Talking in the Subjunctive

What is the map of communication castration, the point at which frequency and intensity combine to produce such a violent explosion of polarity; in this case- hysterical laughter and complete non-reaction? It's at the dinner table. Her head is in her hands. She's rolling on the floor, laughing. But on the other side we're not talking in the subjunctive yet, and apparently we're not understanding it either.

So I have to write. I have to write to communicate to you an emotion so specific, so fine-tuned, so calculated, so complex, that English is my only vessel. And it's true- it's not gonna mean a thing unless somebody reads it. But I am somebody, and it means something to me, and i've come to believe that it helps me.

You only have so much time. What do you want to study? What do want to verse yourself in? We're well down the pipe at 23 years. Yet it's the 10 year old that's laughing. I don't think she's taken linguistics yet. It would probably be worse if she read books- she wouldn't be talking. And who sits opposite with their face in their food? The one who's been to the University.

In this, education is experience. And when is experience most readily available? When you don't have any. When the tab is still white. When your brain is bursting at the seams of your skull and comprehension starts oozing out your pores in the form of miraculous cream-colored brain juice; juice that adds and subtracts, juice that thinks. You're processing incredible amounts of vocabulary every hour, making thousands of unconscious decisions about the thousands of variables regarding their usage with a retention rate still unequaled by the world's most (un)intelligent artificial you. Somehow she knows, she knew today, she knew in that nanosecond that she was supposed to laugh. She acted correctly.

It's gonna be more difficult to learn the piano. Twenty Three you're an old man, practically exponentially degraded. You can change a few belts, maybe throw in a new plastic knee, but hot damn you can't never change the oil inside that head of yours. Your tongue already knows its way around the inside of your mouth, and when you try to change it it spanks you.

I don't know how to say that in Spanish yet.

"So here I am in the middle way, having had twenty years, twenty years largely wasted... trying to learn to use words. And each attempt is a whole new start, and a different kind of failure. For one has only learnt to get the better of words, for the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which one is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate! With shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling, undisciplined squads of emotion, and what there is to conquer."

- T.S. Eliot