The one-question survey

I can't get that movie out of my mind - Julie and Julia. I saw it, then saw it again, and it still sits with me in a comforting way. The movie itself is warm and entertaining, but the idea of blogging for a set purpose is what really entices me. So, I've decided to blog like Julie did. I'm not setting dates and all that, because, first of all, I haven't figured out how you do it, and second of all, I'm not sure how well I would come out on that, as I tend to let things slide (remember the tomatoes???).
But this blog-project is about the one-question survey I did during the last days of 2009. I'll start by setting the scene:
When I started studying German over 2 years ago, I got truly passionate about it (Deutsch ist noch meine Leidenshaft und ich möchte in der Zukunft ein Blog auf Deutsch schreiben, aber das ist eine andere Geschichte!).
One day, another teacher, our director in fact, expressed concern about the fact that a lot of students were getting poor grades on one of the big official German exams. She asked me why that was so... of course, she was just wondering out loud, and it wasn't like she expected an answer in that moment, but her question made me wonder too.
I mulled it over, thought about it from all angles, trying to settle on a single determining factor. I finally concluded that, in order to learn a language (learn anything for that matter) what one must basically have is the desire above all to learn it. Of course there are other important factors, but having the will to learn (or a need to learn which prompts the desire) drives the whole learning process itself.
The next morning, I stopped by the director's office to tell her my answer, not to her original question, but to what lies behind that question, and we ended up discussing the reasons people learn (and don't)... a very subjective discussion to be sure, but quite interesting and satisfying.
In fact, as I left her office a little while later, I felt that I now needed to know what other teachers thought. Since our school is a language center where Spanish, English, German and Portuguese are taught, there are teachers from different countries giving classes. The director herself is German and Mexican by birth, I come from a direct line of migrating ancestors, our kids - hers and mine - are bilingual or trilingual, so we have a definite preference for promoting multilingual (multicultural) living. I wondered what the other teachers in our school would answer if I asked them. So I did!

I approached each teacher asking them to please answer my one-question-survey. The original question was simply: "Why do some people learn a foreign language better than others?" But I quickly realized that it wasn't complete enough, so the final wording of the question was:

In your opinion, why do some people seem to learn a foreign language better, easier, and/or faster than other people?

Answers are coming... Stay tuned for the next blog entry.

those chick flicks

Remember when we watched Romancing the Stone, Six Days Seven Nights, Green Card, True Lies, Overboard, A Walk in the Clouds, First Knight, Zorro, The Goodbye Girl, The Family Stone, Far and Away, Maverick, Something's Gotta Give, As Good as it Gets, and French Kiss in what seemed like a never-ending cycle? There were others, but those ones were always the mainstays - chick flicks. You grew to love them - or rather, you loved watching them with me. I loved watching them with you too... we would start talking about something in the movie, an idea, or a gesture or the way they kissed, or the emotion behind something they said, or we'd chide them for their blindness, or find ourselves remembering some event in our early life together, or with our kids, or we'd take a moment to wonder what it would have been like if we'd done something similar... you didn't want to watch blood and gore, or movies that got too involved, too suspenseful or too dramatic - you wanted to watch romance in the making in the middle of an adventure, and then, as the movie progressed, you'd cuddle with me until we were slowly lulled into asleep, although I sometimes watched the movie to the end no matter how many times I'd seen it! And yet, it was always fun, always as if it were the first time, always exciting to pop the movie into the player and get ready to watch it with you.
I haven't watched any of those flicks lately. It's just not fun to watch a chick flick by yourself. It's okay, because I've been watching other movies and I watch them with Sam or with Clo or with Anto and Moni... or all of us together. And if I'm alone, I watch thrillers, which is more enjoyable without your annoying observations about some actor's/actress's body or real-life messy love-life, or those exasperating derrogatory remarks about the flashbacks being purposely too confusing, followed by inevitable scoffs about Hollywood tactics until I lose the thread; or I watch old black and white movies or musicals, 2 genres you never liked. But on Friday in class, we watched Overboard, and I explained about chick flicks - and it made me think of you with a smile and that old familiar love.

Belated Apology - okay!

Earlier today, I published a belated apology. Whether it was accepted or not is still unclear, but one thing I do know - it was heard and acknowledged, so there's no reason to keep it published (and publicized) mission accomplished!

Twenty!

She's 20! She's through with the teens. Twenty is a number that says something. It stands for balance and perspective. You know you're an individual, a separate peson, when you're 20. It's the reward for having reached and crossed over a threshhold. No one can call you a teenager and lump you in with those who fall into that unfortunate category. Yet you don't have to be a real 'adult' either. 20 is like a rehearsal, with lots of room to adapt and grow into the role. In fact, what you are when you're 20 is a young person! It's a very gratifying thing to be. A young person.

