=== WHO AM I ===
by Lace!

At my feet stooped Atlas, hunched as if to avoid the burden of the heavens. Alone he was a titan, alone he was a figure that intimidated and inspired. But behind Atlas rose the Rockefeller center, and in every direction sprawled New York City, dwarfing the Titan and the little world he carried.
	In a way, we were the same, Atlas and I. As my class explored New York, my mind was stuck on a completely different matter - that of the little world I carried. Instead of paying attention to the city or any of the artefacts we saw, I was thinking up artefacts of my own, constructing a world in my head. Making up buildings and places was an interesting enough exercise, but the part of making a world that fascinated me most was creating the mythologies and languages of the native people.
	Just like the Greek gods, my gods were quintessentially human. They were immortal and omnipotent, but they were ultimately betrayed by human emotions, thoughts and characteristics. A divine inteplay set the stage of the world - a universe ruled by the twin benevolent powers of Kahn and Kohr, the brother who put things into existence and the one who removed them from it. Thinking up the gods was freedom; they could be anything, represent anything, but ultimately most ended up as ideas manifest. These ideas, driven by emotion, fought over the world I had made for them and wrote a story with no ending and an infinite number of different paths.
	But where dreaming up gods was open ended, creating languages was analytical. In order to produce a language that could communicate the abstract, certain rules needed to be followed. Languages needed verbs, they needed objects, they needed ways to indicate what was verbing what. Most of that falls into a field called morphosyntax, but to make the transfer from a written language to a spoken one, a phonology (a collection of sounds) needed to be created and then associated with the words. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Language creation was the idea of 'freedom within limits'. While formalities such as nouns were neccessary, there was infinite freedom with how you dealt with nouns, whether you had their relation with other nouns dealt with through word order or case markings or simply had the noun encased within the verb that affected it. The linguistic 'freedom within limits' captured and maintained my interest for one key reason: it allowed my two greatest passions, learning and creating, to play off of eachother.
	Like Atlas, I carry a world on my shoulders. But rather than being a burden, my world is a manifestation of my interests, inspired by the things that captivate me and an escape from the things that don't. It isn't the same world as it was six years ago in New York - it is much larger, a myriad of worlds rather than a single one, each capturing my interests and ideas from a different time and place.