Say the sentence in the unidentified accent

August 29, 2026: 🗓 

I read something yesterday that set off a domino effect that went an interesting direction. I’ll label the dominos with the little number block emojis.

1️⃣ “Surviving something that was supposed to break you did not happen because you are unusually tough. It happened because ordinary human systems, given even minimally sufficient conditions, tend toward functioning and growth. You were not exceptional in the way that exceptionalism implies. You were human in the way that humanness, at its most fundamental, actually operates.”
– excerpt of a post from Beyond with Kelson

2️⃣ I don’t specifically believe anything was or wasn’t supposed to break me. But the part at the end, “the way that humanness, at its most fundamental, actually operates,” reminded me of my senior-year quote for my high-school yearbook picture. It was “the inspired mind is the very essence of creative influence.” I still don’t know what I specifically meant by that, but I spent so many hours sitting at my mom’s computer desk thinking about the structure of that sentence and researching word definitions and synonyms.

3️⃣ The idea of the fundamental-ness of a thing reminded me of a video I saw months ago of a graduation speech by Maya Angelo. She said that the nobleness of the human spirit is that we rise. Then she read from her poem Still I Rise.

Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou

“You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
I rise
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.”

4️⃣ Rewatching that video, I thought about how that’s not at all what my rising was like for most of my life. I didn’t get to be sassy or sexy or noble or even just myself. I didn’t get to dance. (I literally didn’t get to dance. The church I was raised in said God is offended by dancing.) The rising I did was out of an assumption that that’s what needed to be done, not out of a recognition of my human spirit and what it means to have one. I was withheld from my nature but still functioning adequately enough to be capable of physically rising out of bed most days. Sort of.

5️⃣ There’s something interesting about the structure of the list in the previous paragraph. It goes “___ or ___ or ___ or even just ___.” Whatever comes after the words “or even just” is something either so important or so unimportant (or totally else or totally new) that it goes without saying. Or could go without saying. Being myself is so fundamental to me that it could go without saying. The “or even just” is like an indicator that it’s not compared or on par with the other things in the list for whatever reason.

6️⃣ Writing Domino 5 reminded me of the idea of comparing apples to oranges, and I had a vague visual in my mind of the list items being fruits. This reminded me of the knock-knock joke “Knock, knock. Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? Knock, knock. Who’s there? Orange. Orange who? Orange you glad I didn’t say banana?” (That’s not the actual joke. That’s just how I remember it.)

7️⃣ Early this year I drove to Texas to clear out my storage unit from when I lived there. Leading up to that, I had actually been thinking a lot about my yearbook quote and what I may have specifically meant when I wrote it. (I don’t know why I was thinking about that.) At my storage unit, I found my senior yearbook so I could look at the actual page.

I’m remembering now that I wanted to use this picture of me with my dog Lucy as my yearbook picture, but for some reason this other picture got used instead. To me, that picture that I wanted — I see myself in that picture. I still do. It’s not because I’m with my dog or outside or whatever else. It’s just, I look at my face, and that’s me ➡️

Also, Facebook is like a super broad yearbook slash blog slash interactive art museum.

Edit: 8/30/2026, 12:55pm UTC-7
Actually, a couple months ago, I was thinking about the yearbook quote again (what is it with this quote?) and I thought about how if you say the words "very essence" in an accent I don't recognize, it sounds like "various sins."

1️⃣ This made me think of Edgar Allan Poe's story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I have not read. I was reading about his stories on Wikipedia a couple weeks ago after rewatching a video where Brittany Lee McDonald was dressed as Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, witnesses of a murder (they weren't actually witnesses. I don't know what the word is for a witness who hears but doesn't see.) heard someone speaking in an accent they didn't recognize, and it turned out to be an orangutan.

2️⃣ Just now, I thought about how the full quote probably wouldn't be "the inspired mind is the various sins of creative influence." That would be if you only say "very essence" in the accent. If you say the entire quote in the accent, it could sound like an entirely different sentence.

3️⃣ This reminds me of how David Lynch, before his death, used to talk about finding fragments of ideas. A fragment is like "various sins" or "very essence" or however else someone would interpret it.

Rereading the first paragraph of this edit, I thought about how if you already know what the sentence is, and you hear someone say the sentence in the unidentified accent -- actually, what I mean is, if you believe someone is going to say "the inspired mind is the very essence of creative influence," and they are speaking in an American English accent while reading aloud the other sentence that the unidentified accent made the original quote sound like, would the listener believe they are saying "the inspired mind is the very essence of creative influence"? (I have no idea what I'm even saying. I started writing this paragraph without knowing what it was supposed to be about and, and I just purposely and not trying to follow the logic.)