Continuing Education, Blame Someone Else Day

Chances are, there are lots of folks taking today off in our nation's capitol.  I'm thinking that out of respect for those honoring Blame Someone Else Day, most of our esteemed politicians (as well as the un-esteemed ones) will be keeping themselves out of the line of fire; laying low (appropriately enough descriptive of our elected officials) and generally being scarce.  I know I would if I were in their shoes.  But if they all skedaddle it raises the question: if blame is flung and there's no one there for it to stick to, does it still deserve rebuke?

Not taking sides here, my conservative friends... this is just too funny and too apropos to today's post (no, it isn't Moe):

Part of what occupies my time (on a good, productive day) when work gets slow, is learning new stuff.  My friend Joe, who is in the same line of non-work as I have been for the last year or so, went back to school (at fifty-something) to make himself once more marketable.  I think he was learning how to write programming, which sometimes seems like the only thing that people get paid well to do any more.  Yay, Joe! You go, boy!  I have for long maintained that once we stop learning, we might as well throw in the towel, get out the walker, and go buy a bundle of adult protective underwear.

It occurs to me that one area of continuing education to be mined productively these days, and perhaps the one offering the most bang for one's buck, is linguistics.  No, it's not a way to make skinny pasta. (Nor is it actually the proper term- it just gave me the opportunity to make a bad almost-pun.)  I guess the term foreign language studies would be, in this case, more correct.  Learn a new language, and your employment opportunities seem to double.  Everywhere I go for job/opportunity searches, it seems that foreign language skills are a bonus, and the training certainly seems less expensive than any other tech-school-type courses.  Rosetta Stone courses start around $180, and top out at under $500 for the deluxe works.  Of course, it is a self-administered program, so if one is not especially well self-motivated, one may not do so well here.  But I think you get the point.  My work seems to be picking up without having yet acquired any multi-lingual abilities (unless being able to speak "musician" counts), but I have for long felt an urge to become a more worldly-wise individual, by pursuing an appropriate course of language study.  Hey- small town, nuthin' to do........

 

Comments

[Joe Greear]

Thanks for the shout out. Still at it, but I'm actually studying computer networking. Programming was a just a bit too linguistic for me. Although I do think actual Linguistics is interesting. Did you know that Armenian is one of the few languages that is true to it's roots? In other words, it is not derived from another language like ours is.