I KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN.

I AM NOT SUPPOSED TO BE HERE.

WHAT THE HELL. IS WRONG. WITH YOU PEOPLE?

ALL OF YOU?

Overheard

Frat guy: Yo, sorry, you have to leave, we can’t let high school people in.

High school girl, as she throws a beer in the guy's face: I AM A GROWN-ASS BITCH!

Guy, as he escorts her out: Too bad, we don’t let grown-ass bitches in either.

probably the best thing that you can do right now is accept that this is going to be a SLOW process.

y sabes que este sería más rapida en españa, pero sabes que no es posible. aunque tu te preguntes porque estaba necessario a volver, entiendes al mismo tiempo porque. es porque ahora tienes algo para que no hay una palabra ni en castellano ni en ingles. este es mas importante que españa.

pero te lo extrañas, es una país hermosa con cosas perfectas.

particularmente el café. estaba si bueno pero al mismo tiempo no estaba necessario. estaba una elección. nunca vas a saber si estaba una eleción porque estaba bueno o si estaba bueno porque estaba una elección.

me parece mas como una chica emo en castellano que en ingles. tu les pides perdon, pero conoces si poco de la idioma y también ahora misma la estas pediendo.

Also, college probably has better parties

Why college is superior to high school:

In college, they are allowed to teach philosophy.

In high school, they have to pretend they are teaching something stupid like English and craftily sneak in the philosophy.

sometimes all of the pieces come together. you don't want to look for the scar, but you can't stop yourself. and of course, it's there, so now you know.

but what the fuck do you SAY?

You know when you have a single stray hair stuck to your bare arm?

And you cannot see it or remove it yourself BUT YOU KNOW IT'S THERE. Because you can feel it. Sense it. DRIVING YOU CRAZY.

This is the level of IRKED-NESS I am currently experiencing. (I mean, the hair thing happens too. I shed.) But. Something completely unrealted, but that generates the same level of RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGE.

I know a Person. She believes that she is Very Creative, and thus likes to Captialize. Random words. Like this. And use pun. Cuation. WHERE THERE SHOULD BE NO PUNCTUATION AT ALL.

She's a rebel, people.

She once even...DYED HER HAIR. It was blonde, BUT NOW IT'S BROWN. Oh. My. God. I realize it is hard to comprehend, but yes. SHE WENT THERE. The media tells you to be blonde and SHE AIN'T LISTING TO THE MAN, SISTA. I realize that NO ONE HAS DONE THIS BEFORE and that it may be TOO MUCH for you to handle because this was A STATEMENT. About herSelf. That she is very busy discovering. AND TELLING ME/YOU/LARRY KING/ THE UNIVERSE about. Then I had this fantasy that involved punching her in the teeth.

It was beautiful.

Anyway, we're writing for the same "creative" publication. There's a section where all the contributors answer a question from the editor.

This week's question: "What song lyrics describe your summer mantra?"

Her answer: "Summer days, drifting away...to oh-oh those summer nights."

Oh. My. CHEESEBURGER.

THAT WAS WHAT YOU CAME UP WITH? IN ALL YOUR DARK, ALL-BLACK-WEARING LISTENING TO THE SPICE GIRLS BECAUSE THAT MAKES YOU REEEEETRO SELF-NESS, THAT WAS WHAT YOU CAME UP WITH? FUCKING GREASE?

I'm going to stab her with a spork. Then I'm going to post a picture of it on her Xanga and call it Performan.ce aRt.

/Wave your hands in the air/If you feel fine/We're gonna take it into overtime/Welcome to the space jam

people disappear. good, bad, book touring, parkhursted. saving kids in india, dropping out, interning with goldman, "leave."

" leave" can mean so many things, but sometimes it is too easy to figure it out.

she was so fragile.

i wonder what they did with her, where she is. if she's scared. and i wish i could fix her, this person who used to be my friend, but the only one who can do that is her.

sometimes it's too much and we don't make it.

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN-CONFLICT-MUFFIN

I'm back on the North American continent but I think that broke my brain.

I'll be with you as soon as I'm more sane/no longer jetlagged/get over my sudden withdrawl from Spanish coffee

Also, "honking" is a completely awesome word

Fact of the day: First communions are a BIG HONKING DEAL around here and people take a TRUCKLOAD of pictures.

Minor annoyance of the day: Then they show EVERY SINGLE PICTURE to their foreign exchange student. There are only so many times I can say, “Oh, she looks pretty” and sound sincere, chica.

