Freaking Your Student Out: A One-Act Play

Setting: Conference Room, two individuals sitting next to each other. The audience quickly realizes that this is a professor and his student, and they are playing "getting to know you" games. This is inferred through an elaborate series of miming and hand gestures.

Professor: What is this name here? Points to a name on the paper.

Student: This is my friend Yeyua. She's a girl, but it's a boy's name. She's--

Professor interrupts, intrigued. She used to be a boy?

After a lengthy pause, student answers. She is visibly confused. She has a boy's name.

Awkward silence for about 30 seconds. Professor clears his throat.

Curtain.

Can I Complain About My Schedule Again?

I ask this question because I know that you, cyber-traveler, are no doubt utterly bored with my constant whines about my schedule. Perhaps you'll remember that I was extra happy about my previous schedule, which gave me whole afternoons of lazing about. Unfortunately the wheel has turned, and a new schedule has been produced. I now have a class at 8:00 in the morning (no change) in the south of Madrid (big change), in the outskirts, a place untouched by the metro. I have to travel to the end of a line and take a bus from there. Gads! The Spanish class that I was going to take via my company has been placed in the middle of the only free time that I have on Mondays and Wednesdays, so I already warned the girl who organized it: This does not bode well for my attendance. To tell the truth, in my head I've already stopped going. My Saturday class is still intact, of course.

I'm not terribly unhappy, it's just the whole system that frustrates. Why should a schedule change so dramatically every three months? Another problem is that the company's policy on everything seems so willfully shrouded in drama and mystery. After a week of hiding the process from us, of cutting conversations short in mid-sentence when we walked into the office, they unveiled our schedules with a great "Ta-Daaaaaaa!" All this sleight-of-hand and disappearing, reappearing time gets old.

And I'm totally going part-time after this semester.

Posting Secrets

PostSecret, where readers are invited to send in their deepest secrets in the form of postcards. Only secrets that have never been told to anyone before are eligible. You may want to shower, laugh, or cry after you finish reading them.

Long Overdue Stories, pt.2

An Open Letter to Baby, Almost a Month Old

Wondering a little how you fit into the cogs and wheels of the world, what good your little words could possibly have against the bold IMPACT type of America and its steel doors, you might one day be disheartened and think that you are a tiny speck on a tiny planet. You are here, and will be gone. Right now, you're probably asleep, because from what I hear you're still in that whole phase where you're not very fun. You are incredibly beautiful, though, and I was amazed at the softness of your skin. I thought about how tough the world makes us, the things we do to our insides and outsides to keep up with the rolling wheel of reality. You were warm against my tummy and smelled strongly of baby powder. I was lulled into your spell and was tempted to think all babies must be born like this, perfect and sweet-smelling, until I saw my sister apply it freely during one of your changing sessions. Yeah, I saw your Mom change your diaper. I haven't had that dirty pleasure yet, but I'm sure my day shall come too. And I will curse at you in Spanish, mark my words.

As you nestled into my tummy and with your warmth and smell washing over me, I thought of my Nanny, the strong backbone of our matriarchal family for many years. I thought of her doing the same thing with me, how she held us the same way and whispered to us with quiet Spanish words, raining trilling RRRRRRs and foreign clicks onto our absorbing ears. I clutched you when I thought of her and I began that same whisper, brought from some deep place inside of me, because I don't want to forget her, to forget those words, or our shared past. Before I was even born, we had long replaced the white-sanded beaches and humid air of Puerto Rico for South Georgia's tripthongs and pine forests, but I wanted to make you see that it's all within us anyway. I wanted you to feel our smells, our warmth in return: the paella, the warm breeze through the palm tree, the seagulls I can't remember.

You will feel so small sometimes, and so powerless against the vastness of the entire world. I want to tell you that this is what's good about the world, that it's so much bigger and grander and greater than anything we know, than anything we could possibly remember.

With so much love,
Your Tío Dean

Long Overdue Stories, pt.1

The ID Card of a Whale

Before embarking on my lightning trip home a few weeks ago, and after standing in line to become an Official Foreign Resident of Spain, I realized that it might speed up the whole customs procession to have with me my Spanish resident ID card. This could be a long, dull story, so the gist of it is that I returned to the police station and surprisingly was able to pick up my newly-minted ID card. The problem is not that I'm fat, but that the camera adds 30 pounds, it shades away all traces of your chin upon de-colorizing, and it reveals you as a Giant Face taking over all of Spain. It's not a pretty sight, ladies and gentlemen.

It Happened Like This

My little laptop, a proud friend and faithful companion through Syracuse snowfall and Camp galore, seems to have inherited my stubborn streak. It recently decided to stop letting iPedro connect to it and it denied all use of Flash. Guys, do you know how many websites use flash? Yeah, me neither, but it's a LOT. And it's all the websites I want to look at. Anyways, I suddenly reached my limit this week, and in a fit of righteous anger deleted everything on my computer and re-formatted and re-installed. This would have worked great, except that the version of XP that I have is a few years old, and needs updating badly. My Norton AntiVirus is also about 3 years old, and though the updates I can download are new, it doesn't come ready to fight against 2005's devilry running amok on the internet.

You get the drift. Virus, Virus, Virus in my first 30 seconds connected to the internet. In the course of four days I reformatted and reinstalled computer about 4 times and screamed and cried at my little laptop, willing it to fight against Sasser Virus and Trojan Horses and gloomily watching it succumb every time. I'm back online and will resume all Spanish gossip and stories soon. Thanks for being patient. Ya'll.

Things I Have Minor Issues With

Open Letter to the waitress at La Musa, Too Trendy For Me Restaurant:

I'm terribly sorry that I saw fit to return the steaming pile of fish that you placed in front of me, but it wasn't without great internal struggle. You see, as you neared me with the plate, even from far away I could tell that there was, of course, a head clearly attached to the fish. Your cook had thought to remove the innards, cutting a hole along the bottom of the fish and presumably shaking it up and down till they all flopped out; unfortunately he hadn't thought to remove much else. You said "This is so good!" and smiled at me happily. I hesitantly took the plate from you.

I realize that your cook is mad at me, and probably spit in and/or did worse things to the food that I asked for in place of the fishhead meal, but please understand the events that happened after you left our table. I felt forced to cover the fish head with my napkin, so his little eye wouldn't stare at me so cruelly, condemning my carnivorous ways. I pulled back the skin and scales, for yes, there were scales, and realized that I would be forced to navigate through his bones to reach the pulpy meat. My brilliant idea, Waitress at La Musa, was to pull enough skin off to cover his head. As I did this, my fish's neck(?) tilted back and exposed his jelly-like brains, cooked to perfection by the head chef, who is currently cursing me with expletives I have most likely never heard before in Spanish. After seeing my slain fish's brains, I decided to start from the tail, but a mouthful of fish bones harpooned my upper palate. At that point I decided to give up and to call you over, Waitress.

You were noticeably unhappy as I said, "Pretty please, I would like to change my order, or if that's not possible, just take this away because I can't eat it with the head staring at me." When you did return with a different plate of semi-edible meats, you informed me that the cook now hated me forever. I hesitate to admit that I rolled my eyes at you when you left. I rolled my eyes again at you when you told me, at the end of the meal, that I should never do something like that again, because it is VERY BAD; and you emphasized VERY BAD so that I could hear the capitals, even though I'm a foreigner.

So, I'm pretty sorry about what was essentially a gross afternoon for everybody involved.

Dean Allbritton
Former Customer of La Musa, Which Really Is Too Hip For Me