wo semper bu zhidao, y tu ma?

"veni, vidi, vici."
or so the saying goes.

i've discovered a new phenomenon. lately, i've wondered to myself if some people are born into madness or if, for most, it slowly but surely infiltrates the mind. if we simply stop seeing where we begin and the madness ends. we consciously feel the pangs, but fail to take it seriously until it's too late.

lately, i feel like a part of me is going mad. for those who don't know, words constitute my love language. it's the way i love, the way i process, the way i reason, and really, who i am. i feel that, to a great extent, my self ceases to be without a firm grasp on language and how it moves myself and others.

and lately, everything about it is breaking down. it might seem logical that one's speech would grow if one taught it day in, day out. but the truth is that i listen to so much imperfect english that i, in many ways, can't remember what constitutes good or bad anymore. there's good and bad by esl standards, but they differ a great deal from the sophistication i was cultivating in university.

but if it were english, it would be one thing, but all languages i've been learning have lately coalesced into a non-language. i cannot, sometimes, remember how to express what i want in english. my mind immediately races to chinese, before i have to counter it with my mouth.

furthermore, there are times when i can't remember how to express something in either english or chinese, but can remember the latin or spanish words, and once in a while, i write them down before i realize that it doesn't make any sense. though, for a long while, i couldn't remember how to say "i" or "you" in spanish anymore. wo qiero? that's not right!

and you can tell it's gotten bad when you're supposed to count the students off for dodgeball, and your initial thought is yi, er, yi, er. but oh yeah, you're not allowed to speak chinese. except it's too much mental strain to count one, two, one, two, so you resort to uno, dos, uno, dos. and your kids are confused, but it makes sense to you because, after all, where you come from, that means something!

cohesion. my kingdom for cohesion.