Upcoming: Arts Itoya Residency in Takeo, Japan!

I’m excited to share that I will be attending the Arts Itoya residency in Takeo, Japan this summer for a four-week stay! Morningside University has been very supportive, and has given me both a Morningside Experience Grant and Ver Steeg Faculty Scholarship funding to help me accomplish this exciting project.

I try to learn at least some of the local language for all of my residencies, with varying levels of success. I’m proficient in Spanish, which helped a lot with my learning some French and Portuguese for residencies; with my recent Greek residency I learned enough to say a few greetings and somewhat be able to read the Greek alphabet, which helped in finding destinations via signage. For this Japanese residency, I knew I was going with enough advanced notice to actually enroll in a Japanese I class at Morningside this fall, and have been continuing to study Japanese this spring via Duolingo and a couple other apps as well as watching a lot of anime.

Japanese is a tough language to learn! The US State Department has categorized languages in terms of difficulty for native English-language learners. Spanish is a category I language, requiring an average of 750 class hours to achieve general proficiency. Greek is a category III language, requiring an average of 1100 class hours. Japanese is in the highest category, IV, at 2200 class hours. The other category IV languages are Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean.

At this point, I’ve studied Japanese more than any other language besides Spanish, and I am nevertheless not conversant yet in it. I can pretty much only accomplish basic one-way communication - me asking where the restrooms are, or saying that I am vegetarian - and very limited reading (I can read hiragana and katakana, but only know maybe 100 kanji). I can type it, but handwriting without looking at reference syllabaries is also not really within my capacity.

All that being said, this investment in learning as much of the language as I can ahead of time has already led to my giving a short speech fully in Japanese to our visiting Yamanashi City sister city delegation this fall, and has deeply enriched my knowledge of the culture and ecology of Japan. Several of my students have also gotten a kick out of being a classmate of mine! 私はこのなつ日本に行きます。たのしみです。

COVID-19 Anosmia Frustration

Anosmia happens to be a relatively common symptom of COVID-19, so more people are talking about it of late. I was born with anosmia, which is the term for no sense of smell. (I mostly get by just fine in the world, and in fact I appear to have better color vision as a result, and perhaps my super-powered high-pitch hearing abilities are also related. I do have more exposure risk to toxic fumes, gas leaks, fires, and such, and spoiled food can also be more difficult to discern. My long-term memory is also negatively impacted. So it’s not something I necessarily recommend, but anosmia is and always has been a part of my life.)

One of the more frustrating things about not being able to smell, though, is that people who can smell conflate smell with taste ALL THE TIME. They are not the same sense. Words have meaning. For example, many “flavored” items in the market are in fact scented, which is very frustrating if you don’t in fact experience both because you waste time and money on discovering this inaccurate marketing language. Jolly Rancher candies, Starbursts, Skittles - their various colors and types (strawberry, cherry, orange, lemon, grape, etc.) all taste pretty much the same, and any differences in taste are typically not identifiable as actual fruit differences but rather slight differences in citric acid to sugar ratios. Meanwhile, I can absolutely differentiate a real strawberry from a cherry by taste, and so on. All those “flavored” sparkling waters on the market like La Croix Mango vs. Coconut are all merely scented waters. They are indistinguishable to me. The only truly flavored sparkling waters I’ve found so far are from Spindrift, and they also are 10-15 calories apiece because they do actually incorporate a touch of juice.

This recent op-ed in The New York Times is therefore infuriating. Krista Diamond did not lose her sense of taste. She lost her sense of smell. Ageusia is its own disorder. Words have meaning. WORDS HAVE MEANING.