Garrison Keillor Told Me It Was A Bad Idea.

Doña C was talking about one of her protegees. Said woman is French, and married to an American- an American who won't learn French. Dastardly. What will become of their potential children?

As I may have noted, I no longer assume that the Conquistadors use guile. This is because C and his mother do not, and his father now believes that I am as dense as his wife and child. It is wonderful.

So I spoke from the heart. I said "That poor man." I'm an idiot.

After I spent a third of an hour agreeing that being bilingual is important, and that dedicated people can apply themselves and learn a second language as adults, I want to defend my side of the story. Can I do it with an unnecessarily convoluted metaphor? I can indeed.

I'm not a great swimmer. Due to certain physiological characteristics, I can float for a very long time, but I'm not fast or strong. But I love to swim. Given the opportunity, I will swim five times a week. I am comfortable in the water. Like a duck. Like a cork. Like a platypus. One of the best advantages of switching to Health At Every Size is that now I can float on my back indefinitely. I am, in all senses of the word, buoyant. When I swim, I am in my element- literally and figuratively.

I feel pretty much the same about speaking English. It's very comfortable to speak, obviously, and I'm confident enough in my abilities to try new things. I use words when I'm not sure of the meaning or pronunciation, I can throw in little quips and puns- it is a delight to speak. I like my language.

In both endeavors, my comfort predates my competence. My dear parents emphasized safely, then confidence, then ability. Once they were sure I wasn't going to drown or run around yelling "FART" all the time, I was encouraged to have fun.

I'm very vain. I don't like to do things I'm bad at. And it would take a long, long time to be good at speaking Spanish. I am weak and selfish. I am sorry, honored in-laws, but learning would have to be fun.

And apparently, expatriates are not big on new languages being fun. They are conscientious people. They want you to be precise, accurate, and to practice on your own. They are pretty much insufferable about this. Why would learning a new language be fun and exciting? Why would you bob about, like an inept duck? Get with the program.

My husband, who is not conscientious, has adsorbed this attitude. This is not helpful. I will point out that in the last nine years, I have gone from yammering on in mediocre Spanish to silence and a dread of short sentences full of pronouns. ("Dile que no lo haga." is one of the most terrifying sentences ever.) My beloved spouse can now keep up in conversations composed entirely of unspoken references to puns- and I think his vocabulary is 1.2 times larger. This is because terror is not a learning tool, and feeling clever is fun.

We spouses of the bilingual are delicate flowers, people. Cosset us. For the sake of your descendants.

Conversations.

C is working from home today. I overheard a conversation with his boss. Afterwards, I said,

"I'm constantly surprised by the different styles for office communication in men and women. If I were having that conversation, I would have said 'thank you' and 'please' a lot more and just a landslide of conditional statements and compliments. Even when I edit my brother's internship applications, he gets angry because I say things like "such an honor" and "very prestigious" and "I would be so grateful if..." He says it sounds feminine and conciliatory."

"Does he get those internships?"

"They're competitive."

"And prestigious. Do all my former bosses like and respect me?"

"Do they?"

"Have you considered the possibility that he and I are just aren't very bright?"

Quotes from Us at Tonight's Dinner Party.

"So it's like five humans from all different cultures, and an Argentinian?"*

*Said with innocent intent, by C.

Me, to dog: "Yes, it's pork liver pate with bacon. I am enjoying it. It's so much better than anything you've ever tasted."

Passing man: "It's not better than anything my dogs have ever tasted. I feed them exclusively on raw, organic meats and free range eggs."

Me: "Is this your dog?"

PM: "No..."

Me: "Then excuse me, we're in the middle of a conversation. So tasty... so much better than kibble... "

C has an e-mail devoted to junk. That is, when he buys something and they request a valid e-mail for a.) shipping problems and b.) spam, he has a special e-mail for that. One of the benefits of being his spouse is that I can use it too.

Unless I want to buy him gifts.

NOOOOO!

Quotes from C

"I don't have enough Skinner's boxes."

The 's is important, because it means he's short on the thin cardboard from his cereal boxes instead of experiencing a lack of operant conditioning chambers.

Advantages to Wedded Bliss, Part I.

So C and I got hitched. It was very nice, although there were a lot of people. Fortunately, A brought me a white ginger lei- I managed to smell fantastic through six hours of hugging and dancing and flop sweating. Even now, the wilted and crushed lei is holding its own against the other, less pleasant smells in my bedroom.

The most concrete advantage thus far: when I'm watching him sleep, I'm no longer convinced that he'll be stolen away from me because he is so very cute. Advantage to C- no more being shaken awake and told that you need to appear less adorable immediately.

bivalentcy

I'm reading Extra Lives, a book on "why video games matter, and why they do not matter more". C recommended it as a way to understand his love of moving pixels.

