Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

Again, I’m multitasking. Maybe I’m always multitasking. I was listening to Lost Children Archive while I was moving all my books from my current apartment to my new one (my lease ends in less than 20 days). I put all my books into this big suitcase and dragged it around the block (it’s a short move). I sat for a long time on the floor of my new apartment—on its carpet, not yet sullied by foot traffic. There’s a big, full body mirror and it’s the first thing you see when you open the door. I don’t think I’ve ever had access to mirror like that. I could see the proportions of my body, mostly as they are, which is usually relegated to the shadowed, distorted reflection of building windows. 

While at the apartment, I called Spectrum to set up wifi. The man on the phone was enthusiastic, sweet. He tried for multiple minutes to get me to abandon my phone plan and sign up with theirs. I kept saying no, smiling at his continued enthusiasm, and shaking my head, I guess only to myself. After his first sales pitch, he would bring up the offer three more times. He asked me what tv shows I’d been watching. I told him I don’t watch much tv. He asked me what the weather was like in California, and I told him how I’m still not used to the San Diego weather—its muggy-ness, the marine layer. I asked him what the weather was like where he was. He said he was somewhere in the state of New York. He called the weather “bi-polar,” and he laughed without elaboration. 

By the time he got to his third, and final, phone plan sales pitch, I found the prospect entirely hilarious. I laughed, and he laughed too, even as he delivered the pitch. I thought he was laughing with me, at the artificiality of customer service, but I wonder now if he was only laughing because I was laughing. A sort of awkward reciprocation—the way you laugh or wheeze instead of saying “sorry I didn’t hear you.” After this final sales pitch, the man stopped asking about me. He stopped laughing. His questions became direct and he would remain quiet for minutes at a time; my only indication that he hadn’t hung up was the soft keyboard clack I heard on the other end.

When the call was nearly over—the man had ordered a router to be sent to my house, which I am to set up on Wednesday—I told the man I appreciated his help. He said “sure.” And I said “thanks” and “bye-bye.” And we both hung up.

I wonder how much I misinterpreted in TwERK. Or maybe misinterpretation is part of the point. In this class, twice now, Hangul has been referred to as Kanji, by two different people. I’m pretty sure Kanji only refers to the use of Chinese characters in the Japanese language; it has nothing to do with Korean. Though, maybe, I’m wrong too; I don’t know any of the three languages I just listed. Still, I feel like the mistake, in and of itself, says so much about our positionalities coming to certain languages. Why should Diggs be beholden to speaking a language just so? Language acquisition being so fickle, so imperfect—as a non-native speaker, our relationship to a second or third language may always be shrouded by the grammars of our first. Mistakes, to me, seem more authentic.