I've never been so excited to learn....
Aside from the stupid conflict with orchestra, I've really hit the mark as far as "ideal" goes. I've loved physiology since I signed up for the class in junior year of high school. I was supposed to be in physics, but it conflicted, so I thought, "What the hell? I'll do this, instead." It immediately became a passion and the reason that (thank *insert entity here*) I am not planning to do media communications as a career. I love the body; I love learning why I can sit, stand, blink, twitch, heal, flinch, and learn.
I don't quite know when I started thinking about languages. When I was in middle school (probably earlier), I started dissecting the English language. I tried figuring out roots on my own, and I pondered the origin of words. I wondered why people call mountains "mountains." Did someone just look up and decide, one day, that he would refer to that (and here I insert blanks because I assume there were no words for anything; in my head, I hear muffled noises in this part: a world without nouns, adjectives, or really words of any type) as a "mountain?" How did language develop? How did it come about? Cavemen noises are often the jokes of movies (i.e. Mel Brooks-type movies, i.e. History of the World Part 1), but did repeated sounds just become amplified into words? There is a game (which I'm going to suggest we play tonight at the party once it moves to Zeke's) called "Celebrity," where everyone writes the names of 5-10 (depending on the number of peope playing; I played with 7 names each) and then 2-however many teams are deemed appropriate are formed. The first person on one team takes the bucket-o-names, and he/she has a minute (60 seconds) to use words and motions to get the other teammates to guess as many celebs as possible. The next team does the same, and so forth until the bucket is out of names. Then, the names are all put BACK into the bucket, and the process repeats, but with a catch. The hint-giver can only use 3 words to describe the celeb. Using more words means the name is discarded and no one gets the point. After this round is finished, the names are put BACK into the bucket, again, and the game is repeated with a 1 word limit. During the course of the game, naturally, specific words become nearly synonymous with specific names (i.e., "goth"=Marylin Manson). So, could that be how language got started? Someone pointed at something and made a funny-sounding grunt, and when later referring to the same thing, made the same noise so that whomever he or she was with would better understand, and then the noise stuck? I don't know, but it seems likely enough.
Either way, I've always been fascinated by language. I feel upset and miffed when I don't understand another language. I want to learn more and more. I'm starting with Japanese; I really hope it works out. So far, I LOVE it.
I've always fancied being a traductor, espeically after having read Bel Canto.
Still, it is also true that I experimented with vision a lot in my younger years. I would play with depth perception on the bus ride home from school. I wanted to know how it all worked. I needed to know how it all worked.
So, there. What to do? I want to learn languages, but I don't know how successful I can be just focusing on that. Plus, I'd never forgive myself for not learning everything I can about physiology. I want to be a researcher (medicine, maybe? neurology?), but does that mean giving up my possible hopes of being a translator? Can I possibly do both?
Follow my heart, right? Well, that's what I'm doing. Japanese and physiology in the same semester; it was my idea of a brilliant plan to determine my future: whichever one I like better, I keep as my major. Language vs. Physiology. But if I can't decide between them?
Still. For now, the semester is young (or Yung, if you want to make a HORRIBLE pun, but that's more Chinese or Korean than Japanese, anyway, and therefore relatively irrelevant), and I have plenty of time to determine my future...
...once May rolls around.