She's 20 today and she's going to be 20 for a whole year! Does she feel the difference? Knowing her, I believe she does. Is she ready for it? Knowing her, I believe she is.

Happy Birthday Carm! Twenty years old today!
Good going so far; good things coming ahead.
And always and evermore, my love.

Love in a foreign language

I don't usually like interpreting; as opposed to translating on paper, I much prefer the latter. You can think and revise and perfect what you translate. With interpreting, you have to be totally attentive to the here and now and not let anything distract you. Sometimes you are so attentive, that your awareness of that atentiveness distracts you, with the result that you miss a key word or concept, and then you botch up the translation, or you have to ask the person to repeat what they said. It's quite stressful at times.
Today, I spent 8 hours at the racetrack, where a some people were going to take several cars on rigorous road tests using professional racedriving techniques. They were English speakers, from different places around the world, but the instructors were Spanish speakers. I was the Interpreter - the go-between.

So we had finished two of the tests, and were on a coffee break, when a young woman on the team that had hired me for the event pulled me over and asked me in whispered excitement if I could give a message to one of the men who was there for the event.
"Could you please tell the guy in the black shirt that I would like to talk to him but I just can't speak a word of English."
Now how was I supposed to react to that?? More followed:
"But wait until my boss is not around. I don't want her to hear."
I still didn't know what to say! What I said was, "Okay, no problem."
Everyone was milling around the refreshment table, and then she came up to me again and said, "Yesterday, he tried to talk to me a couple of times, but I couldn't understand, and I just want him to know that I would like to understand. I know when you tell him, he'll say the same thing."
Ahh! Now I was starting to understand. Or was I? Had they really already reached some sort of intutitive understanding? How exciting, if I was right!

A few minutes later, just as I was biting into a plum, squirting juice in seven directions, the guy in the black shirt turned towards me. Not only was he extremely good-looking - jet black hair and sea-blue eyes!!! very unusual - but he also had excellent reflexes. He grabbed a napkin and handed it to me. Naturally I made light of the whole thing by exclaiming about the delicious juiciness of the plum, and by that time the young woman had moved to join us. So I said,
"Oh Jay (not his real name), Nina (not her real name) here asked me to tell you that she would really like to talk to you but it's just that she can't speak English. She just wanted you to know that."
"Well, please tell her that I've been really wanting to speak to her too! But I don't speak any Spanish. But I'd like to invite her to dinner with our group tonight."
So I turned to Nina and told her all of that but I forgot to switch languages - whereupon there was a moment of blank silence, then sudden understanding on my part of my mistake, and then spontaneous, tension-breaking laughter, after which I told her his wishes in Spanish. She immediately responded by thanking him, and adding that maybe they could e-mail each other and translate each other's letters, which I translated to him, and he said that would be fantastic and would she give him her e-mail, so she said she would.
Then the boss came back into circulation, so we split up and went back to business at hand.

Two hours later, during another break, Nina took me aside again.
"Oh what should I do? I want to talk to him, but how?"
I said, "Why don't you write him a note in Spanish and then I'll help you put it into English."
"Okay, I'll tell you and you write the note."
"No, better if you write it, I translate, and then you rewrite it in your handwriting in English."
So that's what we did. This is what she wrote:
'Hi! This is my e-mail address. I just want to say that I really hope that we can find a way to talk to each other. And if you write to me, I'm going to translate each of your e-mails to Spanish and then write you back. Then you will have to translate my letters from Spanish to English (you can do it in the Internet). I'm glad we are going to be in communication.'
And she gave it to him.

When it was time for them to board their bus, Jay came up to me and said, "Could you please tell Nina that I think she is absolutely stunning?" When he saw my incredulous look - how often do you hear the word stunning used like that? - he nodded and said, "I'm serious! Tell her I am going to write to her and that I'm really hoping we can get together this evening because I do want to get to know her."
So I told her (though it was hard to find an effective translation for the word 'stunning' and all it implies, and I told her that too!) and she blushed with happiness.

"It was just one of those things. We fell in love with each other before we could even communicate! We had to get the interpreter to help us set up our first date."

Will that be the story they tell their grandkids one day?

You

It's like diving in. You know how it feels to plunge head first into deep cool water? Your body shoots below the surface, slicing through the water, and in that silent weightlessness amid bubbles and currents, the feel of yourself and the feel of the water cannot be separated.

