and I were discussing one time about my taking up French. One brought up that even during college he had an issue with learning new languages that is why he hated the Computer programming language classes that we had. It was a bit of a funny comparison, but he justified that most of the time, in programming, we blame logic, but it really was a language issue or a language barrier.

When I thought about what he said and pondered on what we use at work. It is amusing that we use English as a baseline so we all can have a common understanding and yet in the middle of the project we still somehow need to check if we are still on the same page because misunderstanding happens.

And English is a complex language after all. They have lots of words that have two meanings.

And here I am entertaining myself with some.

I asked some kids to draw for me. I was given this book that shows drawing prompts. Oh, but I am super rusty and close to “I do not draw at all”. So I had some kid do it for me.

So I flipped the book and it says: Rolling Pin

One kid gave me this:

Another kid gave me this:

See? Ahahahaha