Blindsided By Foreign

Absolutely Incredible Kid Day
Companies That Care Day
Great American Meatout
Maundy Thursday
Holy Thursday
National Agriculture Day
Ostara (Wiccan)
Purim (begins at sundown - Jewish)
Proposal Day
Spring Begins
Vernal Equinox
Snowman Burning
Ta'Anit Ester (Fast of Esther - Jewish)
Birthday - Fred "Mr." Rodgers (children's host)
Independence Day (Tunisia)

 

Last night chibicharibdysand I were at the bus station waiting to go to our writers’ group,* and I was feeling a little mopey because it has turned out that I am her replacement—she’s moving back to Hawai’i over spring break, and I won’t get to hang out with her anymore, and we were just becoming in-real-life-meatspace friends!—when this dude came straight over to me, smiling.

 

Let me just reiterate something here: I suck at faces.  Even when my vision is 20/20, I have trouble recognizing people who are not a) part of my immediate family, or b) people I’ve been familiar with for years. I used to have trouble in clothing retail because I didn’t recognize customers when they came out of the dressing room.  I hate movies that have casts featuring a bunch of similar people in similar outfits, because I can never tell who is the villain.** So when random guys start moseying up to me in the bus stop, I am going to be just a bit nervous. Is this an acquaintance? A stranger asking for the time?  A stranger asking for money?  A stranger with a gun asking for money?  A relative?  It could be any of those things.

 

And then, when he says “Habari gani?”—which is something you say to a random person in Kenya where you’re on an old town street discovering the meaning of the phrase “solar radiation” while somebody walks by with a handcart full of water tanks and kids behind you are yelling “Mzungu give me a shilling,” and not something you say to a random person at a rainy bus stop in Eugene with college kids and crazy people around carrying home fruits they got in the grocery store—I get really confused.

 

Fortunately, that only lasted for a second, and I was already responding with the automatic, “Nzuri sana!” Then I figured it out: this was my old Swahili teacher, Marko, whom I have’t seen in over a year.

 

Ha ha! I knew that! Who says I didn’t, huh?

 

Have you ever run into an old language teacher?  It’s awkward. Their first instinct is always to start chatting away with you in Spanish, or Japanese, or Swahili, or ASL, and you find yourself suddenly attempting to wrench your thoughts into that language’s structure and remembering how the hell you say anything, in any language, including English.*** And this is your teacher, after all, so you’re under the vague impression that this is a pop quiz. SHIT! So your brain goes to Red Alert and races around trying to locate its somewhat buried files on How To Speak Foreign, and when it finds the language it’s in a huge case—labeled “FOREIGN”—that contains all the information you’ve amassed about all languages other than English, ever, in a huge tangled pile. Then, like the badass doctors in the movies who race the clock to save someone with whatever the hell is lying around, your brain plunges a hand into that mess, seizes a random handful of linguistic information, and flings it at your mouth.  “Stall them with this!” it shouts as it assembles squads to sort out which language is which.

 

And so you blurt out a bizarre pastiche of words and syntax, and your teacher smiles as you flounder around until the boys at the lab in your head can crank out some semblance of the correct language.

 

Of course, once I got past that initial lurch, things went a little more smoothly. I had spent four months speaking some Swahili, so I managed to get a few sentences out as we sat on the bus and chatted—though my attempts to include chibicharibdysand speak Swahili at the same time were futile. It was good to see him again.

 

The only trouble is, now I still am thinking in Foreign.  It’ll take me a few days to sort out all my vocabulary and grammar again. Thank goodness this happened after the essays.

 

 

*Contrary to the fears I expressed earlier, I gotta say: this writers’ group is a pretty cool one.  The critiques are good, and earnest, and while they aren’t always the same as my reviews, none of them is ridiclously pompous.  I mean, you know, not any more pompous than is normal for writers.

 

**Thanks, Star Trek, for the color coding and the forehead makeup. It helps.

 

***Also, if it is ASL, you are invariably carrying a tote bag, a hot dog, and a travel mug.

See You After The Strike

Still doing the strike. I don't actually expect this to do anything, but glaring angrily at SUP for a day will at least send the message.

Anyway, to keep you snickering, here's something from the vaults of medusasowl: