I Am Human

I went into Arrival not knowing much about the movie. I knew it had something to do with Amy Adams and aliens, but I wasn't provided with any context until actually viewing the movie itself. On my 29th birthday, my mom and I ate dinner at Palace Kitchen and went to the AMC theater for this mysterious movie about pods that may or may not contain extraterrestrial life.

The film centers around Dr. Louise Banks, a linguistics professor who had previous translation experience with the military. After 12 pod shaped spacecrafts land all over the globe, there's a worldwide race to decipher the intentions of the pods: curiosity or destruction. Contact between us and the beyond was surrounded by language and the components that were necessary to communicate effectively. Do the aliens understand the concept of a question? How is their sentence structure comprised? Is syntax relevant? Does the written version of their language indicative of what sounds are produced?

I'm not going to do a WhOa SpOiLeR ALeRt!!!11 thing here because if you're interested in language at all, I've probably piqued your interest in seeing the film and I'm not going to ruin it for you, but I'll offer up some interesting ideas. The aliens communicated with Louise and her fellow researchers by using curls, swoops, splats, and twirls measured out in a circle called a logogram, and the team finally breaks through with one word: human. Eventually, after some test runs and estimations were successfully executed with minimal clues or prior knowledge, Dr. Banks is able to not only see the language, but is able to visualize the language through time. I don't mean "well she had an hour so she understood it after a while" time, but actual time.

Arrival made me cry a few different places. It's a rollercoaster when you least expect it to be, especially when walking into it not having any frame of reference for the plot. Today I have the logogram for "human" tattooed around my pulse on my left arm. A lot of people think it's some sort of significant coffee stain when really it's a great example of what it means to communicate, and if heptapods do invade the earth in the name of curiosity and things which cannot be expressed in what we know as an alphabet, at least I'll be tagged and bagged when they get here.

I'm a language nerd. I excelled in reading, writing, and spelling, even though I still have a tab open to Google just for typing words I'm nervous of spelling wrong (maintenance, privilege, and indigenous are among them). I'd like to think most people enjoy communicating effectively in their native language or another they picked up along the way. Most bilingual people I've talked with in the Czech Republic have brought up the subject of language, whether it's asking if I'm learning Czech or asking how difficult of a time I'm having learning Czech. English is now a much more common language throughout the country. Lots of old timers speak a second language, but it most likely isn't English. If you lived in Czechoslovakia before it went the way of film and the VHS, chances are you were speaking Czech, Slovak, German, or Russian since that whole "we're gonna occupy the fuck out of you" thing really took off in the 20th century.

I've been in the country for about three weeks, and I've only had to use "do you speak English?" maybe once every other day, most of the time with people over the age of 40. These Czechs are hardened Czechs, as in they've witnessed power exchanges multiple times throughout their lives and endured influxes of languages other than their own, which I'm sort of experiencing in reverse right now. Czech is supposed to be more stark and halting while Slovak is more sing-songy and whimsical. But for now, I just hear a bunch of hard consonants with murdery letters and sounds. They even made up their own "r," which is a combination of the letter itself and a bit of both "z" and "j."

I met Lenka under a clock near the popular tram stop of Česka. She sent me exact coordinates on Google Maps because the Czechs have this peculiar habit of making the current time very public on multiple surfaces, so some clarification was needed about which historical timekeeping monument I needed to find. Lenka is almost 40 but when it comes to her age, she's ambiguous. She could have given me any number of ages and I would have believed her. Her dyed auburn hair compliments the highlights in her face and doesn't wash her out like many women I've seen here. She carries herself well and speaks English with a British accent from spending time in London. A few weeks before I arrived in Brno, she contacted me on Facebook about wanting to find an "adventure buddy" for her nine-year-old daughter. She explained how she wanted to have her daughter exposed to more conversational and non-traditional English rather than what was taught in school for someone her age, which is usually a verb and its relative conjugations, trying to figure out which adjectives are placed before which noun, and a vast array of numbers which might as well all be the same. I was excited to take on my own language while analyzing and using it from a beginner's perspective. And I could finally put my fucking Creative Writing degree to use in a vocal sense and not just...on here. 

Lenka explained that not only do I just get to hang out with her daughter, Alžběta, but her current best friend whose status will undoubtedly change three or four times before high school. Alžběta (the Czech version of "Elizabeth") and her friend Miša (I now have a sticky note open on my computer with all of the relevant hats and reverse circumflexes for the alphabet) are extremely bubbly and act like nine-year-old girls do. They met me in front of a church across the street from their school. Both buildings are incredibly expansive and are complete with ornate architecture and pumpkins cut out of construction paper placed neatly in the windows for the fall season. 

