The poet-sacrificer is due their portion. Perhaps it would taint their prayers to the mad phoneme god to get my over-40 smell on them. The ritual purity of the fires that burn new lexis must be maintained.

(Autocorrect HATED this thread. That also gave me joy.)

I supped from the skibbidi cup long before the toilet grew a face, and now it falls to me to let others wend the word road ahead of me.

My only question is if I cheered for their slang, would they think it cringe? I'm not afraid of looking delulu, I just don't want to silence anyone by joying, too.

How dare I scold a kid for gifting me new words and the puzzle of knowing them, when I once chose, as I racked up college debt, to instead of do my homework, puzzle out what a dragon language would sound like if its speakers was cursed into human form. What hypocrisy that would be!

Youth slang is a manifestation of God's Blessing of Babel: the power to throw off the yoke of the tower by speaking new words the master can't grok.

And once we yoke ourselves to rent and a pension, we don't want to remember what it was like to babble and not needing it to matter.

...drop everything and study that phrase under a microscope. But I can't, because there is no economic value to be wrung from that labor and I'm already over-committed on things that require my attention.

I wonder if that's why adults get annoyed at youth slang. It reminds us of our cages.

Life admin is a petty little shit who needs to go sit in a corner and think about what they've done.

But if you're making any progress on the life you want, that's cause for celebration. I've only seen the tiniest sliver of what you put out publicly and it looks amazing. You're killing it.

You are good at this.

And so even though I am not a uni lecturer, even though I am not under the publish-or-perish paradigm, even though I don't know how to network and don't have experience with university academia, I feel like I fit in at JALT.

And every year, I come away feeling refreshed by it.

JALT is a chance to be around people who love languages for the sake of loving languages. People who turn that love into extremely niche research and passions for incredibly specific corners of the field. My brain jumps around too much to focus like that, but I share the love for language.

In my workaday world, I am surrounded by people who are constantly squabbling about little aspects of institutional power and procedure, or competition for the few jobs that pay non-Japanese teachers well.

We gotta solve that. We all need to eat. But...

I want students who study in my classes because communicating in English gives them joy, not because some admin has decided for them that English is necessary for their future.

And I want to be in a school that has students who are just as excited if they choose to study a different language.

English is the international language of business, science, and media. The number of native English speakers is very low, but something like 1 in 8 people in the world speak English as a language. So there is undeniable power in learning English. But I don't want that power as a stick.

At the end of one talk, a moderator thanked Sakai, a German professor, in I think Malay. And you could see his face light up in joy when he understood it, and with a little thinking, gave a reply in Malay.

And that's why I didn't feel threatened. I want that.

And that feeling struck me as a paradox. I'm an English teacher. If Japanese education de-emphasized English as the only option for foreign language study in most schools, wouldn't that put my job at risk? Shouldn't other languages be my competition?

But the highlight for me was the selection of plenary speakers. All of them left me thinking they were both delightful and insightful, but for one example: Prof. Sakai from Dokkyo University saying that internationalization is not Anglicisation.

It was a breath of fresh air.

And of course, there is the pride that I have students who let me take ideas from university 'shops and try them out at my school. And sometimes my students exceed typical uni student performance.

For all the professional obstacles I've faced these last few years, something *is* going right.

This is delightful. And seems to me like it was deeply thought out in a way I respect.