Cool as a Cucumber

Why does it seem that the 9th year of our life was so much more important than our 23rd?  

I don't know that this is always true - in fact an original purpose of my current trip was to disprove it, to show that you can teach an old(er) dog new tricks - but it certainly does seem that we learn so much when we're young, but by the time we reach adulthood (whenever we feel comfortable adopting the terminology, from 18 to 45) we suddenly have so much left to learn, and a great difficulty assimilating and internalizing these lessons.

We learn a lot as kids, but despite the wealth of our worldly ignorance, we think we know everything.  As we get older, we begin to understand how much we don't know, and simultaneously it becomes more difficult for us to make headway against the immense abyss of everything that's left to learn.

Take for example Cucumbers and Zuccini.

or Zuccini and Cucumbers.

Either is the same to me, for until 5 days ago I never actually knew the difference.

Strange isn't it?  Staggering, even?  I took honors courses in school, scored well on my entrance exams, got a degree Cum Laude, and was accepted into an acclaimed graduate school, and yet I never learned the difference between two simple items of produce.

Ignorance could be explained by inexperience - for example I do not to this day know the difference between a Guava and a Passion Fruit.  Perhaps I should, but I've never eaten either of these (in their natural form), so voila: inexperience excuses all.

And it's not mental dyslexia either.  Whenever I try to descibe a woman's open bottom-half garment, I call it a dress, and whenever referring to a full-body version, I call it a skirt.  I know the difference, but my brain just switches them.

Not so with Zuccini and Cucumbers!  I'm not a big fan of either, but I have been eating them (grudgingly) all my life in various salads and casseroles, without any idea what I was munching upon or how to tell the difference.  

I was in Amberg, having a bizarre German steak dish served to me on a tree stump (no joke) and I made a comment about the Cucumbers.  This is an on-going joke with Shelley and I, who often asks me to name the little green circles in my food.  I always just pick one, and say it in such a way that it sounds like I'm hamming it up.  This works excellently (and I recommend it to others) for if you are correct it sounds like you know how obvious the answer is, and if incorrect, it sounds like you're having a lark by giving the (obviously) wrong answer intentionally.  Use it wisely.

I guessed wrong (50/50 odds) but rather than let it slide, I revisited the situation with her later when we were alone.  "Shel, what is the difference between a Zuccini and a Cucumber?"

she didn't look at me like I'm an idiot - we've been dating too long for this sort of thing to surprise her - but instead she started giving me the same answer she would if asked the same question in her 2nd grade classroom.

"A Zuccini is a green vegetable from the same family as the squash, so it's thicker on one end, with a very thick stalk at the top.  A Cucumber is long and the same thickness with rounded ends and a little stem like pickles, which are made from them."

She then confessed some embarrassment about having to explain such a thing (and in such a way) to her 27 year old boyfriend.

And this got me really thinking.  First, it got me thinking about solving this green-veggie virtigo of mine once and for all.  I asked her to list off the foods each was commonly served in.  Cucumbers in salad, with yogurt, tahini, etc.  Zuccini in casseroles, pasta, whatever.  I brilliantly surmised that Cucumbers are almost always served raw, while Zuccini seem to always need cooking, and I triumphantly proclaimed, "Cool as a Cucumber, Zap the Zuccini."

this earned me a 'no duh' look, but my brain was already onto my second thought process, "who chooses what we learn when we're young, and how do we go about correcting the things we learned wrong, or never learned at all?"

The answers could lead to all manner of interesting analysis about generational racism, cultist society, and the awesome power of parents/educational institutions.  For me, I was stuck on the simplest of issues: vocabulary.

I'll bet 99% of everything we learn is from observation.  Probably more.  Probably 99.9999% of things we learn not by someone telling us, reading in a book, or even figuring out through trial and error.  We just listen, watch, and slowly assemble the vocabulary and mechanism of our world around us.

