today, at 9.21am, i turned 27. last year i found out, and this year i was sadly reminded, that i share this birthday with george dubya. sigh. and that reminds me that i *also* share this birthday with nancy reagan. yup. me and the 'publicans, gettin' a year older. i wanna* know who gets to share their birthday with marie curie, or martin luther king jr., or elvis. and then i wanna ... switch celebrities with them. hmm, perhaps that's not quite the turn-white-and-start-blabbering-like-a-tired-infant threat i had intended.

karl made me crepes filled with ice cream for birthday breakfast. yuuuuummmy. then he gave me 2 toe rings (replacing the one he gave me for xmas that had a nice leaf design that lovingly stabbed me as i walked) and a bar of chocolate. we had to postpone Sixth of July fireworks (nudge nudge wink wink say no more) til later cuz i had to rush home to clean my apartment and my self before the 'rents arrived.

after wishing me happy birthday, my mom asked me if karl was sad he wasn't going to be seeing me on my birthday. i told her he was invited to dinner and to spend the afternoon with us. i didn't tell her he had made me crepes. we had a lovely dessert and coffee at rx, a local cafe that has a few tables outside on the corner, in what passes for scenic outdoor dining in west philadelphia. following rx was a stimulating game of scrabble, and dinner at the white dog. mm mmm MMM. after the white dog, we had cake and ice cream (mom had made me a brownie cake) at my house, and i opened presents: nice picture frame from sis, new stereo speakers from the 'rents, plus a red/ladybug beaded bracelet made by my dad, a planter for herbs, a new case for my visor, and a recording of rostropovich playing shostakovich.

when i was a kid (well, a teenager), my friends and i were philosophizing about what age it would be best to be stuck at. if you had to pick one age to be for the rest of your life, what would it be? i picked 26. old enough to do all the adult things without "issues" (like paying extra for car insurance or getting a plausible fake id), but young enough to still be young. 26 has been almost all good. i went on a great camping trip to northern (king range mountains) california, met karl, passed my major area exams, and got reinvigorated wrt my research. of course, 26 will also be the age i was when the world trade centers fell, when my beautiful little piggy wuza died, and when i found out that my other beautiful little piggy (probably) has cancer. but for me, the good had outweighed the bad.

*un-asked-for lesson in psycholinguistics on the topic of why 'wanna' is not bad english. 'wanna' is not just sloppy talking. there are elegant rules about when you can use it and when you can't. this is one of the things i think is cool about language.

you can say: this is the cantata i want to sing.
you can say: this is the canary i want to sing.
you can say: this is the cantata i wanna sing.
you cannot say: this is the canary i wanna sing.

why not?

expand the sentences into their 'underlying' structure:
this is the cantata. i want to sing the cantata.
this is the canary. i want the canary to sing.
when the sentences are combined, you take out the second instance of the cantata or the canary, leaving what linguists call 'traces' (rules of english say you don't repeat stuff like that in the same sentence). thus, you get:
this is the cantata i want to sing [trace].
this is the canary i want [trace] to sing.
a trace just means that that element of the sentence is there in your underlying representation, but not actually pronounced.

you'll notice that the traces appear in different places. in the cantata sentence, the trace appears last--it's a trace of the direct object of 'to sing'. in the canary sentence, the trace appears in the middle--it's a trace of the subject of 'to sing'. crucially, in the canary sentence, the trace comes between 'want' and 'to'. in the cantata sentence, it doesn't.

and here we come to the simple rule of english: english does not allow speakers to contract (e.g. 'want to' -> 'wanna') across a trace. thus, you can contract the cantata sentence, but not the canary sentence.

even better that the rule itself is the fact that all native speakers of english know it, and use it perfectly, without ever having been taught. if anything, they've been anti-taught the rule by some schoolmarm who told them they shouldn't use sloppy english like 'wanna'.

and perhaps even cooler than that is that this rule actually makes language clearer and easier to understand in some circumstances. take the following example:
this is the person i want to visit.
that sentence is ambiguous: do you want to go to that person's house to visit? or do you want that person to come visit at your house? the sentence has two meanings. if, however, you say:
this is the person i wanna visit
the sentence can only have one meaning: you want to go to that person's house. (say it to yourself, and see that you can't get it to mean that you want the person to come to you). where did the other meaning go? vanished in a trace.

expand the sentences again:
this is the person. i want to visit the person.
this is the person i want to visit [trace].
this is the person. i want the person to visit.
this is the person i want [trace] to visit. you can only contract if there's no trace between the elements you want to contract. so, you can only contract the first one. sooo, if you hear the contracted version, you know that the speaker intends to go visit someone, not have someone come visit them. ambiguity is no more.

clap if you thought that was cool.

go clean your toilet if you thought it wasn't.