Cafffe Tre Effe and the Road Not Taken
[Warning: Purple prose and nostalgia yonder! but at least this one's not about boys.]
Tuesday in conference, the physiology professor -- the one who asks for classical derivations, and who referenced Charles Dickens in class yesterday -- started off by asking "Where would you like to have breakfast right now, if you could be anywhere?" The answers varied from "a seven-star hotel in Dubai" to "IHOP" to "in bed."
An hour and a half later, when conference was ending, Dr. R repeated the question. "Rome," I said. "Rome," he said, his baritone calling the class to attention. "That's a good one. Okay, where?" "The cafe with the good cappuccino, across from the place where Caesar was stabbed," I hedged, recalling neither the name of the bar nor the name of the archaeological site. "Very interesting you say that," he noted. "Do you know the place Caesar was stabbed?" "It's not the forum; it's this place that's now a cat sanctuary" I replied. "Very good!" he said, surprised. "Most people think that Caesar was stabbed in the forum, where all the tourists walk around now, but it's actually, oh, about five hundred meters away at a bus depot and the Largo Argentina, now a cat sanctuary. My wife and I stayed at a hotel just aruond the corner."
After he dismissed us, Dr. R complimented me again on my choice, which, I recalled, was "Caffe Tre Effe," and my knowledge of history. "I was a classics major," I admitted. "What went wrong?" asked Dr. R lightly. "Meh, I... I didn't want to write the long papers that would be read by no one, I guess." "Where did you study?" he asked. "Chicago -- University of Chicago," I said. "Oh," he said, "my university had a very old, established classics department." "Where?" I took the bait. "Cambridge," he said. "Ah," and I laughed. Because: Smackdown.
As we were packing up to leave, Revi, who'd witnessed the whole episode, rolled her eyes and asked "Gabbiana, why are you in med school?" "I don't know," I answered. I was grinning from the rush of classics (well, Rome, and warm memories) to my brain.
Later that day, I went to Intensive Spanish at lunch again; it runs three days a week. Dr. C starts each lesson slowly, but by the end, when he's moving through the crowd and asking us to come up with sentences, I am generally completely lost and ducking behind my neighbors in an effort to hide from his questions. Meanwhile, people like Revi, who taught sex ed in Spanish earlier this year for her CEE, are bored as hell.
I know that I couldn't really have expected to pick up Spanish easily in three hourlong sessions a week, moreover in sessions that are geared towards people with a background in the language. That's not what hurts. What hurts is when, during practice, my brain forms what it wants to say in Yiddish, the last spoken language I learned, or Italian (even when I do manage to get Spanish out of my mouth, it's with hard "c" and "ch" scattered everywhere), or sometimes even Hebrew. (Latin and Greek rarely make appearances, probably because I never practiced speaking in either.)
Later, Tuesday afternoon, down in a Manayunk coffee shop, two men sat and talked for an hour in Hebrew, straight across from me. I understood maybe three words -- helpful, since any more would've distracted me from my physiology, but yet another reminder that I'm losing all the languages I've ever studied. Hebrew, I know, I haven't done with any regularity since eighth grade; at this point, I'm not actively losing any more ability, but I'm certainly not where I once was.
Anyway, all these episodes -- Dr. R asking for Greek derivations and my sitting dumb, and then our class-stopping digression about Rome; my tongue-tied, Yiddish- and Italian-ized Spanish; the Hebrew that pops up all over Philadelphia -- make me wonder exactly what Revi asked: What am I doing here?
Languages were a constant in my life for so long: Hebrew from fourth grade to eighth, Latin in ninth grade (for the purpose of boosting my SAT scores, and because when I was ten I read a book of classical myths that intrigued me, and because I'd always heard Jewish history from the losing side, and I wanted to hear what the Romans had to say) all the way until the end of college, Greek for three years of undegrad, Italian for a semester, Yiddish for a year.
And yet. Languages make me insanely happy, but I don't think I was ever meant to be more than a dilettante, the one who shares interesting facts at dinner parties. What makes me happiest are the quirks of a language: How the ancient Greeks talk about their lungs the way we talk about our heart; the lungs are where emotion sits. How, in Yiddish, a woman with a big bosom is said to have "ragged shoes." How in Hebrew, the word for "sky" is a plural, but you'd add a singular verb.
