Have a nice Spring Break

“So, what are you doing for spring break?” I doubt there is a student that currently goes to our fine establishment that hasn’t been asked that question. The answers to said question are as varied as the outfits the red-haired SA wears. Typically after the place of destination is announced by the questioned, there is a follow up statement exclaimed by the questioner. “Oh, that is cool!” “You are staying home? That is lame.” “That sounds like a fun trip.” “I hear that place is really nice.” In my own experiences, the conversation at this point diverges into another topic, or the details of the previously mentioned spring break plans.

The feeble attempt of expression of the questioner’s opinion is rarely criticized. It seems that these short statements are said to ensure the questioner remains in the conversation. He doesn’t want to facilitate a mobile survey the questioned verbally fills out. In fact, similar short statements find their way into the majority of conversations that we embark in. Such statements aren’t worth the trouble for our brains to decipher the changes in frequency and wavelength of the air around our eardrums.

I understand it is pretty hard to convince our brains to not decipher changes, but what am I trying to say? It is my opinion that it is impossible to truly exhibit our opinions through the use of our language. To describe what I mean, I will give an example about 400 students can relate to.

I attended the last showing of Crazy For You, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought that all of the costumes looked very nice. The Rabbi singing his solo was extremely funny, and all of the tap dancing was cool.

Okay, do you have any idea what I really thought of the musical by reading such a paragraph? Note: I actually did feel that attending the musical was an advantageous use of my time. The actors, dancers, musicians, and crew involved put in gargantuan amounts of effort for such a production to come to fruition at our campus. I regret that I saw “A Room with a View and a Staircase and a Pond” instead of “Frankenstein” in the winter.

Obviously, if you could determine my opinion simply by reading the paragraph, your initials would be JSMP. That being said, what does a word like “nice” or “cool” even mean? I have used such words since I had the ability to speak. I wish that I could have gone through all of my 328 lunar cycles without hearing such trite and cheap words. The main problem with words like this are the plethora of definitions that can be applied to them. To be direct, when a speaker says something is “cool,” it is highly unlikely his “cool” is the same as the person being spoken to, although we never reconcile these differences.

All right, so is the only problem just in the articulations of individuals trying to state their opinions? Now I will restate what I thought about an aspect of the musical. I was pretty amazed at the timing of the tap dancers. They made the act of synchronized movement with metal shoes without a conductor to exhibit time intervals seem effortless. (Mr. Turner was there of course, but the tap dancers couldn’t see his time interval movements). Also, they knew exactly where they were supposed to be on the stage at a given point in time. Though I was impressed that they kept such good time and it was in sync, does that mean that I “liked” the tap dancing?

To try to answer this, I need to think back to what I was thinking during the tap dancing. Truth be told, there were a multitude of thoughts simultaneously occurring: how I knew some of the dancers, how much different the dancers I did know looked at that moment, what type of metal was used in the shoes (then I thought if there was any rating for such a type of shoes and what units would be used to demonstrate “tapping” ability), how much practice did it take to learn the dance numbers, who paid for all of these costumes, why is cross dressing in females more prevalent than in males, did those bow ties need to be tied or were they the clip-on variety, if the dancers could actually see the faces of audience members, and if the presence of certain individuals affect the performance of the dancers positively or negatively.

Can my opinion on the tap dancing be determined by psychoanalyzing all of my thoughts? It would probably take at least a short novel for every aspect of my thoughts to be explained. We have more important things to do than try and understand every aspect of the opinions of our fellow humans. I hope that you will not think that you can truly understand what another person’s opinion on a subject is.

I haven’t described non-verbal communication aspects, but even with that I doubt you can understand everything about a person’s opinion. The means to deal with that subject is very unclear for me right now.

Our language cannot express our opinions effectively, but it does have some very useful qualities. If you don’t care about a person knowing exactly what your opinion is, then our language will do a “good enough” job of describing it. It is great to give commands with, physically describe events, and ask questions of fellow individuals. Alas, I only have space for one last question. The following is quite possibly the question I am most unsure about it this point in my life. Where are you Arinette?