The Par-Tay

I sent Cathy on a two-hour mission to Ikea to buy chairs while I finished the pumpkin pie, dressing, stuffing, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and magical punch. I frantically cleaned and rearranged the entire house. I took a shower at the last minute, worried that I would still be dripping while greeting the early arrivers. There were, in fact, no early arrivers, which just gave me more time to plan the games for the party. When they finally did arrive I was given gift after gift in amazement. It's possible that I've never been that generous in my life. I surely didn't expect gifts from everyone. The punch I made was an instant hit, an homage to apple cider with very little of real apples in it. My rule of thumb was to mix enough apple juice, cinnamon powder, and vodka to drown a small village. I heated it up in a huge pot on the stove like some wizard's brew. Halfway through the party I forgot all of my friend's names. Lawrence from England drank and ate enough food to feed several families. His stomach gurgled loudly for the rest of the night. We played stupid games, watched Thanksgiving Friends episodes, and Spanish Ana smoked in exile on the balcony. Cathy and I planned our Christmas party in the corner.

Giving Thanks

I plan a strike with friendly Patrick from the Academy. It seems unfair, uncouth and unjust to force us to work on this high holy day. My Catalan teacher (because Thanksgiving strike or no, I'm gonna get my money's worth from these classes) asks me how I'm going to celebrate. I tell him I plan to work like a dog and celebrate on Saturday. He asks me if I'm going to have turkey (guy-dindy, a Catalan word I still laugh at), and I roll my eyes. I'm not up to such work. I'm thankful that the shop down the street sells roasted chickens. I'm also thankful that I'm not observed every day, because my students received an in-depth lesson on Thanksgiving. Grammar who?

Like a Soap Opera But Crazier

I skipped my Catalan course today and spent the morning doing lesson plans and browsing Craig's List's Missed Connections, a haven of missed opportunities, close calls and horrible love poems. For every candy-sweet might-have-been [We made eyes all night. I wish I had the courage to tell you that you are gorgeous], there's it's raunchy counterpart [You were the big-breasted girl. Want a take-out order of me?] It might leave you feeling a little dirty, a little sad at all the people who are too shy to say what they need/want to. It might make you laugh because some of the people who write these things are serving up a heaping helpin' of CRAZY. It's my newest addiction.

The Thanksbirthday Extravaganza

I shirk my duties and spend all afternoon planning an invitation to our hastily-invented Thanksbirthday party. The guest list is small but the food list is large.

Do-it-Yourself instructions:
1. Click on link to the Thanksbirthday Invitation.
2. Print out (for best results, use color printer).
3. Fold invitation.
4. [Optional] Place in envelope and send to yourself. Upon receiving, act surprised and touched.

Cathy gets a sudden burst of creative energy and demands that we begin working on Christmas party plans next week.

Ginny's Visit

I wake up with a sore throat and a stranger in the bed next to me. Ginny from Bilbao arrived late last night and instead of bothering with an extra cot, we decided to throw onto the other end of the Queen Size. I constructed pillow barricades and wore a chastity belt to make sure that all hands stayed on their prospective sides of the bed. We are talking about Juan Luis' girlfriend, after all.


The next morning we get up and mosey down the street. Ginny doesn't like walking too much, so we make plenty of stops to rest and refill our bellies. We have chocolate and churros, typical Spanish breakfast fare; a caloric Weapon of Mass Destruction, these deep-fried sticks of dough are dipped into a cup of melted chocolate and cream. American hot chocolate is water compared to this. We also do a little bit of shopping, although neither of us wind up buying anything. I couldn't help but smile. It was a perfect kind of day: waking up late, no hurry, no plan, lots of frivolous spending. The week is far too cramped, too rushed, too much. Not being too used to a proper job with a proper salary and things, I can't say if this is what the future holds for me, but I dearly hope not. The weekends keep me sane, but they're far too short and filled with too many things I couldn't do during the week. I miss the lazy days of graduate school, where your greatest effort was not planning or implementing classes, it was doing mental stretches in front of your computer, writing your great masterpiece (or what would stand in its place until you had time for the masterpiece). Oddly enough, I can't wait to get back to that.