But. The one linguistics course I took at UC (on the languages of JRR Tolkien, so take *that* for what it's worth) was confusing as all hell. And I don't want to be a classicist; I might enjoy teaching basic Latin, introducing the stories that I love, all "hankerin' for a hunk-o" the way Sully used to do it. But I don't want to deal with the messy bits, and high school is all messy bits, and higher ed is all publish or perish. I kind of wish that Yiddish had been offered before my senior year at UC; Yiddish literature is far less plowed-over than Latin or Greek, and it's possible to write papers that don't simply restate what's been said before (I think). Who's to say, though, that I wouldn't have gotten sick of Yiddish eventually, too? A dying language, fewer and fewer native speakers, a slow stagnation in literature...
Anyway. I haven't been back to Spanish (I was exhausted on Thursday after our quiz and cut the middle of the day to go jogging in the summerlike weather, and Friday I just... took a me day, and didn't go to classes at all.) since Tuesday; if I skip another session, I won't get medical humanities credit, which wasn't my goal, really, but... I don't know if I'll go back. It's disheartening, for all the wrong causes.
RachelTheWise is thinking of dropping out of graduate school for a host of reasons that are her own, but in many ways echo my thinking about my program. Medical school is a slog, a marathon, an effort to tread water while ten different laughing professors pour gelatin into the pool, and it seems like everyone else but you has flippers on. It is Not Fun; it is a Means to An End. I like Philadelphia a lot, and I love my friends here. I have a good time on weekends (especially long ones). And yet I think of what I could be studying, what I'm forgetting with every day I memorize pathways and not participles.
I wonder. It's too late for regrets, but I guess I'll always wonder.
(And occasionally I'll wear my Junior Classical League t-shirt. "Faber est suae quisque fortunae!" indeed.)
Tuesday in conference, the physiology professor -- the one who asks for classical derivations, and who referenced Charles Dickens in class yesterday -- started off by asking "Where would you like to have breakfast right now, if you could be anywhere?" The answers varied from "a seven-star hotel in Dubai" to "IHOP" to "in bed."
An hour and a half later, when conference was ending, Dr. R repeated the question. "Rome," I said. "Rome," he said, his baritone calling the class to attention. "That's a good one. Okay, where?" "The cafe with the good cappuccino, across from the place where Caesar was stabbed," I hedged, recalling neither the name of the bar nor the name of the archaeological site. "Very interesting you say that," he noted. "Do you know the place Caesar was stabbed?" "It's not the forum; it's this place that's now a cat sanctuary" I replied. "Very good!" he said, surprised. "Most people think that Caesar was stabbed in the forum, where all the tourists walk around now, but it's actually, oh, about five hundred meters away at a bus depot and the Largo Argentina, now a cat sanctuary. My wife and I stayed at a hotel just aruond the corner."
After he dismissed us, Dr. R complimented me again on my choice, which, I recalled, was "Caffe Tre Effe," and my knowledge of history. "I was a classics major," I admitted. "What went wrong?" asked Dr. R lightly. "Meh, I... I didn't want to write the long papers that would be read by no one, I guess." "Where did you study?" he asked. "Chicago -- University of Chicago," I said. "Oh," he said, "my university had a very old, established classics department." "Where?" I took the bait. "Cambridge," he said. "Ah," and I laughed. Because: Smackdown.
As we were packing up to leave, Revi, who'd witnessed the whole episode, rolled her eyes and asked "Gabbiana, why are you in med school?" "I don't know," I answered. I was grinning from the rush of classics (well, Rome, and warm memories) to my brain.
Later that day, I went to Intensive Spanish at lunch again; it runs three days a week. Dr. C starts each lesson slowly, but by the end, when he's moving through the crowd and asking us to come up with sentences, I am generally completely lost and ducking behind my neighbors in an effort to hide from his questions. Meanwhile, people like Revi, who taught sex ed in Spanish earlier this year for her CEE, are bored as hell.