(Also, nice shots of you, sweetheart. Did you actually wear THAT MUCH makeup to church? And they let you IN? ¡Hostia!)

Linguistics

Lidia comes for lunch sometimes.

I have noticed, if they are in a fight, Paquita refers to her as “mi hija.” My daughter.

But if they aren’t in a fight, it’s “mi niña.” My little girl. My baby.

Does she think about her word choice?

Does Lidia care?

Do I analyze things to death?

POR. FA. VOR.

WHAT? What what what what WHAT?

AY MUJER.

So you usually DON’T take a nap after lunch, but if you have lunch with me and are thus TALKING to someone, YOU HAVE TO TAKE A NAP BECAUSE THAT MAKES YOU OUT OF BREATH?

Talking makes you out of breath? Madre FREAKING mia.

Oh you’d like my year-and-a-half-of-pre-med opinion? Is it because you’re getting old? NO, I DON’T THINK IT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE GETTING OLD. I THINK IT’S BECAUSE YOU SMOKE THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND CIGERETTES A SECOND. HAS THAT EVER OCCURRED TO YOU?

Oh.

Of course not.

DUH.

Paquita Logic

If she doesn’t have time to make me anything for lunch besides a sandwich, she should give me wine, to make up for it.

If she has time to make a full meal, she should give me wine, because it’s part of the meal.

On the bright side, my alcohol tolerance has increased markedly.

Chica, PLEASE

This is Paquita's favorite song.

How the HELL did she select something so appropriate without speaking English?

Guess what?

Picasso...was Spanish!

This is not actually groundbreaking, but it does make that time I gave a presentation about him as a FRENCH artist in FRENCH class rather funny.

/Especially because I got an A.

it always is those two. coffee. chocolate. and every fucking time i wonder if there is indeed some order to the universe because the irony that those are the worst is just so horrific that it makes me bitterly laugh.

and i can't outofpracticemaybe dios mío if you knew what you had caused, please, for the love of God it's too much, stop giving people food. mujer, por favor.

if you knew.

Spit

In the middle of a highly embarrassing (for me) conversation about thongs:

Paquita: "Kati, you have something on your face."

*licks napkin, leans over, wipes whatever it is off of my face*

It's really amusing when the Paquita side of her collides with the mother side of her.

So I leave the U.S. for five minutes

and they go and come up with this while I'm gone.

I can't decide whether to go all American-college-student-OMG-WANT-GIMME-NOW or to go all America-college-student-who-was-just-in-Europe-and-is-now
all-above-your-mass-marketed-consumer-crap.

/I'll get back to you

She tells me that I think too much. If she only knew.

Sometimes I wonder what I would think of Paquita if I had met her speaking English, but it is a thought I suppress because I would have judged her.

She is uneducated. She is sometimes crude. She is stubborn and will never admit if she is actually incorrect. She smokes like it’s keeping her alive. She holds grudges, forever. You could say she’s kind of a bitch, and you wouldn’t be wrong, and as much as she is European, stylish and sophisticated to the American me, in truth, she also might be kind of…trashy.

Before she was sick, she was a secretary, somewhere, I don’t know where, and I can hear the dismissive, sometimes cruel comments that the investment bankers and the lawyers make about their secretaries, how sometimes they imitate the thick Brooklyn accents, and sometimes I can imagine her as the woman they are mocking. The woman that I have also mocked, have seen on the street and have thought that I was better than her.

I didn’t know.

I’m not going to give you some hugely cliché thing right now about how “Oh but I didn’t know, her life was really difficult, I’m so THANKFUL that I was given this opportunity to meet her,” blah-blah-blah-DIVE Day-cakes, put it in your college admissions essay, cariña. Not that she didn’t go through a lot of shit, and not that I don’t respect her, tremendously, for surviving, because life dealt her a hell of a hand, stuff many people couldn’t take, but she did, and she’s Paquita, Spanish chica extraordinaire.

But I don’t always agree with Spanish chicas. Sometimes, in my opinion, they make bad decisions. Sometimes, our values are too different. I was raised to believe that working hard is THE most important thing that you can do, taught to look down on people who don’t, learned to be ashamed if my lack of effort ever even slightly inconvenienced another person. Maybe that’s right and maybe it isn’t I don’t know. I say that Spanish people don’t work, because really, they don’t, but cultural differences aside…Paquita? Not so into the whole working thing. Example: sometimes, she sleeps through her alarm and I don’t see her at breakfast. Whatevs, no passa nada, I really don’t care, the first time it happened she did apologize, asked me if I knew where all the breakfast stuff was so I could grab something before I went out, I did. The mother? Good lord. With her own family, let ALONE a foreign exchange student, if she wasn’t up three hours before everyone else and didn’t make breakfast? I think if she ever accidentally sleeps through her alarm, she’ll die of shame. (No, it’s never happened. Ever. It’s against the laws of physics, I think.)