Or like this morning. I was dreaming and then I was not - in the middle of a word - I think it was a cry or a call - in some kind of glaringly bright piece of somewhere, I opened my eyes and it was the gray light of early morning and I was in my bed at home. But as I teetered between glaring and gray, between loud and still, between there and here, I saw you.

I've been thinking about you a lot in the last couple of days. Or rather, consciously not thinking of you. I put my thoughts on hold time and again to attend to what's going on or escape into acceptable modes of fantasy.

But this morning, it was as if someone had thrown a cog into the machinery causing a fragmenting of time. In the middle of the ordinary, things became extraordinary. I was driving along the cobblestone road that leads out of this tiny town, traveling slowly and gently over the speedbumps and dips, and I looked to my left, as I do when I'm on this road, taking in the volcanoes and the puff of smoke sitting atop the Popo, marveling at the shouting blue of the sky, and noting that the clouds seemed to be frozen there in a billowing whiteness...

Meanwhile, the Dixie Chicks were singing that song about a landslide, and suddenly I saw you, moving in a rhythm that breathed with the sound of your voice and the beat of my heart; you were putting on your socks and telling me the dogs were waiting to be fed, you were wheedling a kiss from me, you were telling me about the political scene, you were on the phone, you were calling me over to see something on the computer, you were cooking and explaining the virtues of olive oil, you were offering me a taste of your fragrant steaming mug of coffee, you were going outside to oversee the work on the cars and asking me to bring your water bottle... you were telling me I would miss your love when you were gone.
And I do!

I know, I know... you told me so.

It's Q and A Time - i.o.w. A Quiz!

Well, I read Fned's blog and she was tagging anyone who arrived there, so I said I would play the Q&A game; why not? Here are the Questions and my Answers:

1. What did you want to be when you were little?
   A writer, a singer, and an actress - all together. I used to invent all these stories and then act them out (playing all the parts myself). Most of the plots included the scene where the wild, or poor, or uneducated - but always beautiful - young girl is discovered by a rich handsome guy who somehow gets lost in some rural paradise, where he hears her singing while she's picking berries or whatever, whereupon he convinces her to go to the big city, where she's able to become a star, but she always ends up scorning wealth and glamour and returning to her rustic life, whereupon the guy who has naturally fallen in love with her by then, goes and finds her and they end up together... There were also plots that had to do with an incredibly elaborate story of espionage and got played out with NoneOther when we were left to our own devices. When I was very young, I wrote out the story of the lives of my paper dolls including Pickles (their dog) in my Big Chief tablet (and I still have it!).
2. What one place makes you the happiest being there?
   Wow! Only one place? Hmmm... okay, I'd have to say up on the roof. I rarely go up any more, but whenever I've gone up on the roof of any of the places I've lived, I've always felt especially happy. Just being above all the mundane, daily comings and goings of everyone, and looking out over everything from a higher place... it's a great feeling.
3. Do you wish your first kiss could have been with somebody else?
   Absolutely not! The only first kiss that I really remember as being such was the first kiss with Car - and that was a kiss like no other. I once wrote a song about it.
4. What's one thing you wish you could tell your 16-yr-old self?
   Don't think twice! Take your parents up on their offer to send you to a Kibbutz for the summer!
5. What movie do you never get tired of watching?
   There are lots... and all for different - but equally compelling - reasons. At this moment, Jerry Maguire comes to mind, for the overall good message and feeling you get from it.
6. What movie do you wish you had never seen?
   "Whatever happened to Baby Jane?". That movie gave me nightmares for years, and even today I can't stand to remember any part of it.
7. How much time do you admit to spending on Facebook in a week's time and how much time do you really spend there?
   Two to four hours. And that's for real. How do I know? Because whenever I go in there, I end up spending a couple of hours, and then I inevitably check back a few days later but very quickly... that's it for the week. And there are weeks where I don't go in at all because I'm still frustrated about the last time I sat there for 2 to 4 hours.
8. Who do you miss at this exact moment?
   My Dad - it's almost Father's Day and I wish I could be there and wish him a happy day in person. HAPPY FATHER'S DAY DAD. I LOVE YOU AND MISS YOU!
9. Where are you going tomorrow and why?
   Nowhere special, but maybe for a long walk or a bike ride. Probably up on the roof at some point now that I think about it!! Those are some ideas of what I want to do.
10. If you had a gift certificate for plastic surgery and you had to use it (witness protection program or something) what would you get done?
    My nose. Not for beauty's sake, but rather to open up my nasal passages.

Okay - I did it. Now that means that you too have to do it if you were here! Are you up for it? Ready? GO!