i said "i must be fine cause my heart's still beating"

by mg at 01:50 AM on April 29, 2002

When I was in college, I took a linguistics class. It was a class required of all English Majors. I was an English major. I took the class.

The class was taught by a Barb Schwarte, a impassioned educator, who really loved her material. She named her dog Noam Chomsky. She also had a very pronounced lisp. A linguistics professor with a lisp; certainly an irony worthy of Alanis Morissette.

Part of the class was phonology - looking at the various mouth shapes used when pronouncing certain sounds. Though I got an A in the class, I never quite got that part of the curriculum. I was never able to remember all the different mouth shapes and all of the sounds they produced. Still, what I remember of them has held true. Sometimes I watch people’s mouth and think to myself , "That was a voiceless labiodental fricative, it is responsible for the f sound in fine."

Tonight I went out with the Mystery Date. Our first date was almost a month ago, and our schedules haven’t really panned out for the second date, until tonight. Since the first date, we’ve talked on the phone a lot. A couple times a week, several hours at a pop. When we spoke last night, the Mystery Date said she’d almost forgotten what I looked like. I have to admit I shared her fuzzy memory.

For some reason, she really wanted to come out to Jackson Heights, eat some of our famous Indian food, walk around my neighborhood, and see my apartment. Who am I to turn down a girl wanting to come back to my apartment?

I picked her up at the train station around 7:30. She didn’t quite look I remembered, but better than I could have hoped. We walked around Jackson Heights for a bit, I pointed out some local landmarks. The ‘hood is cute, and especially so to someone new to New York and only experienced in the hustle and bustle of Manhattan.

We went to the Jackson Diner, the best Indian food in New York City, and draw to as many Indian families looking for traditional fare as Chic Urbanites, slumming in one of the outer boroughs. We sat in the restaurant until about 10:30. Great food, great conversation. I kept finding myself watching her mouth. She has the most beautiful mouth. It is probably the most expressive mouth I’ve ever seen. I’d find myself staring at it, thinking, she just said mail but her mouth didn’t take the voiced bilabial nasal shape.

I’m not sure what that says about her, or what it says about me, but if you can fall in love with someone over phonology, I could fall in love with that mouth.