Immersion in a Second Language

October 13, 2025October 13, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

I have always envied people who can speak more than one language. In high school, I took Spanish, and all I have to show for it are recurring nightmares about my butchering of Spanish pronunciations in front of the class. In college, I tried to soothe my subconscious by taking four semesters of Biblical Greek, a dead language that requires no conversational proficiency. In hindsight, that was also a bad decision for my subconscious. It is never good for Jesus to be able to directly communicate with your subconscious, without you as the interpreter.

JESUS: ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς

ME: [acting as interpreter] Jesus said it’s okay to ridicule your enemies, just a little bit.

SUBCONSCIOUS: No, he didn’t. I know Biblical Greek. He said, “Love Your Enemies.”

After college, I gave up all studies of foreign languages, in hopes of circumventing my subconscious, only to buy an old farmhouse with a chatty vent pipe. Learning the meaning of the various gurgles and hiccups emanating from the vent pipe or toilet or bathtub is vital for surviving in an old farmhouse.

For instance, a gurgle bordering on a dry persistent cough, could be indicative that your well has run dry. If this is indeed the case, prepare for a long and drawn out process to reprime the well pump. The steps are as follows: (1) Scratch your head and try to remember the correct process for repriming the pump. (2) Call your wife’s Poppaw to see if he can remember. (3) Meet your wife’s Poppaw at the well pump to see if physical proximity to the pump jogs any enlightening memories. (4) Fiddle with valves and switches to see if anything miraculous happens. (5) Out of sheer befuddlement, yank on the tiny hose connecting the pump to the pressure switch. (6) Wave and enjoy the scenery from atop the geyser spurting from the nozzle to the pressure switch.

Misdiagnoses like a dry well for a clogged nozzle are common among folks who are not yet proficient at the nuances of conversational gurgles. Personally, I should have used context clues to realize that we were not in a drought, so that gurgle, in that context, must have meant a clogged nozzle, not a dry well. But I can’t be too hard on myself because it takes years of immersion in a second-language to become truly proficient–plus, it was mostly my wife’s Poppaw who got immersed in the geyser.

That’s not to say that I have escaped immersion. There was the time the drain pipe from the kitchen sink got clogged and then burst during winter. Although I only heard a soft gurgle bubbling up in the backyard, the stench alone was context enough to diagnose the problem. The process for replacing the drain pipe was prolonged by the fact it took many hours wandering the hardware store to find the correct fitting–it is hard to find help in a big box hardware store these days, especially when you smell like the inside of a putrid pipe.

Be glad you can’t smell what is seeping out of this busted clean-out valve.

Perhaps, subconsciously, I wanted to linger–sauntering through a hardware store in muddy jeans and boots while emanating the scent of hard work is possibly a man’s proudest moment, especially for an over-educated man proficient in an antiquated language.

Fatherhood

June 16, 2025June 16, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 6 Comments

Thomas is going through this phase–well, at least, I hope it’s a phase–we’re he communicates with the urgency and intensity of a drill sergeant. “Rise and shine, Dad, time to drop down and give me fifty pushups, plus turn on the TV so I can watch cartoons,” he yells into my eardrum while I try to swat him away with a pillow. Crazy thing is he never tries this early morning tactic on his mom’s side of the bed, in his mom’s ear, probably because she is such a deep and peaceful sleeper that she is incapable of awakening for anything quieter than a mild bomb blast. And if, by some small miracle, he did awaken her, she would just roll over and tell me to deal with it. It’s pretty much a tacit agreement we’ve made–my wife deals with scary sounds in the night that she thinks could be robbers and I think could be ghosts–and I deal with our son’s militaristic Saturday morning roll call.

Sometimes I think parenthood is basically 50% percent time spent wondering if you’re a good parent, 45% time spent wondering what you’re doing wrong, and 5% wondering if the hospital accidentally switched your child at birth.

Natalie went to visit her dad this past weekend for Fathers’ Day, leaving Thomas and I behind to visit my parents. If it wasn’t for Thomas, my parents and I would still be trying to figure out where to eat dinner this past weekend. Thankfully, Thomas knows his own mind and chose Chili’s over the Mayflower Fish House, so half of his family tree, the indecisive half, didn’t starve and wither up due to indecision.

However, Thomas’s decisiveness isn’t without its downsides, specifically when he commands the waitress, “Bring me my quesadilla now!” I’m pretty sure I heard an audible gasp arise from the surrounding tables; meanwhile, I just wanted to get under the table and hide. Who is this child? Not only did he vocalize an imperative sentence, which I’m pretty sure I wasn’t allowed to utter until I turned 21 (and even now I still feel awkward giving commands), but he vocalized it at the top of his lungs in a public setting.

Don’t get wrong, in some ways, I’m glad Thomas is decisive and vocal, and I hope he doesn’t grow up quite as shy as I was, but at the same time, I don’t want the waitress spitting in our food. So Thomas and I had a “discussion” in the bathroom, which was mostly me pleading with him in a bathroom stall to behave and listen, to not besmirch the Bishop family name, all while threatening him with various punishments once we get home (you name them, we’ve tried them) that seem to have a five minute half-life for effectiveness, then he just goes right back to his preferred form of communication, which is loud imperative sentences.

