See, here�s the thing. As soon as I take that first drink, parts of my brain cease functioning altogether, and I start losing words from my vocabulary. While it�s normally silly and charming to see me stuttering for words or staring blankly into space awaiting divine intervention, when I�m at a semi-businesslike affair, it�s frankly mortifying. It�s not as if I�m drunk, either. Granted this is also said later, when it�s likely I am, but upon the first half-glass? I think not.

And so I find myself talking in some sort of stilted speech, trying to avoid the words which have so ruthlessly left the language center of my brain, and I suspect I scarcely sound like a native speaker at all. Well, that�s the nicer way of thinking of it. Perhaps I actually just sound drunk, even then. But I think the scary part comes when I insert words into the discussion that are outside my usual lexicon, words whose meanings I think I know from inference, but words that I�ve failed to test in conversation with knowledgeable friends who�d delight in pointing out my errors. Instead I�m left with colleagues who�ve spent years working with or living with academics, colleagues who are too polite to correct me.

And still I talk on. Mainly because I�ve never quite managed to articulate the thought I was trying to convey in the first place. Later I am qualm-addled, wondering why on earth nobody came to my defenses, why I wasn�t forcibly gagged, in order to save myself from additional embarrassment.

Yes, this oddly animated, stilted babble makes me a hit at social cocktail parties, but at any sort of gathering that could present work-related topics, I should stick with ginger ale.

Maybe if I brought my pocket electronic dictionary, though? Oh yes, sure, nobody would think anything of it if I paused amid each sentence to spend a few minutes searching an electronic device for a word that I can�t think of in the first place.

Maybe I just shouldn�t speak at all.

I will speak on this�Former IL Senator Carol Moseley-Braun is neither a peace dove nor a budget hawk. Discuss.

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Farewell, Johnny PayCheck. I heard a long set of songs punctuated with �The Violin� this morning on the Whip, and I suspected something was amiss. I daresay he contributed one of the most important songs in our canon of dissatisfaction�

�Take This Job and Shove It.� It�s on jukeboxes in finer dive bars across the land.

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No, no, I shouldn�t speak at all. Or type. That�s worse�it�s an undeniable record of the moronic things that fall out of my head.