And that is the beauty of reading. Just when I feel so high up on my spanish horse, I open up some piece of literature and it takes but only a few moments to knock me right back down. You know nothing Renée, it tells me. You know nothing more than lists of cognates and multiplication tables of verbs. Oh, and your rolled r sucks.
But I am not dismayed. Learning spanish has been a beautiful, beautiful thing, once I got past having to learn boring stuff like expressing the basics of survival (which reminds me of a time in Buenos Aires when I ate or drank something gnarly and literally thought my appendix was bursting, I had never experienced such pain; and because my host mom paid small attention to my pleas of "Me duele!" the first day, I pulled out the "Estoy muriendo!" the second, and after she gave me nothing but pills (I wanted a ride to the hospital), I resorted to the computer and pulled up the spanish wikipedia page for appendicitis and shoved it in her face... I'm still bitter about the laugh she had to suppress..but for the record, I was fine by day four).
Anyway, what I was getting to is that I find much joy in learning new, cool words like tozudo (fancy word for stubborn) or meloso (sticky or sugary), and then immediately finding moments to use them...
Like in listening to the voices floating out of my living room right now. I am trying not to eavesdrop but this small apartment just makes that impossible. There are two, a he and a she, and they are arguing the way two people at the beginnings of a relationship often do: with a soft choice of words, with a certain reserve. Despite the calm, he remains so tozudo, he just won't give up his point. And she, with her husky, meloso voice, goes over her side of the case over and over again, as if trying to soothe an upset child with a lollypop and soft strokes of a teary cheek.
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