A Scientific Discovery

In between sips of sangria at Australian Katie's dinner party, Cathy and I discuss the horrendous state of our shower now that the temperature in Madrid has dropped. "It's freezing!" I complain. I pout my lips. "Oh aye." Cathy sometimes becomes SuperIrish and these types of phrases slip out. We continue discussing how cold the room is, since shower and bathroom are in fact combined in our humble abode. The window to the bathroom is the bane of all things evil and makes sure that the bathroom is the coldest room in the house. Cathy takes another sip of the sangria, eats a miniature pizza (our favorite things at Katie's dinner party) and then says: "I've been figuring out the physics of it, thinking that if I turned the water down a bit then the gas would be able to heat more of it, and it would make the water hotter." My eyes widen at this suggestion. Cathy could fly space shuttles with that kind of brain.

New Friends

Adapting ever so slowly to my new schedule, I finally pushed time aside from the frantic lesson planning and from the mindless internet surfing (both the reason and the bane of my existence) to text message a friend of a friend, Quique (the apparently superhip nickname of Enrique). We immediately went out and had dinner with his friends, a giant paella built for five. It was the first time that I've spoken extended Spanish in a little bit, so I was a bit rusty but still kind of impressive. They remarked on my Spanish, and I blushed when I was forced to tell them that I had actually taught it. That sentence always makes me feel amazingly nervous and inadequate. I'm waiting for any Spaniard, true to form and as blunt as anyone in the world can be, to ask me how I earned that job. Yikes.

The next day I went to a film festival with them, and tried my best to keep my eyes open through avant-garde projection after projection. It was a bit sluggish, but we went out to eat again (me, racking up a small fortune on my newly-minted debit card) and had more opportunity for conversation. Giddy with Spanish, I invited friend Alberto over later that night to watch a movie with me. In Spanish. All of this is to say that maybe I'm finding my niche, the Spanish bits of a new life that contains far too much English for my liking. I'm learning to control my schedule a little bit more, which is nice. I just hope that this keeps up. And that Quique and friends call me back. I tried to be as endearing and Bambi as I could be.

The price of a name

Description of Your First Name of: Dean
Although the name Dean creates the urge to be reliable and responsible, we emphasize that it can cause a superior, interfering expression whose favorite expression is "I know" when not combined with a balanced last name. This name, when not combined with a balanced last name, can also frustrate happiness, contentment, and success, as well as cause health weaknesses through worry and mental tension.

Your name of Dean gives you a clever mind, good business judgment, a sense of responsibility, and an appreciation of the finer things of life. You are serious-minded and not inclined to make light of things even in little ways, and in your younger years you had more mature interests than others your age. Home and family mean a great deal to you and it is natural that you should desire the security of a peaceful, settled home environment where you can enjoy the companionship of family and friends. Whatever you set out to accomplish you do your very best to complete in accordance with what you consider to be right.

See if the Kabbalah hates you too at kabalarians.com

Halloween Adventures

Today, a thoroughly Catholic country if only by name and nationally sanctioned holidays, is another one of those glorious public holidays. I have lazed about all day, pretending that there are neither classes to plan nor attend tomorrow. On Saturday night I went to a Halloween party, a celebration that I have really never celebrated in my adult life but now feel obligated to after expounding at length as to how important it is to current American culture. Sometimes I feel sorry for my classes, because I most definitely give them my version of American culture, which is much more likely to be my skewed, particular version of Southern culture, or worse, a hodge-podge of all the places I have lived, including Spain. Thanks to Cathy's linguistic influence, the lines between Southern, American and Irish/British English are blurring more and more. Potato Chips are, in a moment of weakness, likely to be called crisps just as quickly. But I digress: I was the first person to leave the Halloween party, as it began to spiral into dark regions of everyone else being overly drunk except for me. My friend Katie even brought liquor-soaked cherries to the party, which tasted awful and too much like pint-sized shots of Robitussin. Roommate Cathy and I went as twin ghouls to the party, but since she was way more into her costume and much scarier in general than I, everyone compared me to a raccoon or simply Dean, all in black and with makeup. I took many pictures, thanked God for the slimming effects of an all-black attire, and walked home in the rain, my makeup sliding off my face and my twin horns of spiked hair slowly drooping. A Halloween for the books.