It's my last day at the language lab after 3 1/2 years. I feel ready to move on, but can't say I won't miss this place: the office gray/slate blue decorating scheme, the sexy spanish movies I've seen a thousand times, the wall of windows overlooking Beebe lake, the art and architechture students studying Italian who never know that it's the ICR tape series that they need, the intensive Japanese students who spend almost as much time here as I do, and the occasional ambitious student who wanders in saying they would like to do some indepent study of Javanese or Quechua or Urdu, and I do everything I can to help them. I''ll even miss the finicky laser disc players and telling students time and again to press the REC button (RECeive sound, not RECord) to get sound from their tape deck. And that's what it all comes down to in the end, it's the students and the people I'll miss the most. Isn't it always that way? Something special happens when people learn languages, and I'll never get tired of being around it.

Once I'm gone I'll probally regret not making copies of that Russian series like I meant to, or not listening to the Swahili series like I said I would. For as much as I can carry on about the magic in a new language, I haven't done more language learning here than watching the Spanish and occasional French movies we broadcast.

All in good time. My all-consuming fetish these days is plant physiology. The language of gibberelins and auxins and signal transduction pathways. I'm taking 8 credits of it this semester. Who knew plants were such fascinating creatures? For example, some kinds of sage can recognize when insect grazers are near by the chemical scent that is releazsed from other leaves that are eaten. The leaves that receive this chemical signal then increase their production of enzymes that inhibit digestion of plant material in an insects body. And we've all heard of insects that imitate twigs, but have you heard of plants that mimic animals to avoid predation?

I know I tend to be flaky about my passions, bored quickly, and never learning more than an anecdote or two for a cocktail party (which might be useful if I ever were invited to such events.) But something makes me feel like this might be it. I like it at all levels, the nitty gritty of the physics and chemistry of biological reactions is fascinating as is the ecology of global climate change.

So fairwell my dear language lab. I have some plant samples to grind.