Ah, apple pie a’la mode. There’s nothing like a hearty, warm slice of delicious apple pie: the flaky crust, the tart yet sweet apple filling tickling your taste buds with molten butter and brown sugar, the scoop of ice cream to cleanse the palate.
These days, the only mode I’m interested in is a’la.
Modes. There’s modality in the sociological sense: as Giddens writes, modes define the existence of social structures, how they work, how they enable and constrain. There’s the modality in linguistics and, to a certain extent, philosophy: the actuality and the possibility, the “is” and the “ought to be.” There’s kain mode, work mode, acads mode, the kung-anu-anong mode.
For one, the word “mode” as anik-anik; the “uhmmm” and “aaah” of writing. Burloloy would refer to the tildes, umlauts, and other diacritical marks used by kids to artsy-fartsify their names, while words like “chuva” and “chenes” are extremely useful if you’re at a loss for words.
“Mode,” however, is something I don’t completely understand. I overthink; not in a pa-intellectual mode (grrr), but just because I’m bored. So allow me to mumble incoherently in written form.
Once you’re already performing the action, or if you have resolved to perform the action, the mode ceases to exist. After all, there are no possibilities anymore. Of all the possibilities at work, for example, you chose petiks mode; once you’re petiks-ing, the rest of the modes are no longer there, so you’re in the act as much as you are doing it. The proper term would be to petiks-act.
With all those modalities, you have to make differences between the modes that you speak of:
- Deontic modals, or the ought-to-be, and;
- Epistemic modals, or the thought-to-be.
Or:
- Dictum: what is said, and;
- Modus: the manner by which it is said.
A mode is either an inference towards a truth or the truth itself. When you say jackol mode, for example, what is communicated is not clear at all; we merely arrive at the conclusion that there is a possibility of masturbation. Heck, it may not even be a possibility available to you. We cannot arrive at an ontological, much less epistemological, reality of your genitalia anyway, because it’s just “jackol mode.”
More than that, you’re always in a mode: every mode will open you up to so many other modes anyway, so you’re only denying yourself so many other modes by acknowledging only one possibility as a mode. When, in fact, everything in the world that you can do something with is a wellspring of modalities. Take kain mode: there are those things that you can make kain, there are things on how you can make kain. You can also have a mode in, say, picking purple blossoms that fall from the Jacaranda tree. Jacaranda mode, so to speak, but you can make a didgeridoo or a guitar from the Jacaranda tree, anyway.
Of course, you wouldn’t go through all that thought that will probably get you to sleep mode.
With all that overthinking done and over with, the qualifier/verb/whatever it is “mode,” is just that: anik-anik, a useless expression, a word that, in the grand scheme of things, is a modality upon itself (a mode mode, so to speak). When accompanied with sT1CkY cApZ and all that shit, though, the mode is about to change.
What I feel about apple pie a’la mode, though, doesn’t.
