Potato chips, museum trips, linguistics

1. At home I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, once or twice a year. Usually because somebody else has bought them and brought them to a party that I am attending. In Spain I eat potato chips, oh, maybe, one or twice a WEEK. That's because here they are made with olive oil, and, ergo are very delicious. Also, I spend a lot of time waiting in the Beasain train station with a vending machine as my only companion. I like to think that the olive oil makes them healthier, too, but I have no idea if this is actually the case.

2. I went to the Guggenheim on Thursday with a few classes from my school. It was pretty amazing and I had that same feeling that I get whenever I go to museums, namely, "why don't I go to museums more often?" I wish I'd had more time to wander freely and to hang out with the amazing, massive, and amazingly massive Serra sculptures, but instead I had a guided tour of "Art in the USA: 300 Years of Innovation" conducted entirely in Basque. One of the teachers on the trip translated a lot of it into Spanish for me, but it was still a pretty strange experience: American art history through the prism of Spanish-Basque culture. Huh. It was funny to have this Spanish woman telling me things like "in the 1920s Jazz was becoming very important to American culture" or, even better "this is a picture of George Washington, the first president of America." What? Who? Really? I've never heard of him.

3. Generally, I tend to reject the Sapir=Whorf hypothesis (which at my level of understanding amounts to the belief that the language we speak shapes the way we think in pretty clear-cut and unbending ways) but I do have a tendency to import certain grammatical structures from English into Spanish. There are certain ways of saying things in English which are so intermingled with my sense of the logic of how things work that it is difficult to get rid of them. For example, the present progressive: common in English and appropriate in a variety of circumstances ("I am drinking tea," "I am teaching English") and rare in Spanish, generally being restricted to what is actually happening in this very moment ("I am drinking tea," but not "I am teaching English," rather "I teach English). And yet. I use the present progressive all the time in Spanish because to me it just....sounds right. I don't know that thinking in the present progressive really shapes my wider world-view that much, but still it is an English construction changing how I conceive of something. Then again, probably as I start thinking in Spanish more (presuming that this will indeed happen) the good old P.P. will leave me alone. I'll keep you posted Sapir and Whorf.

A sequence of words, often alliterative, difficult to articulate quickly

Yup. This week is tongue twister week for the students at Txindoki Alkartasuna and for the most part they are eating it up. I may have blown my heretofore assumed coolness by revealing that I can say "Betty Botter bought some butter..." at warp speed, but I think it's worth it for the resulting laughter. Whatever. It's kind of a neat skill. For the first 15 years that I possessed it (or maybe more like 17 ), it was regarded as supremely annoying. Now is its moment of redemption.

Also enjoyable: in trying to understand the phrase "selfish shellfish" at least three students have independently guessed that "selfish" means fish seller. They are so smart! Though, unfortunately, also so wrong, at least in this case.

In non-tongue-twister related news, I went to a lovely Bloc Party concert in Bilbao this weekend. It rocked at just the right level for me: at no point was I frightened for my life but I did frequently feel inspired to jump around. After the concert the venue turned into a club and not just any club but a club full of Spanish hipsters. We could have been in New York, we could have been in Minneapolis, we could have been in Seattle, but actually we were in Spain and maybe that's why we stayed out way too late. We caught the 5:54am train home (to my friend's house in a town near Bilbao) and had to deal with a lot of very drunk teenagers. I have, I believe, in the past complained about the drinking age in the US but now it strikes me as entirely appropriate. Teenagers should not drink because drunk teenagers are really annoying.

Hamaiketako

This is my favorite Basque word that I've learned thus far. An Hamaiketako is like an early lunch, it's when you eat delicious food at 11am. Hamaike means 11, and tako? I don't know, but I like to imagine that it means delicious food.

So this week I've had two hamaiketakos at school. The first one was with my favorite and smallest (only 7 kids) class. It was potluck style and they were all so cute with the things they made. Everything from tuna sandwiches to muffins to tortilla. I brought chocolate chip cookies and one kid (one of the many Jon's, a basque name which is amusingly pronounced like 'yawn') was all "Oh, it's like chips ahoy." I responded in a friendly manner but I thought "Oh, you poor boy, you are only exposed to lame american culture. These cookies are NOT like chips ahoy."

The second hamaiketako (how many times I can I use this word in one post? well, let's see)was with my fellow teachers in celebration of a few birthdays (god only knows who's). This one was just so overwhelmingly Spanish, what with the tortilla de bacalo, the chorizo, the ridiculous amounts of bread and oh, did I mention the wine? Yeah, there was wine. Can you imagine the entire faculty of an American high school drinking wine together in the middle of a school day? Yeah, I can't either.

