Preface To Slow Down: Wouldn't A Better Theme Be "Slowing Down"?

Ugh, everybody prefers the gerund.

Did I ever mention I took Latin in high school?  It wasn't because I was on my way to be a pretentious twat, although certainly that road was right there in front of me.  No, I did it to spite my mother & my family.

My mother, you see, is German, & all her other kids took German in high school.  The same high school I was at, actually.  The same damn German teacher, too; her name was Frau Phillips.  I had actually had Mrs. Phillips for English in the tenth grade.  When the time came to take a foreign language, though, I chose Latin.

It might have broken my mother's heart.  Or it might just have irritated her.  Or she might have thought, well, he's a smart boy, & smart people learn dead languages.  Or she didn't give a fuck.  She never said.  But the idea that I was doing something that no one else in my family had done - that I was somehow breaking with what maybe the family felt was tradition - that pleased me.

It's no surprise that my family didn't like me much when I was that age.  I assume they like me less now, but most certainly being different, when they all worked so hard to be the same, must have baffled them.  Well, if they stopped to think about it, which they didn't.  "Gary's weird," is probably as deep as that thought went.  Mostly I don't think they noticed me.

Damn it, I didn't want to start talking about my family!  I wanted instead to talk about Latin.  Latin!  I remember impressing Mrs. Phillips by using the word celerity - she didn't know that word - in a poem I wrote for her class.  "It comes from the word celer," I told her.  "Latin for 'speed.'"  Helpfully, I added, "Like in the word accelerate."

Did I say 'impress'?  She might have just thought me a pretentious twat.

Actually what I learned most about Latin - this is true - was how English works.  I knew all about nouns, verbs, pronouns, etc., mainly because of Schoolhouse Rock - but there were ways the parts of speech worked in a sentence that completely escaped me.

Latin nouns have endings depending on their use - they call them "declensions."  I learned about indirect objects, objects of prepositions, etc.  & of course Latin verbs conjugate much more regularly than English verbs.  Putting a Latin sentence together was kind of a puzzle, the rules of which were laid out before you if you took the time to know them.

In English class, I had struggled with the idea of the passive voice.  In Latin, it made sense because the pieces of the puzzle had to fit a certain way to make the sentence do what it needs to do to be correct.

The fact is, I learned more about English from studying Latin than I learned in English class.

Also, I almost got beat up in Latin class for saying I thought Eddie Van Halen looked "a little gay" in the video for "Jump."  But that's neither here nor there.

In any event, I don't feel tied to the idea of noun forms for my show themes.  They can be short sentences, like "slow down."  I might have thought that subjects should be nouns once upon a time, but no more.

Also, I've retained virtually no Latin.  What I remember from two years taking that language is pretty much the word "celer."  Also, "agricola."  That means "farmer."  Hence, "agriculture."

Damn, I am such a pretentious twat!