I know that I couldn't really have expected to pick up Spanish easily in three hourlong sessions a week, moreover in sessions that are geared towards people with a background in the language. That's not what hurts. What hurts is when, during practice, my brain forms what it wants to say in Yiddish, the last spoken language I learned, or Italian (even when I do manage to get Spanish out of my mouth, it's with hard "c" and "ch" scattered everywhere), or sometimes even Hebrew. (Latin and Greek rarely make appearances, probably because I never practiced speaking in either.)
Later, Tuesday afternoon, down in a Manayunk coffee shop, two men sat and talked for an hour in Hebrew, straight across from me. I understood maybe three words -- helpful, since any more would've distracted me from my physiology, but yet another reminder that I'm losing all the languages I've ever studied. Hebrew, I know, I haven't done with any regularity since eighth grade; at this point, I'm not actively losing any more ability, but I'm certainly not where I once was.
Anyway, all these episodes -- Dr. R asking for Greek derivations and my sitting dumb, and then our class-stopping digression about Rome; my tongue-tied, Yiddish- and Italian-ized Spanish; the Hebrew that pops up all over Philadelphia -- make me wonder exactly what Revi asked: What am I doing here?
Languages were a constant in my life for so long: Hebrew from fourth grade to eighth, Latin in ninth grade (for the purpose of boosting my SAT scores, and because when I was ten I read a book of classical myths that intrigued me, and because I'd always heard Jewish history from the losing side, and I wanted to hear what the Romans had to say) all the way until the end of college, Greek for three years of undegrad, Italian for a semester, Yiddish for a year.
And yet. Languages make me insanely happy, but I don't think I was ever meant to be more than a dilettante, the one who shares interesting facts at dinner parties. What makes me happiest are the quirks of a language: How the ancient Greeks talk about their lungs the way we talk about our heart; the lungs are where emotion sits. How, in Yiddish, a woman with a big bosom is said to have "ragged shoes." How in Hebrew, the word for "sky" is a plural, but you'd add a singular verb.
But. The one linguistics course I took at UC (on the languages of JRR Tolkien, so take *that* for what it's worth) was confusing as all hell. And I don't want to be a classicist; I might enjoy teaching basic Latin, introducing the stories that I love, all "hankerin' for a hunk-o" the way Sully used to do it. But I don't want to deal with the messy bits, and high school is all messy bits, and higher ed is all publish or perish. I kind of wish that Yiddish had been offered before my senior year at UC; Yiddish literature is far less plowed-over than Latin or Greek, and it's possible to write papers that don't simply restate what's been said before (I think). Who's to say, though, that I wouldn't have gotten sick of Yiddish eventually, too? A dying language, fewer and fewer native speakers, a slow stagnation in literature...
Anyway. I haven't been back to Spanish (I was exhausted on Thursday after our quiz and cut the middle of the day to go jogging in the summerlike weather, and Friday I just... took a me day, and didn't go to classes at all.) since Tuesday; if I skip another session, I won't get medical humanities credit, which wasn't my goal, really, but... I don't know if I'll go back. It's disheartening, for all the wrong causes.
RachelTheWise is thinking of dropping out of graduate school for a host of reasons that are her own, but in many ways echo my thinking about my program. Medical school is a slog, a marathon, an effort to tread water while ten different laughing professors pour gelatin into the pool, and it seems like everyone else but you has flippers on. It is Not Fun; it is a Means to An End. I like Philadelphia a lot, and I love my friends here. I have a good time on weekends (especially long ones). And yet I think of what I could be studying, what I'm forgetting with every day I memorize pathways and not participles.
I wonder. It's too late for regrets, but I guess I'll always wonder.
(And occasionally I'll wear my Junior Classical League t-shirt. "Faber est suae quisque fortunae!" indeed.)
posted by gabbiana at 1:45 PM
2 Comments:
Too late for regrets? I expect to be regretting things until I die. I'm trying to minimize them, that's all. And maybe, once in a while, to regret having done something rather than the reverse.
Find me a good quotation about dilettantism, and we can form a club. Secret handshakes and argot (...weaving lingo!) and everything.
cat forum = plaza argentina? or something? piaza argentina? let's go back to rome!
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