So, yes, my life here definitely revolves around food. And speaking of which: Happy Thanksgiving! We are doing a cute little ex-pat style dinner tonight and yesterday I made 3 pies (2 pumpkin and 1 apple) for the occaision, so I'm pretty psyched. Oooh and we used the extra pie dough to make these amazing little vegetable empanada things. Just the dough filled with sautéed mushrooms, onions, eggplant and spinach. Way better then the sugar-cinnamon cracker things that I usually use extra dough for. I highly recommend them.

But, back to hamaiketakos. What I really like about this word is its elegant specificity. It's becoming clear that I'm only in the learning new languages game for moments like this, moments when you can say something in one word that your native tongue would need several words or even several clauses to express. It's Occam's razor for words. Why say 'to take advantage of' when you can use 'aprovechar?' Why say 'food that you eat at 11am, that's not lunch because you'll still eat lunch at like 2 or 3 and certainly isn't brunch because everything is savory and probably includes wine because why wouldn't you want to have some wine half way through the morning' when you can say 'hamaiketako' and call it good? Also, why not say 'hamaiketako' all the time? It's fun.

Seriously, come on

OK. So it is 6:45 am and I do not want to be awake right now. And yet. So, body I have one question for you: what's up?

I admit that I allowed you to catch a cold and that congestion can make sleeping more difficult. I also admit that yesterday we consumed more cafinated beverages then usual (two cafe con leches and two earl grey teas). I just wanted them for their warm, throat-soothing abilities and I thought that since we had them all before 6pm, that things would work out. We didn't go to bed until 1am. And weren't you tired by then? You didn't want to keep reading (even though we're re-reading "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" and it is so pleasantly familiar, like getting back in touch with a friend and remembering that you forgot how funny he can be) so I turned out the light. And pretty quickly we weren't feeling so conscious anymore.

But. Then. A mere four and half hours later, zing, wakefullness re-emerged. I tried to wait it out, to ignore your protestations, but I gave in. I got you water. I took you to the bathroom. I blew your nose. But you remain steadfast in your refusal to go back to sleep.

Cada loco con su tema

This is a phrase that I overheard last night that I'm pretty sure I've come across previously, though I can't remember in what context. Anyway, I reallly like it. "Every crazy person with his theme" or maybe to be more coloquial "Every crazy person has their thing" or "Everyone has their own obsession." OK, I'll stop with the endless 'ors' of translation.

But it's just so true. And I think that it is true in three ways. And here they are:

1) As I grow up I start to find the connections between all of the seemingly diverse subjects that I find fascinating. It's like "oh, I like words and I like people and I want to know all about both and about their interactions." I'm just trying (allbeit clumsily) to access this theme from a variety of angles.

2) Everyone has "a thing." A thing or, two, or three. Everyone likes River Pheonix, or biking, or chess, or vinegar, or prose poems or something. We share or hide our quirks as the mood strikes, the theme we are crazy about.

3) Everyone has "their thing" in that everyone has hang-up(s) which they keep re-encountering. More and more you find yoursef following the same patterns of behavior, oh, it's hard to avoid your theme.


In other news, my housemates really need to clean the kitchen, joder. Gross.

Obviously, I should read poetry more often

You cannot control your laughter.
You cannot control your love.
You know not to hit the brakes on ice
but do anyway. You bend the nail
but keep hammering because
hammering makes the world.

-Dean Young from "How I Get My Ideas"

Second Order Feelings

I'm in a good mood and I am happy that I'm in a good mood. I'm in a good mood because I just remembered that I know how to take care of myself! I know how to sleep in a bit and then get up and make tea and delicious scrambled eggs. I know that, actually, you don't need a toaster to make toast, you can just use a pan! I know that it's fiction week on Slate and that I can read lots about books. I know that I have a book that I want to read and that there is a hot shower waiting for me whenever I can manage to get out of my pajamas. I know what bands to listen to in order to amplify my happiness. I do.

Today I've just got this growing sense that I know myself well enough to seek out the things that I need and want. I know things about myself that are not circumstance dependent, things that I can always come back to. And even when I have trouble explaining myself to others (oh, say in Spanish, for example) I stilll...well, I still have myself. Maybe that is the sort of sentence that will make me cringe when viewed from a week's distance, but there it is.

And, although I'm not crazy about Myla Goldberg as a novelist (OK, I've only read "Bee Season" but that book gets pretty messy in the end) I do really like this quote of hers from Slate about books that you are supposed to have read, but haven't:

"As much as I admire and value intellectualism and experimentation, I've discovered that unless a book has a throbbing heart as well as a sexy brain, I feel like the story is a specimen in a sealed glass jar and not a living, breathing creature I want to take by the hand and talk to for hours on end."

Yeah, exactly.