The more I know of Spanish, the more I enjoy it and appeciate its subtleties, and there are certainly Spanish words and concepts that cannot be adequately expressed in English... but I am convinced that there are many more cases where Spanish lacks a word that really expresses the meaning of an English one (whimsical, for example), or where Spanish bundles up meanings into one word where English has many slightly differing words, often from different roots. I think that in Spanish meaning is less reliant on individual words and more on grammar and context - and the many meanings bound up in single words can be a great source of richness in itself.
Anyway, my oddity of Spanish (as I percieve it) for the day is that the nouns (though not the verbs) for sleep and dream are the same - sueño. Which really is very odd, because I conceptualise them as two very different things. I try not to let my love of the English language prejudice me - after all I'm bound to see the subtleties in English that elude me in Spanish - but it's difficult not to see the lack of two seperate words as, well, a lack.
On a sleepy note, the following aphorism strikes me as pleasing, and quite possibly profound:
There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock.
... that I am buying vegetables from Jesus this Saturday.
Hee hee.
Jesus is an organic gardener, who will be starting to make trips to the campus so we can buy his fruit, vegetables, eggs, and rabbit meat. Which is exciting. But the best thing about it is the opportunity for silly jokes.
although I have my blog language set to English (and sometimes Gibberish), the Blogger toolbar at the top usually (though not always) appears to me in Spanish. OK, fair enough, it is magically detecting that I am in Mexico, I can handle that. But today large chunks of the navigation stuff for writing posts, changing settings etc (though not all of it) has started appearing in German.
German is rather phasing stuff. I am rather phased. And linguistically confused.
(I am also a bit pleased that today, in Spanish, I: - made a joke at a meeting with more than a dozen people present. A one-word joke, but still. - had a long conversation about politics and corruption. - explored the meaning of some Mexican slang. ("Cabron". Don't ask, it's confusing.) - cheekily teased one of my colleagues/friends. I may even be smug. But it won't last long - until my next moment of complete non-comprehension - some time tomorrow I expect.)
Does something you've done twice count as a hobby? If so, one of my favourite hobbies is taking pictures of roses wet with rain on damp afternoons, until the damp turns into drizzle turns back into rain.
I only use my baby point-and-shoot digital camera, but I love these photos, and I don't care how much of a cliche pictures of flowers are. I love the way the roses are all crumpled, tattered and scorched by the rain and the cold weather setting in, and the colours fading and merging in the background. I love crouching in the wet grass and really taking time to look.
1) Stay up until 4am the night before, desperately trying to get some editing out of the way, and then preparing the artwork for the publicity for the staff Independence Day party you are organising on Friday. ii) Be very tired. And, until lunchtime, unshowered. c) Talk to your boss, and become even more worried about all the work you have to do. 2x2) Meet a Real Life awesome journalist (Fred Pearce of New Scientist) and have nothing to say and no mental energy to initiate a conversation. 101) Spend considerable portions of your working day desperately trying to organise things for the party, in particular a mariachi band and whether/how we can pay for it. Get frustrated. Spend some time panicking about the important thing you have to write, and the fact that none of the people you need to talk to in order to write it are on the right continent or answering your emails. Spend the rest of your time answering emails, playing phone tag, and struggling to get the same bloody editing out of the way. 3!) Spend an hour doing a "conversation class" (ie talking in English) with a Mexican friend who is shortly going to an Anglophone conference. Talk about the BBC - after your friend is foolish enough to ask if it is American - and thence public institutions, corruption, the rule of law... seven) Go into town with your newly-arrived colleague and buddy and fellow-intern. Puruse the stalls selling flags and bunting and streamers and paper decorations and tacky jewellery and plastic trumpets for Independence Day. Buy decorations for the party. And two false moustaches. Try not to go overboard. Buy bread. Expound upon the delights of Texcoco. Eat esquites sitting on a damp wall in the darkening square. Go into the market for fruit and ribbons. Buy balloons for the party. Buy CDs for the party. Finally drag yourself, and a wilting amiga, round the supermarket. Buy groceries. And food and drink for the party. ate) Unpack your shopping, sterilise your fruit, and eat toast. IX) Contemplate making muffins with your aging fruit and brand new wholemeal flour. Rapidly realise that you are going insane. diez) At 11pm, head over to your office, knowing you MUST get that bloody editing out of the way and email it off tonight. Be slower than you hoped. Fall asleep at your desk. legs) At around 12.30 spend half an hour talking to the nice security guard who has come upon you while patrolling the corridors. Wish he would leave. hours) Go into a trance. Listen to Whitney Houston songs on youtube that you loved when you were 11 (while working on transcribing corrections, not requiring thought). suit) Finally finish at a little after 3am. 14) Squelch across the sodden grass in the dark, considering building an ark in response to the Biblical levels of recent rain. Be terrified of the important thing you have to write tomorrow. And the people to track down and things to read before you can do that. And the finalising of the mariachi band. And the finishing and printing and posting of posters. And the buttonholing of half the staff to try to get enough money for the mariachis. And the finalising of the arrangements for food. And the emails. And the Spanish class. And the friend's conversation class. And the nervous breakdown.