There are obvious exceptions:

"Don't touch that, it's hot."  (I touched it - lesson learned)

"the Word of the Day is 'Ubiquitous'...."  (6th grade english - quiz every friday)

"Thou Shalt Not Kill."  (rather old book - divine justice implied)

But when was I 'supposed' to learn the difference between Zuccini and Cucumbers?  That wasn't in 4th grade math, 12th grade economics, or even 8th grade sex ex.  And don't ask a university professor for the basics; they're great people, but half of them can't tie their shoelaces any better than a 10 year old (here only used to demonstrate that great minds are not always the best source of support for abjectly simple issues).

And if I wasn't supposed to learn it at school, or sunday school, or boy scouts, or youth group, or... soccer practice, then what?  Is it the parents' burden to supply us with words for every random item, concept, ideal, feeling, situation, synonym, antonym and pseudonym which we can experience as we traverse our lives?  How much does the human vocabulary grow after the age of 18, and how useful are the nuanced terminologies we pick up to impress our friends (and blog readers) anyway?

This thought process starts to amble its way into my months-long confrontation with language and being an english speaker in a diverse world forced to adapt to english limitations.  I have no conclusions, only sympathy, confusion, and a touch of guilt-by-association, but I'll save that for another time.  At least being back in London affords me the chance to not be constantly (and unintentionally) reminded of my own mono-lingual inadequacies.

Language is something best learned young, and while it's not the whole of what I'm trying to say, it is at the heart of it:  communication.  How do we communicate to another person what we think, or how we feel, if somewhere in our past, perhaps somewhere in everyone's past, the perfect concept got skipped.  How does a color-blind person describe "green" to a blind man?  Or, to be less dramatic, what is love to someone who knew abuse?  What is the point of talking these things out when, ultimately, we're using a different language.  Not french or even flemish, but we all use the words associated with the concepts we know, but these are not absolute.  You say Tomato, as the story goes, Egg Plant to Aubergine, Ciao, Nyet, and Goooooooal.  International concepts, some understood internationally, but for each of us a unique personal definition which we can only assume holds true for others, but which in point of fact may not.

the Irony of you reading all these scribblings as I try to vomit my thoughts out onto the world wide web, as a method of staying in communication, is not lost on me one bit.  For this is the language that binds us, not the words we have in common, but the assumptions we must all make in the spaces between letters.  "He said 'vomit' so that must imply he feels ______ about his writing."  "why 'flemish,' did he want to go to Belgium and not have time?"

And you are correct to do so, to read the unwritten text just as we do with body language, voice intonation, and everything else.  But these are all communications as well, and at some point we learned them, or didn't learn them, and so we must admit that even these we read through the lens of assumption.  I giggle when I get embarrassed, and I get excited when faced with fiascos, both of which are easy to misread.

And I'm nothing special.  You can all tell me stories, hundreds of them, and I hope you do, about the times when someone misunderstood you to hilarious effect.  Simple word slips to Romantic misdirections, the genre of comedy seems to be all about the breakdown of communication, with Tragedy not far behind.  

So I just learned how to identify a cucumber, and if I'm lucky tomorrow I'll learn something else I should have figured out years ago.  maybe it will be practical and useful (the conversion of lbs to kilograms), or perhaps metaphysical (I will visit Tate Modern).  But probably not.  For the same obstacle haunts me now that did 20 years ago when I never learned about the big Z and C issue:  I wasn't really paying attention.  Because it's hard, and I already know so much, and who cares anyway, right?

who cares, it's just vegetables, and feelings, and life and people.  And it's all too much to ask, and we keep trying half-heartedly, and we don't understand each other but we pretend that we do.  We live in such a way that others won't know we don't understand, and we're all willing to give each other the benefit of the doubt even though we know better, because who wants to live in a world where nobody understands you?

I've said my piece, and it means very little, but I appreciate you taking the journey with me.

Weber (on the Lamb)