This phase has been going on for a few months/eons now, and to be honest, on several occasions it’s made me wonder if I’m doing something wrong as a Dad. It wasn’t until I picked Thomas up from preschool one day that I realized that barking commands seemed to be the preferred form of communication for the entire class.

“Do they yell at each other all day long?” I asked his teacher.

“Yes,” she said, exasperatedly, “but Thomas is one of the quieter ones.”

-the drill sergeant

Midnight Rider

March 10, 2025March 10, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 5 Comments

“Use the force,” that is what my inner Obi-Wan told me last week when I was driving home from a long work trip at night. It felt like just about every oncoming pair of headlights sent me into momentary blindness–and I more or less just aimed straight ahead and hoped the road didn’t curve. My problem is twofold: My old headlights have developed a cloudy patina, which causes them to emit roughly 10 lumens max, which is the equivalent of a wavering candle flame. Meanwhile, everyone else is driving around with modern ultrabrite LED headlights which have the ability to brighten your teeth two shades as you clench the steering wheel and your teeth simultaneously.

While I was driving, the thought also crossed my mind that I am getting old. I thought this right after I thought about how much I now hate driving at night, which is what old people think. Young people see nocturnal journeys as great adventures, usually because their destination contains something fun and entertaining.

I remember my first nighttime road trip. In high school, my buddy and I set out over the horizon in my car. We were two rural, small town boys heading two hours away to the state capital, Raleigh, to see Pearl Jam. I’m not sure how we convinced my parents to let us do that, but back then parents could live in blissful ignorance and more or less just let their children grow up. Nowadays, parents can’t do that because teenagers post all the stupid stuff they’re doing on social media. Thank goodness, we didn’t have social media back then.

As you grow older, driving at night usually ceases to be for pleasure and entertainment, and you only drive at night for one of two things: you’re either driving for work or driving to the emergency room.

So far, we have had two nocturnal trips to the emergency room. The first was when Thomas had a bad bout of croup when he was a baby. Natalie drove. FYI, you never want to be in the passenger seat when your wife is driving your child to the emergency room. I learned that night that neither speed limit, nor red light, nor traffic pattern will separate Thomas from the love of his mom. Also, I learned that if my wife ever wants to quit her job as a librarian, she has a second career waiting as a Formula One driver.

Recently, our second midnight trip to the emergency room for Thomas was for a bad toothache. This time I drove. Despite Natalie pleading with me to speed up, I’m proud to say that I drove in such a safe and orderly manner that Thomas fell back asleep, so we just turned around and returned home–and in so doing, I saved us from being waylaid by the bandits in the emergency room billing department.

Being waylaid is one of the main reasons not to drive at night. In our rural county, I’m pretty sure the deer herds fight over roadside territory to waylay innocent passersby. Although you can spot a lot more deer with ultrabrite LED headlights, they are so erratic that you’re better off channeling Obi-Wan and using the force to navigate them.

Advice from a Talking Jellyfish

February 25, 2025February 25, 2025 ~ sanebishop ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday, I was thinking, when it occurred to me that thinking is highly overrated. As far as I can tell, thinking is what humans do to make their lives miserable. To me, it seems like most one cell amoebas are happier than most humans these days, and I suspect that is because most one cell amoebas spend very little time thinking. Amoebas just exist, which is to say they just flop and plop around the microscopic world and spend little time engaged in higher thought. I would love to be able to just flop and plop onto the couch, but I can’t plop in peaceful lassitude without thinking about all the other things I ought to be doing instead.

Winter is the worst time for thinking. It’s when thoughts pile up, like a log jam in a river. A thought jam is when your stream of consciousness can’t flow naturally because all the debris flowing downstream clogs up the neurological pathways in your head. To clear up a thought jam, it helps to engage in productive activities, like taking out the trash. But on cold rainy days, it is too dreary to take out the trash, so thoughts just pile up, as does the trash.

The only advantage I see to thinking is that occasionally we can think about happy thoughts, often at the most inopportune times, like the time I thought about a talking jellyfish in church. He was just drifting along in my stream of consciousness, chatting about stuff, until he ran into my thought jam and voiced his displeasure with his habitat.

JELLYFISH: It’s too muddy in here–my tentacles are getting tangled in all the deadwood floating around in your head.

ME: Wait, who is this?

JELLYFISH: I’m the talking jellyfish you just thought about

ME: Why am I thinking about a talking jellyfish?

JELLYFISH: Because you’re a human, and humans have the great evolutionary advantage of conscious thought, which allows you to think about talking jellyfish.

ME: It doesn’t feel like an advantage.

JELLFYISH: It will be if you ever need to make small talk with a jellyfish in the future because most jellyfish, myself excluded, are quite taciturn.

ME: Geez, thanks for the insight. I think I’m supposed to be praying now.

The problem is once you chat with a talking jellyfish while you’re supposed to be communicating with the infallible Creator of the Universe, the talking jellyfish starts to get presumptuous. For instance, you never want to listen to a talking jellyfish practice his stand up routine while your preacher is in the middle of a thorough explication of the Book of Job. If you crack even the slightest trace of a grin, the preacher will know something is up. At that point, you’re just better off feigning a seizure than falling into fit of a laughter while poor Job is being put through the wringer. That said, maybe God sends us talking jellyfish, or other such irrational thoughts, to cheer us up when our rational thoughts are rather dreary.