God is in the phenomenology

God is in the phenomenology

 

RantWoman offers the following souvenir moments from today’s excursions around Planet RantWoman:

 

“…communication….30 years…” implying on Planet RantWoman, RantWoman is not sure what.

 

Have you visited the part where RantWoman gets to untangle the unholy creole generated when bad Russian <> English phrasebook interacts with ASL syntax?

 

Or the part where the interpreting client has suffered a stroke and timelines are not linear and RantWoman’s task is to render what is said and let the listeners form their own conclusions about what to ask if clarification is needed.

 

Or the part where RantWoman gets to filter the mistakes many native Spanish speakers make in English and file with the helpfully supplied info that the speaker also suffers a brain injury.

 

Or the cycles where Biblical interpretation gets mixed in with what comes and goes as meanings cross different language boundaries?

 

Or maybe the part where RantWoman previously has erupted ferociously about incredibly sloppy use of mental health terminology in a conflict resolution context where, quaintly, RantWoman thinks other vocabulary should work JUST FINE and RantWoman is HAPPY to contribute further thoughts about “could we please try…?”

 

RantWoman! Most of us need to stick with English. (Why is that so hard for you?!?!?) and NO, we are not guaranteed to be interested in all the places your Excessively Plain English to Quakerese is short-circuiting.

 

No? Could you MAYBE please just try to appreciate the phenomenology.

 

RantWoman, WTF is phenomenology????

 

GOOGLE IT. Meanwhile some more examples, with content not just language.

 

Old friend to RantWoman about a mutual friend not a native English speaker who uttered something in perfect idiomatic English: “RantWoman, how does he DO that?” He’s an actor trying out lines. Why don’t you ask him what that line means to him?

 

Same old friend as above as this odd gift: RantWoman’s first reaction many times: ”Old Friend is just flipping out like he sometimes does.” However a time or two recently, Old Friend has just blurted out something where RantWoman has been able to say “Oh thank you. I had no idea what I said was coming across that way. Here is what I really meant.”

 

Different Friend recently opened a conversation about a RantWoman email by first needing to tell RantWoman about the friend’s experience with numbers. RantWoman does not necessarily have the right credentials to call something synesthesia, but thank you Wikipedia, thinking of numbers as people sounds to RantWoman like a case of synesthesia. The friend says this works fine for addition and subtraction but not for multiplication and division. Here RantWoman tried with no success to explain what she found so cool when she figured out fractions.  Friend then explained how useful it had been to have a dyslexic math teacher used to having to think about many things along multiple pathways. RantWoman means to interrogate this experience some more at some point, but in the moment RantWoman just kept thinking “Why do you need to tell me about your synesthesia issues with numbers when there were no numbers at all in the email you are calling about?”

 

What WAS the problem from the email? It turns out that people at Meeting are not the only people who get emails where RantWoman makes giant leaps over chasms of meaning without really specifying how she has gotten from point A to point B.

 

Ohhhh! Clarification easily (or sometimes not so easily) forthcoming. THANK YOU FOR ASKING.