Forging ahead like a marlin walking on water...

So after closing my eyes for a restful spell last night, I awoke to find it was 1:30 am.

Drat.

There are no singularly intense stressors in my life, currently. I hardly notice the scar in my chest any more, either because I'm getting used to the feeling that several layers of kraftboard have been inserted under the surface of the skin, or because I'm actually getting better.

And there's not much to be done about the cancer, except to let the therapy run its course.

However, that's not to say there's nothing to do.

Work has been light, despite having resurrected a relationship that had faded away when my client failed to win a contract. I have something on my plate right now, and every bit helps at the end of the month, but it's not a big job at all.

It turns out tomorrow's event (at which Galina and I will be judges) is the annual Olympiada of Spoken Russian sponsored by the American Council of Teachers of Russian. The judging rules are pretty straightforward, although I suspect things might go slowly at first because the examination procedure is not something I have first-hand knowledge of, although I've heard descriptions of the process, which involves the examinee blindly selecting one or more cards with questions written on them (out of a general collection of all possible questions that can be asked for the examination).

The one thing that bugged me upon waking last night is the fact that I had been asked, last Saturday, to prepare "a few words," as apparently, I am among the speakers that will be called upon tomorrow morning to kick off the competition. When I asked what the "few words" were to be about, the response was a bit fuzzy: about myself and my work.

Who the heck is interested in that?

Still, I suppose I shall prepare about 90 seconds of remarks, likely leading off with my journal's subtitle here on LJ (from Wittgenstein: The limits of my language denote the limits of my world.) and then...

I don't know.

Would there be a place to cite a quote Lomonosov, where he says, in the dedication of his Russian Grammar:

Carl the Fifth, the Holy Roman Emperor, used to say that one should speak Spanish with God, French with friends, German with enemies, and Italian with the fair sex. But had he been skilled in Russian he would of course have added that it would be appropriate to speak with all of these in it, for he would have found in it the magnificence of Spanish, the vivacity of French, the strength of German, the delicacy of Italian, and, in addition, the richness and conciseness of Greek and Latin.

(Although I should probably leave out the part where it is said that Lomonosov came across this chestnut in a book published years before, the Dictionnaire historique et critique of Pierre Bayle.)

Tell them about all the cool people I've worked with and all the places I've been to in connection with my devotion to languages?

Tell them how it was that an engineering student ended up taking an intensive elementary Russian course and then—lacking employment prospects in the engineering field—found a job working for a US travel agency in the USSR?

If I could convince myself that this was relevant to the competition, maybe I would. Just like that, however, I get the feeling it'd sound like bragging.

I don't know.

Maybe note the side benefits of learning a language, i.e., how language works (which can only really be appreciated when studying a foreign language), which can lead to think about about English in a way that you would not be able to without having something (e..g, Russian) against which to set things off.

Should I argue that a foreign language is perhaps the most important thing one can study in school? (Problem 1: This has nothing to do with the Russian language. Problem 2: As attractive as I can make this argument sound, it can be easily reduced to dust in any one of several ways.)

Gee, does it sound like I'm freewheeling my remarks right here and now? &grin>

More later, maybe.

It's Windows, silly goose!

I spent entirely too much time, a few days ago, trying to get gnus to run in emacs—more specifically, the emacs executable for Windows—and when I finally was able to configure the software to fetch mail from one of my Gmail accounts, I was too elated to realize that emacs was relying on an old, clunky, non-working configuration file instead of the one I had been polishing to a high spit-shine.

I tried using the "new and improved" configuration file the next day and ran into some problems, most having to do with simply not knowing how to work with gnus. Eventually, I got to the point where I again could fetch mail from Google, and called it a day.

During last night's bout of insomnia, out of an inclination to being ornery, I took the configuration file I had developed for the emacs Windows executable and put it on my all-Linux netbook. After checking the file to make sure it wasn't trying to deal with files within a Windows folder structure, I finally let fly and ran gnus.

The silly thing ran like a greased ferret.

I was even able—mirabile dictu—to get what I think of as "the newsreader part" of gnus to work (although to be fair, it would appear that everything inside of gnus is treated like a newsreader of some kind, including email accounts). Specifically, emacs has downloaded a list of all the groups available at news.gmane.org.

Now, among other things, I am faced with the task of learning enough about navigating through gnus to select the groups I want to follow and read them.

In other news, a scan of my Twitter feed revealed a link to an article titled How learning Russian can make you better at math. This sounds like a definite item for me to research to prepare tomorrow's remarks.

Cheers...

A key takeaway...

Understanding doesn’t build fluency; instead, fluency builds understanding.

~ Barbara Oakley, Ph.D.

(from How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math)