No Hablo Espanol

Random Fact: Sweet Potatoes are the candy of the vegetable world.

I'd spent practically the whole vacation nodding and smiling, understanding little to none of what was actually being said. I would raise my eyebrows in interest as if to say, "I'm listening," and then politely turn to Eric for a translation.

"They said you have nice hair," he would whisper to me.

"Oh...GRACIAS!" I would shout in their general direction as though they were hearing impaired as well as Spanish-speaking. I usually tuned out during conversations, relying solely on Eric to provide me with the necessary information. Towards the end of the vacation however, I began to catch on to fragments of sentences and random words I remembered from my high school Spanish classes.

"Make a left here!!" I once shouted excitedly in a quiet car when I recognized the word izquierda. My reaction was much like a small child's when they become elated at the opportunity to show off their smarts.

"That car is blue!! Look mommy!! A blue car!!"

"That's right dear," his mother might say, proud of her son's astuteness. With me, the habit wasn't nearly as endearing. So, the vacation to Texas to meet Eric's family and attend his brother's wedding lit a spark in me to learn Spanish. I had always envied people who were bilingual and envisioned learning Spanish would change my life.

It must have been a weak spark because a solid year passed after returning home before I made any attempt at learning the language. I reasoned that I was mostly busy with school and work and didn't have the time or money to invest in classes and lessons. Since graduating though, I still don't have the money but I certainly have the time. So, the thought of another day spent overcoming my mind-numbing boredom is what drove me to the bookstore in search of instructional books.

I live in Chicago's Boystown neighborhood and my local bookstore has a wide selection of fiction, nonfiction, children's books, local authors, and gay erotica. It's a cozy store so packed with books that it's almost impossible to move through the shelves without knocking something over. I quickly found a massive shelf full of a series of books called "Everything About..." Everything You Need to Know About Religion OR Everything You Need to Know About Anatomy OR Everything You Need to Know About Golf. I found the book titled Everything You Need to Know About Spanish Grammar and lingered just a while longer, looking for any supplemental material. After an accidental turn into the Gay Erotica section, I decided it was time to checkout and be on my way.

This would be a piece of el pastel, right? Read a few pages, memorize a few words, tape a few notecards around my house and I would be bilingual in no time. And I was ALWAYS being approached by lost Spanish-speaking women on the street asking for directions. And I can guarantee you that I don't look Hipspanic. If you don't know what I look like, reference my picture in the 'Whozits and Whatnots Galore' blog (I'm the one on the right). Besides, I took three years of Spanish in high school. Surely, those lessons would come flooding back to me in a wave of recognition and understanding. Incorrecto, mis amigos.

It dawned on me that while I may have been in the Spanish Honor Society, I skipped the induction ceremony for a Dave Matthew's Band concert. Now that I think of it, the only vivid memory I have of sitting in Spanish Class was being told by my neighboring classmate that my toes are freakishly long and should be called "Tingoes" (a cruel combination of 'fingers' and 'toes'). And my only real exposure to Spanish outside of Eric's house was poorly bartering with vendors during two family vacations to Mexico, and our usual birthday trips to Chi-Chi's Mexican Dining. Chi Chi's was a classy 'unlimited chips and salsa' kind of establishment that made you stand on a chair and dance while the servers sang Happy Birthday. It wasn't until high school Spanish Class that I learned the Spanish version of Happy Birthday was not sung to the tune of La Cucaracha. Those dinners usually ended with my Mom's enormous van pulled over in a parking lot because Gracie had gotten sick in the back seat. At first we thought it was just a fluke but when the tradition continued, we started ordering Grace peanut butter and jelly sandwiches off the kid's menu. (In a non-Spanish related note, Grace has admitted that she would occasionally lick the brown faux-leather carseat, knowing full well that she had vomited on it in the past.)


I also thought that my role in our high school's production of West Side Story would have had a lasting effect on my connection with the Spanish language. You see, I played the role of Consuelo, a saucy but compassionate Puerto Rican who worked alongside Maria and Anita in the local dress shop and who also appeared to be a bit loose back on the island. My role, along with the other Sharks, required intensive Spanish lessons with one of the school's Spanish teachers in order to make our portrayal of Puerto Rican immigrants living on the mean streets of New York City more raw and gritty. We would spend fifteen, even TWENTY minutes with the tutor learning mostly Spanish explicatives that the Sharks of the 1960's may have shouted at the Jets, our rival gang.

"BASURA!!!" we shouted in unison.

"Vaya Tiburones!!" was our rallying cry.

"Marchese!" we ordered.

"I like to be in A-MER-EE-CA!!" we sung in unison.

But the fun of the show wasn't about perfecting a Spanish accent. It was about costumes and beehive hairdos and covering ourselves in bronzer in an attempt to look Puerto Rican.

Sure, we all attempted to imitate Spanish accents to the best of our ability, resulting in a veritable hodgepodge of sounds that was surely difficult to understand, painful to watch, and quite possibly even offensive to any native Spanish speakers in the audience. My friend Rick probably had the most trouble with the accent, rolling r's when it wasn't called for, accenting the wrong syllables, and sometimes sounding more like Fantasy Island's Tattoo than he did Spanish. There was one particular line that required Rick to say the name 'Beatrice,' and try as he might, the name sounded more like 'Batteries' when showtime rolled around.

So perhaps my memory of my adventures in Spanish was cloudy. And when I cracked open my Everything You need to Know About Spanish Grammar book, my suspicions were confirmed. It would seem 'everything I need to know' required a much larger book.

At first, I was actually optimisstic. Masculine and feminine nouns? Got it. Rules of possession? Check. Indefinite and definite articles? Okay... Demonstrative pronouns? Ummm.... Past Participle Verb Conjugation? Que?? Soy arturdido. I closed the book at page forty and never looked back. The thing is, it's so much WORK. It would require studying and memorizing and patience- UGH. I won't lie, I had planned on writing this blog weeks ago when I actually bought the dumb book but had nothing subtantiative to say when I gave up a week into it.

So here's the deal, I figured writing about my plan to actually commit to learning Spanish would, in turn, hold me accountable to learning it. Once I click the little "Publish Post" button at the bottom of the screen, there's no looking back. People will ask me how goes the Spanish and I can't lie! Well, I can lie....but I won't (wink). Sooo, here it goes... I'm gonna click it...right....NOW!!!!!