Thinly-spread? Me?
Like the butter on the Queen's cucumber sandwiches.
I’m not generally one of those people with a constant mental soundtrack, but in the past ten days or so, out of nowhere, I have developed a passionate obsession with Mexican pop. I hadn’t really payed much attention before, being more interested in music to dance to, like salsa, cumbia and banda. But now my brain always seems to be playing some fragment of one of half a dozen songs. And my love for them just grows and grows.
So this is how it is inside my head:
This first one’s not strictly Mexican, or pop… apparently they are actually a Belgian dance act with a Spanish lead singer… but every time I go out dancing I seem to get one song firmly lodged in my brain. And the Saturday before last saw me dancing the night away in the hottest club in town (which, in my town, isn’t saying too much!), singing (yelling) along to this (Bailando by Paradisio):
The video makes me cringe, but it does contain the most amusingly unflattering pink wig ever. It’s a fun song if you’re prepared to embrace cheesy eurodance (dancy eurocheese, euro dancecheese…?), but I wouldn’t listen if you have at all refined musical sensibilities. On the other hand, it could be – and has been - worse…
With something of a change of mood, here is one of the Mexican songs that has been on a constant loop in my head, Volverte a Amar by Alejandra Guzmán:
It is about how it’s impossible that they could not be together, she falls captivated every time he calls, she misses him all the time, he’s the one for her and she can’t stop thinking about him, and… “tengo tanto miedo de volverte a amar” - I’m so afraid of falling in love with you again.
I love that she is really belting this song out, but it retains its bittersweetness. And I like that this woman is a kind of Mexican Madonna (in a been around for decades, Like a Virgin, not a Virgin Mary, sense) and is sexing it up like a trooper.
However, my biggest current obsession is the songstress Julieta Venegas. I’ve known one or two of her songs for a while, but I suddenly LOVE them. One of the – I think – coolest things about her is that she plays the accordion on many of her songs. Me Voy is one of my favourites; the accordion and the slight surrealism of the video remind me of Amelie, and it’s just a beautiful song:
It’s about the end of a relationship, where there’s no communication and love hasn’t been enough. The chorus is: No voy a llorar y decir que no merezco esto porque es probable que lo merezco pero no lo quiero. Por eso me voy, que lástima pero adiós me despido de ti y me voy, que lástima pero adiós me despido de ti... It doesn’t translate well, but more or less it means: I’m not going to cry and say I don’t deserve this, because I probably do deserve it, but I don’t want it. And so I’m going, it’s a pity but farewell, I’m saying goodbye to you and I’m going… In Spanish and in the right mood it’s a song to break your heart to!
My absolute favourite Julieta song is this one, Lento:
I don’t like the video much, but it is a lovely, sweet, simple love song. She is asking someone to go slowly, gradually forget about time, slow down and let her love him. The chorus is: Ser delicado y esperar, dame tiempo para darte todo lo que tengo. Or: Be gentle and wait, give me time to give you everything I have. Come to think of it this one kind of breaks your heart too, but so sweetly…
I was listening to this last night and singing along, with feeling, and I realized that it makes me hugely, absurdly happy to be able to sing along to a song in Spanish. Even if only the choruses!
