corvi

Fun things:

•  ASL has grammatically-meaningful facial expressions! Eek! I have a hard time remembering to do various things with my eyebrows when signing. I hope that starts feeling more natural at some point.

• ASL has loanwords from English. Initially, the word would have been signed by fingerspelling individual letters, but over time it evolved into a sign sort of blended from the various letter shapes, with of them dropped or not entirely formed. Makes sense; it all seems pretty similar to the way English adapts loanwords to its own pronunciation; I doubt the way I say "corsage" is at all like a French speaker would. When writing ASL these are sometimes indicated with a # in front of the word, like #ALL, which is distinct from ALL.

• We did an exercise describing what we were wearing. My answer was HAT BLACK SHIRT BLACK PANTS BLACK BOOTS BLACK and the instructor said #ALL BLACK? and I wish I'd had the presence of mind to spell G O T H, I think it would have been pretty funny

• ASL doesn't really have pronouns, you just point to people.

• This class is philosophically opposed to any gendered signs, so we just refer to everyone as PERSON. I appreciate the convenience.

• juli  and I are making good use of ASL's WHAT. We signed it at an unknown mushroom today while we were out walking

juli

• For a zoom call with ASL, you point your camera differently, showing your head and torso down to your waist, so signs are fully visible. 

• juli and I were once in Ukraine and encountered a merchant selling puppets who, despite not sharing a language with us, was extremely easy to understand, and extremely persuasive (we bought a hedgehog puppet). I had previously thought of pantomime and something people just sort of did when circumstances called for it, I hadn't realized it was a skill you could learn, and I'm honestly not sure how to learn it, unless perhaps your job involves working with puppets and communicating with clueless tourists who don't speak a local language. The Deaf sign language instructor is the second person I have encountered. who was Skilled At Pantomime - after all, we don't speak her language yet.

• We did finger spelling, a couple of sign useful to class flow, and numbers, culminating in a fun activity where you had to describe a monster to your partner ("5 E Y E S, 2 W I N G S") while they drew it, and then compare your drawings at the end. So I can also sign "draw" and "monster" which honestly seem like they might be useful in my life.

• double letters in finger spelling are interesting. You can sort of make the letter shape and slide it along, or bounce it up and down. For Z, which is drawn in the air with a finger, you can draw it in the air with two fingers.

• juli  and I did a silent video call today while she was on break at work (the walls are thin at her workplace, so talking is out) and signed "L O V E J U L I" "L O V E C O R V I" at each other. Silent communication is very practical (we could have just texted, but looking at each other was nice!)

Yesterday, the turkey vultures came back. For months, there'd been no vultures, but yesterday juli saw one in the backyard, and then I saw one in the backyard and two on the way to the cell phone repair shop. It was like someone had suddenly thrown a giant knife switch from No Vultures to Vultures and they all just appeared. There was nothing gradual about it. 

Our vultures spend the winters in Venezuela. They're gliders, not really flappy endurance fliers, so they don't like to cross the sea until conditions are perfect. All the vultures from all their various islands congregate at the southern end of the Big Island and wait until the wind is good, and then they all launch themselves off to the mainland at once. Some October I'd like to go see them there, hundreds of vultures, spiralling over the stony beach, watching and waiting, a tower of wings and eyes. 

They must do the same thing on the way here, circling over the shore on the mainland, waiting and watching for the winds to open the way here. They crossed Monday, maybe. We saw one on the Big Island Tuesday, and now they're here on Salt Spring Island, all at once, like magic.

They have an extra tendon in their wings they can use to lock their wings open and hold them without exerting any effort, and they mostly find the places where the air rises and just spiral upwards there, for hours.

Watching them, you can see: there are huge columns of uprushing air, strong enough to lift a massive bird with a two-meter wingspan. They spiral around one column for a while, and then glide over to the next one and spiral there. If you watch them for long enough, you get the sense you're in an invisible structure of vast pillars, like a henge or a temple, kilometers high, made of air and warmth. It's eerie and incredible.

One of the columns rises from the rocky mossy ridge our house is perched on. The sun warms the rock, and the rock warms the air, and the air goes up and up, and the vultures circle above us. 

Yesterday the sky was gleaming blue, nearly cloudless. There were just a few faint streaks and smears of cloud, like the sky was a bright glass that had been cleaned rather half-heartedly. Looking up felt oddly like making eye contact with something. And then there were the vultures, new-arrived, sharp and ink-black - except sometimes a little gold where the sun comes through their feathers - sketching out the invisible architecture of the sky.