Alžběta was holding a huge Czech/Slovak/English (Anglicky) dictionary from the 1970s. It was almost comical to see a young kid carrying around such a ridiculously thick book that could have easily been mistaken for Moby Dick or The Count of Monte Cristo. We greeted each other in limited English but I was really blown away with the amount of English they've already learned just from being taught in school, as in it wasn't just pointing at things and knowing the vocabulary. The two girls had complete thoughts and sentences in English and a lot of giggling in Czech.

My memories of language learning at a young age aren't great. The teacher I had as an elementary school student was extremely selective and active with her favoritism while teaching my class. I had an easy time learning Spanish and all of the words to "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" in a different language, but if any sort of enthusiasm or humorous contribution was made to the class, you were linguistically shunned and given the silent treatment in both languages. 

When I entered middle school, I discovered I was to take Latin for two years in order to prepare me for the life or death decision of taking French or Spanish through high school. While I couldn't exercise my learned Latin in every day situations, it was during this time I figured out that I was a visual learner. Even today I'm seeing it in action. If I go to the supermarket (not grocery store!) up the street from my flat, I can remember the labels of food after I see them accompanying the appropriate food. But if someone were to stop me mid aisle and say, "the Czech word for 'butter' is ‘maslo,'" I won't remember it at all. And after using this sentence, I'll always know the Czech word for "butter." 

Alžběta and Miša took me around the center of Brno to a few different stores and coffee shops they find interesting. I tried to ask them as many questions as I could without seeming like a hipster version of the foreign police. If I asked them something and they didn't know what I said, they would either ask me politely "again" or all three of us would stop and huddle around the giant dictionary while we tried to find a Czech word and it's English equivalent. Some of these words ended up being "music," "pathway," "take," "late," and "decaf." Technology ended up saving us a lot of time because we all defaulted to Google Translate. We used my phone to type and pass back and forth, but this process illuminated the difficulties and vagaries of the English language. Words such as "take," "go," "set," and "be" have many definitions so zeroing in on the exact one to translate a particular thought effectively can take some patience. There were a lot of guesses as to meanings and estimations on which phrases were actually intended to be a question. In a lot of ways, I felt like Dr. Banks with her new alien friends except I don't feel threatened and I know why they're here.

After a confusing amount of time, Lenka's daughter led me back to their flat on Rooseveltova, about a ten minute tram ride from my flat. Czech flats usually have what Minnesotans would refer to as a "mud room." There's an entirely different room you go in prior to entering the apartment that is meant for shoes and storage and a place to kick dirt and snow off of your boots, which I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of but it appears Seattle and Minneapolis both beat me to it. Their flat is homey and well lived in. There's a small loft for a bed above their living room and their ceilings are very tall. Large double insulated windows let a lot of light in so the need for indoor lighting was minimal, even after dark. 

Alžběta's room is the perfect nine-year-old girl room. She has a stack of books on her nightstand for bedtime stories. She has little pink boxes that I'm not even sure hold anything in them; they're just boxes meant for buttons or small things magpies would pick up. There are plenty of small stuffed animals on her bed. Everything in her room has a label (in Czech) for which items go where. She has a hook for her backpack, a perfectly made bed with polka dot sheets, and picture frames with bright flowers around the edges. Her shoes are perfectly aligned underneath her steel coatrack and her white curtains are somewhere between doily and fabric meant for an American Girl doll. 

Alžběta and I played Bejeweled, Merged!, and Angry Birds and I realized I could use games to help with her English so we may be spending a lot of time on tablets in the future. I'm going to be helping Miša out as well and I hope her and Alžběta don't find new best friends too quickly. At some point Alžběta messaged Lenka and asked if I could stay longer because "Liz is really cool and we like her," and I have my Monday afternoons blocked off until further notice. 

While I've been writing this, I found out today I have a brand new niece named Emily November Vekich. She was born this morning and she's already smiling. I lost my favorite aunt this week but gained a little bundle who will make the family incredibly happy. It's times like this where I wish I was home, just for a hug and a warm exchange. Facebook is stupid for a lot of reasons but it's helping me connect with people back home so it's acting as my temporary portal. I'm nine hours ahead of most people I know, which has made communication somewhat easy due to me keeping weirdo hours but it's made watching football on Sundays rather difficult. I guess I'm still adjusting but I feel at home, but not home home yet. And I'm doing better than most of my league in fantasy football and I'm not even in the country. Two thumbs up for this human right here.