And that’s what I didn’t know. That I could not agree with someone, fundamentally, that I could judge them, that they’re probably judging me, thinking I’m crazy (verdad), who knows what, that we could just be a completely random pair…and that we could still be friends. Amigas. Juntos.

We are both Aries, something she puts a lot of stock in, and if we go out, if we have a drink, now, we toast las mujeres Aries, stubborn and sort of crazy, and we’re the perfect example of how differently those characteristics can manifest themselves. And I want a picture, because I want to see the scene from outside, the teeny little Spanish madre and her slightly awkward foreign student, in a bar, glasses raised, and actually, no, I don’t want a picture—I want to freeze that moment in time and never let it go.

411

It is easy to throw out a quick post about something outrageous, and it is easier still to select only certain elements of someone’s personality and to pick choice quotes and come up with a character in a story instead of a person in your life.

Because there is a lot more.

I don’t know why she has told me. Is it because of the language barrier, the way that everything has to be so simple, or would she tell me anyway? Sometimes it is impossible to pick up on social norms and I cannot tell if she is crazy, Spanish, maybe a little low-class, or all three.

I tell her, “Paquita you have no secrets,” and she laughs, and I am still confused.

This is what I know:

(In chronological order because dios mio how would I pick a way to organize it?)

1. She was born in the south of Spain, second youngest of six children. I have seen a picture, old and black and white. Little Paqui in blonde pigtails, to my immediate surprise, is shy and hiding from the camera. She tells me that she too is shy and I tell her I do not believe her.

2. Her family moved to Catalunya when she was nine. She can understand and read Catalan but doesn’t speak it. The family was very Catholic, very poor. She dropped out of school when she was twelve, to work. I am very careful when I ask her questions about the language now, because she will remind me how she does not know, she did not study. (Nouns are infinitely safer than verb tenses.) She speaks very colloquially and I can now see when her grammar is off.

3. She met Juan when she was nineteen, in a dance club. She was with her sisters, and her older sister liked him too, but the next week he asked her to dance, only her. They dated for six years before they were married. He left 20 years later. She woke up and he was gone. She is still in love him and I would wager that is the reason for the prescription of Prozac she once left in the kitchen by mistake.

4. She has two children. The oldest, Lidia, is almost 24. Pretty (although in my opinion her mother is prettier), very smart, from what I can tell, I’ve only met her twice. She works in Luxembourg, with her boyfriend, of whom Paquita does not approve (I think it’s because he’s Portuguese). Children usually take sides in a divorce and Lidia clearly chose her father, and I have seen her hurt her mother, deliberately calculated, and I have heard Paquita tell me that it does not bother her and I don’t believe a word. And I have done the same thing, and I know that it is different for Lidia because she calls her Mama instead of Paquita but still, I wish she weren’t a bitch like that.

4. The other is named Victor. He is 19. When Paquita was pregnant with him, Juan threw her into a door during an argument, and burned her stomach with a cigarette lighter. I have no idea what my face looked like when she told me that. The doctors told her she would lose the baby, but he lived. He’s mentally retarded but considering the circumstances, very high-functioning. He loves Hillary Duff’s music.

She stayed with Juan, of course, even though he did that, and I wonder if it even occurred to her that perhaps she should leave, escape. It probably didn’t, and she has an odd scar on her jaw that makes me think it has been broken, more than once. And I cannot give you a reason for any of that, but I can tell you that it is the same reason that she is still in love with him.

5. There was a boyfriend, after Juan. José. Former fútbol player, current team trainer, aka A BIG FREAKING DEAL. I’ve met him, he’s a classic sports superstar smooth playa hiding the asshole underneath. She knows that, and now they are “friends, to talk on the phone.” He wants her back and I know she debates just going back, because it would be easy, but she does not let herself. I think.

6. She has worked many, many different jobs, and I think one of them was definitely sketchy—I never understand 100% of what she says but it involved her, in France, with men. She was 14. (For all I know she was selling flowers. Translation errors are an unfortunate reality.) Now, she doesn’t work. She’s sick. At first she told me it was fibromyalgia, and I, the scientist who doesn’t believe in that, was skeptical. Even though I see how sometimes, she is so clearly seized with pain, she will never admit it, will yell at me if I try to pick up whatever it is on the floor so she doesn’t have bend over. But then she tells me, with her little naughty smile how she flirts with the doctor who signed her form for disability payments, and I wonder, I judge her, accuse her in my mind of simply not wanting to go to work.