I’m also listening to a number of other Julieta Venegas songs (check out Eres Para Mi for an un-nunlike dancing nun), Las de la Intuición by Shakira (also playing when I last went dancing), and, inexplicably, this Mexican football song (even though I hate the band, and I’m not so big on football, it’s extremely catchy!):
Ten, five, even two years ago, who’d’ve thought I’d be singing mournfully along to Mexican ballads or shakin’ it to Latin disco?
As a child, I told lies. Not constantly, but often. I was quite fearful, and so I told lies to protect myself, to smooth away my mistakes and misdemeanours, and to make life easier on myself. Lies came easily to me, and in a way they still do. I’m naturally hesitant in telling people where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing, even if the truth is completely ordinary and innocuous.
But, whilst I am a little wary of complete candour and trust in others, as an adult truth is very important to me. Being able to be honest in my interactions and personal relationships with others is something I value hugely, and I am so much happier and more comfortable when I can speak truthfully. Not that the opposite of honesty is necessarily lies of course – more often silence, or simply not being true to ourselves and murmuring what others seem to want to hear.
Twice in the past few days I have been brave and so sought honesty where I might easily have shrunk from it. Both occasions it was hard, and both were ultimately wonderful. Two friendships, at very different stages, grew and were deepened by speaking honestly. And realising that I really could be honest was not fearful, but felt like freedom from fear: a boundless happiness in being able to speak from the heart.
I didn’t quite have the weekend I was hoping for. I was looking forward to meeting up with a sweet boy and forgetting about the working week listening to live Mexican rock in a noisy bar – but he cancelled at the last minute, which made me more miserable than it should have. The conversations and emails I exchanged were more than I’d hoped for and made me happy, but it was a bittersweet sweetness thinking of how the dearest and most remarkable people in my life are so far away, and another friend is soon to be gone. One of the hardest things about living here is all the goodbyes as people come and go – and the more awesome the times you’ve shared, the harder the goodbye.
On the other hand, I did finally realise my ambition to visit the witchcraft market in Mexico City. It was weird, fascinating, occasionally gruesome, and fantastic in every sense. And I ate rose petal pie in a fancy restaurant a short journey and a world away and felt decadent, like an ancient empress. And I played ping pong and made tea for friends and talked until late. No regrets.
Outside my window, a little while ago, a group of Japanese students arrived outside the gene bank, on a visit, clearly having been in the fields and about to continue their tour inside. I noticed they were all wearing black wellingtons, and when I looked up again a minute later they had all - every single one, as if choreographed - whipped out brightly-coloured shopping bags (the durable woven-plastic kind you can buy in every market here, and everywhere in the world) and were as one carefully removing their wellies and replacing them with neatly-wrapped indoor shoes.
It was extraordinary, like a sudden flowering - with a military flourish. I have no idea where all these shopping bags from - they were concealed in their rucksacks, I suppose, but they might as well have conjured them out of thin air to brighten this dull, hazy day. And it made me smile that the members of our staff who were accompanying them were nowhere near as organised, wiping their muddy shoes off on the muddy grass.
Sometimes late at night the ordinary is extraordinary
There are hills behind my house. In the dark you wouldn’t know they were there, except that high up above one of the villages there is a large white illuminated cross, only it looks small from down here, bright and floating like the moon. Last Saturday night, eyes drawn to the cross as usual, I noticed that there were lights, and must have been people, up there. Who knows what they were celebrating, but fireworks began to blossom over the cross, tiny bursts of sparks from this distance. I watched one of the fireworks exploding in beautiful white sparkles, falling, and still falling, past the cross, past where the sky ended, tumbling down the hillside as if falling in impossible space.
It was beautiful.
This has been a week of emotional conversations with dear people here and far, of progress but not enough of it at work, of Hollywood movies and Mexican pop, of Mexican tacos and American cookies, of every kind of weather, of honesty and confusion, of doing too much and being too tired.
This weekend I'm ready to be smiling, ready for things to work out OK, ready to dance all night and ready for tranquility. I'm hoping for sweetness.
