tonight on the t

"Excuse me, can I trouble you for a pen?"

He had long hair and glasses, and a copy of _Fight Club_ (the book) on his lap.

"Of course," I replied, and reached into my bag.

He reached across the aisle for the pen and turned to the man in the stocking cap next to him.

"What's your number, man?" Long Hair asked. I tried to tune out as Stocking Cap answered--eavesdropping is a habit I'm looking to break. I spent the next few stops focusing instead on the ring of black dirt around each one of Long Hair's fingernails, the cover of the book, and the geometric shapes on each man's parka. The pen was returned to me with a smile and I watched Long Hair hand _Fight Club_ to Stocking Cap, who was getting up to exit the train at Tufts. They shook hands and the train stopped. As the doors opened, Stocking Cap turned back around, looked at me, and said, very softly,

"Excuse me, but you're beautiful."

Astonished, I smiled, and remembered to say Thank You right right as the doors were closing.

A few more stops ticked by in silence as I toyed with my phone. Long Hair had produced another book from one of his many plastic bags.

Then, out of the blue, I heard, "I wanna thank you."

I stared at Long Hair.

"For the use of your pen, you know. I wanna thank you. I just met that guy [stocking cap] tonight, just now, and he's just getting out of a psych ward, you know. I think he needs to read books. No one fuckin reads anymore, you know? That really frustrates me. I wish I had something better than Palahniuk to give 'im. At least Palahniuk beats Grisham, you know? But still. I wish I had something better. But I'll call him in three days. It takes people on average nine hours to read _Fight Club_. So I'll call him in three days."

Not really knowing what to say, I asked, "Will he be ok?"

"Him? Oh yeah, I think so. He seems to be in good spirits."

Silence.

"Do you read?" Long Hair wanted to know.

"...A little?" I ventured, a lame substitute for the yeah-tons-but-not-cool-stuff answer that immediately sprang to mind.

I don't really remember the next few minutes in any reproducible detail, honestly--he told me about his mom, an Orthodox Jewish theologian who introduced him to Sartre and Camus when he was younger, and monologued for a bit on his interest in French existentialism and the Western Occult tradition.

Then, out of nowhere: "I've been thinking a lot about miscommunication across dialects, you know?"

I couldn't believe my ears.

"I'm talking about accurate communication, you know? That doesn't happen very often."

Well aware that my time with him was limited, I mentally raced through the million questions I wanted to ask him about this. I settled on: "Do you think accurate communication is possible?"

He rubbed his forehead. "Mmm...Yeah. I mean, only through the use of different modes, you know? Like music. Or painting. I paint. Mostly I paint portraits. Especially of jazz artists. I feel like I communicate best through painting, you know? Most accurately."

His stop was nearing and he was gathering the plastic bags. I bit my tongue--I wanted him to keep talking. Instead: "Are you on Facebook?"

"No."

Silence.

"Well, do you communicate electronically? I could send you some images. You could see what I mean."

He wasn't asking for a phone number, so what the hell? I jotted down my email quickly and handed it to him.

"Thanks. I'm Soren. It was nice to meet you."

And with an awkward sidelong handshake, he was gone, and I was left thinking about "accurate communication", painting, multimodal expressions of self, Maria, "the artist who doesn't speak English is no artist", Soren's implicit belief in the merits of post-psych-ward exercises in literacy, his valuing of Palahniuk over Grisham, the bequeathing of _Fight Club_, miscommunication across dialects, and, by extension, translingualism. What, according to Soren, does painting do that language can't? In what ways might multi-modalism be useful to translingualism? Is translingualism even about accuracy, though? Or is accuracy one of those words (like authenticity...ha, ha...) that just drive everyone crazy?

Anyways.

Nothing groundbreaking, obviously--just one of those strange T interactions (made all the more weighty by the fact that I was on my way home from our class) that I don't want to forget, so I am logging it here.

is it too late for me?

It occurred to me as I was reading Kells that, yes, we should encourage “Students [to] bring not only their language(s) and discourses but the cultural ecologies of their own experience to their writing” (207)...but have I ever done this myself? When I read these articles, I think about them from the point of view of the teacher wanting to know what to do in her classroom. But I don't know why it's taken me this long to realize that I am the student, right now: in all of the writing that I do for all of the classes that I take, do I ever make a conscious effort to employ MY language, or does everything I write come out sounding like washed-out pseudo- (or, more graciously, apprentice-) academese that fits like ugly old shirts I've kept since high school (cuz they're stretched out in all the right places) and wear with a resigned shrug whenever I don't know what else is appropriate? Would I ever stick my neck out on a final paper, for instance, and write something that sounds like Chloe, rather than something that sounds like Chloe-sounding-as-much-like-everyone-else-as-she-can-get? The obnoxious truth is, probably not. Not even on a paper about linguistic diversity, which is the cruelest of ironies...I would probably write that linguistic diversity paper in the exact same linguistically un-diverse voice I've used for every other paper I've ever written, just like I've spent all semester blogging about trans/multi[lingualism/culturalism] in the same damn clinical mono-everything voice that has come to feel safe and legitimating, somehow.

The even-more-obnoxious truth is, I don't actually know what Chloe (minus academese) sounds like on paper. Kells asks, “Where and how do our students claim citizenship? How do they enact what they know and who they are?” (207), and I'm haunted by that because * I am the student! * and I'm afraid that the way that I enact who I am on paper is a very constructed, inauthentic (that just sent shivers down everyone’s spine, including mine—sorry—) process that is the result of years and years in The Academy.

(Note: I'm not interested in playing the blame game. I'm not making claims that I've been brainwashed by anyone or anything. I take full responsibility for the performative attitude I adopt whenever I try to write like a background-less perfect-English machine. And I'll also note that standardization of academic language is certainly not only the US's problem. I have vivid memories of my third grade teacher in France holding up my notebook in front of the whole class and condescendingly asking everyone, “Qui peut montrer a Chloe comment ecrire un sept?” (Who can show Chloe how we write our sevens?) because I hadn't put the little strike-through bar on the diagonal part. A standardized seven! In third grade! I'd gotten the math answer right, I just hadn't written the number the way everyone else did, and I got called out publicly for it. It was a traumatizing experience for a shy little bookworm whose American education had entirely failed her on the European way of writing numbers (now I'm blaming a little). Obviously, that experience was the tip of the Chloe-meets-standardized-French iceberg...)

Point is: can a girl who, right now, as a student, can't really remember her “own” language ever really help her future students write in theirs? How do I encourage a practice that I myself don't practice?