But there is something else, too, besides fibromyalgia and phantom pain, and knowing how she is, I believe that she would tell me about the “fibromyalgia” and hide whatever it is she also has that is more serious. That some days makes her completely unable to eat. That sometimes makes her vomit, endlessly, even though I know there is nothing in her stomach. I’m sure she thought I couldn’t hear, but I can unfortunately detect that sound rather well and one day worked up the nerve to ask if she was okay. Because, despite her personality, she is still a Spanish woman, and they are so damn SMALL, tiny even. Narrow shoulders, slender wrists, arms, legs—I feel like if I were careless, I might break her. Not that anyone could actually break her—she’d kick your ass first.


This sounds sort of emo, but I had to get all the facts out, somehow. If I don’t say it, it rattles around in my head and drives me crazier.

I wrote a story

so it's in Spanish. Oh well. I like it.

Hay un parque cerca de mi trabajo que me gusta, es donde voy cada tarde para sentarme y para leer mi periódico tabloide, mi actividad ligeramente vergonzosa para el día. Es uno de esos parques que el gobierno de la ciudad construyó cuando el alcalde quería decir a los ciudadanos que él estaba trayendo la naturaleza a la ciudad, para los niños, claro. Entonces ellos metiendo los parques adondequiera había espacio, y algunos, como mío, son tan pequeñitos que parecen ridículos, unas islas minúsculas en el centro del caos urbano, el tipo de trabajo del gobierno que explica porque los contribuyentes siempre quieren llorar.

Mi parque posiblemente no es completamente un desperdicio. Hay solo algunos árboles y la banca donde estoy sentando ahora, no hay bastante espacio para un patio de recreo, pero algunos de los niños del barrio vienen aquí, para jugar. Ellos pueden encontrar espacio para sus juegos, pienso que ellos juegan al escondite o juegan al corre que te pillo o posiblemente otra cosa, no sé exactamente que los niños hagan estas días. ¿Qué hacen ahora ?

Dios, uno ha trepado un árbol. A veces, sus juegos son un poco peligrosos y quiero decirse parar, pero recuerdo cuando tenía siete anos, y no me gustaría una descocida entrometida, entonces, no hago nada pero me pregunto, ¿ donde están sus padres?

¿ Ah, que pasa? Están mirando un pájaro pequeño. Si, puedo ver, el cayó de ese nido a esto cepo más bajo. Esto niño en el árbol está tratando ayudarlo. Él se sale del árbol con el pájaro pequeño en sus manos. Se me caigo mi tabloide y me levanto para mirarlos.

El niño pone el pájaro sobre la tierra. Es lerda, inestable sobre sus pies. Los niños agrupan alrededor del pájaro y lo siguen, el está tratando escaparse, claro está aterrorizado. Me parezco que esté tan pequeña para volar, prácticamente no puede ni correr y—Dios mío. Él corrió en la calle, enfrente de un coche. Que lastima.

Los niños están al margen de la calle, con cinco bocas pequeñas abiertas en círculos perfectos de sorpresa, hasta uno empieza reír. Es uno tipo de reacción, supongo. Tres de los otros empiezan reír también, riendo hasta ellos tienen que sentarse sobre la tierra. Pero uno, el niño quien trepó el árbol, él está llorando.

“ ¡ No es divertido, idiotas! ” él grita a los otros, y huye, pienso para su casa. Hay una parte de mi corazón que quiere seguirlo. Probablemente él piensa que la culpa es suya, pero claro, no es. Culpo el alcalde, o posiblemente los ciudadanos quien votan y ponen impuestos. Yo, por ejemplo.

Doblo mi tabloide, he leyendo solo la primera mitad, pero ahora tengo que volver a mi casa. Los otros niños todavía están aquí, están jugando un juego diferente, quizás ellos han olivado el pájaro. Tengo que caminar cerca del pájaro para cruzar la calle, pobre diablo, y no puedo contenerme de mirarlo. Está más que un poco repugnante, pero mientras miro, yo también empiezo reír. No es divertido, pero es mi mundo, nuestro mundo, que nosotros hemos creado, un mundo donde necesitamos construir los parques ridículos en el centro de la ciudad y no puedo hacer nada para repararlo, pero puedo reír.