I am possibly the worst canidate for liking video games ever. I have no patience for skills where there are no rewards for mediocrity. (or actual rewards) I am not dextrous. I have other time-sink indoor hobbies which gain respect from the adult world. I have your typical nerd-girl isolation and abandonment issues, compounded by nine years of the "I am more important than video games" fight. But the book is pretty good.

It is carefully argued and bewitchingly written- the sort of book that rewards you for playing freerice.com with the vocabulary I'd forgotten I knew. The interviews with game designers are fucking trenchant- as is the self analysis. (One of the roots of his periods of video game immersion is bouts of non-clinical depression; times of deep sadness due to unmet emotional needs. "I played this game for over a hundred hours because I was alone in a strange place and had no friends." is probably the most succinct reason I'm likely to get for why C played Stupid China Game until there was no more game unplayed.) Lastly, his descriptions of the most memorable moments in his gaming history are instantly familiar to an old D&D player- moments when some quirk of designer intellect and luck give a scene unexpected emotional resonance. I get that. And since the author sold his soul at the crossroads for a golden pen, they aren't mind-killingly stultifying to read, unlike every cool story from a RPG short of the gazebo attack.

So it makes its core argument very well- games do have emotional impact, they serve to fulfill emotional needs like other art, and the design process is deeply deeply flawed. I do hear the last chapter is basically a memoir of a six week cocaine and GTA binge that undermines some of these points.

But I don't know if I'll manage to make it to the final chapter. In college there were dudes- charming, interesting, amusing dudes- who A pointed out were not worth the effort of befriending. They could be aquaintances until the cows came home, but there was no reason to care about them, worry about them, or ever be alone with them. They, by word or deed, clearly did not think of women as people. Spending time considering the inside their heads made you feel... subhuman. I get the same vibe from this man. They are little things- he uses "sororal" as an insult; his test for game adequacy is whether a real life naked woman can distract the player; he repeats a joke which was probably funny the first time. Not only is his default gamer definitely male, so is his default human being.

My poor dear one attempted to show me why he loves the things he loves, and managed to tap into my fear of cultural misogyny.

The elephant is striking down the dwarf.

Last night I dreamed that that one of my oldest friends- the one who can't seem to remember Señor C's actual name- kidnapped C and threw him a bachelor party. Unfortunately, the bachelor party was after the wedding, and during the reception. I stood there, surrounded by friends, family, and seven thousand Chileans- waiting.

My paranoia is slightly justified as this friend has offered to have such a party. He really likes strippers.

So to preclude such an occurrence, I'd like to propose an alternative event- Señor C gets an entire cheesecake, people sign up on a rota, and we take two hours shifts playing Descent of the Rings in SPACE with him. Sixteen solid hours of one of his obscenely long and complex strategy games. It'll be like Boatmurdered!

If you get that reference, you've just signed up for two shifts.

It IS nice, actually.

I floated C some money soes he could eat until his mom came back from vacation or he got paid. (We are still nineteen financially.) He just sent me a check- he wrote "sometimes payback is nice" in the memo line.

It's sweet- but it's sweeter because I usually write something like "LARPing Competition: third place" or "Western Boa Competition" in the memo line. I also give him nicknames like "Cuddles" and "Bubble Butt". I feel only moderate guilt!

The baby was very fine.

Important information for following anecdote: we call C's room "the Cage", short for Faraday cage.

On the drive back from the old west, I was attempting phone conversation with my beau. He said something which sounds ripped from the lyrics of a third rate emo band:

"You're in a shadow, I'm in my cage. There's no way we can even begin to talk to each other."

First Dance

So I'm trying to find a song for our first dance. We don't really have a song that's our song, because we are bad at schmaltz. I made a list anyway.

"Secret Agent Man", Johnny Rivers. We went to a karaoke party before we were dating and knew we both hated karaoke. And parties. C sang this.

"Infected", Bad Religion. C had a clock/radio/CD player until it mysteriously fell down the stairs and got stepped on when we were moving in together. This was the first song on the CD that played every morning at 7 without fail. I'd always sleep through the first minute or so and have really disturbing dreams. Of course, since the untimely demise of the alarm clock, no one's been able to get C out of bed at 7 again. This song is totally about a relationship, so it's still in the running.

"Barrett's Privateers", Stan Rogers. Sea shanty about getting crippled in a disastrous navel battle! I made C listen to thus until he appreciated it.

"Rivers of Babylon", Sublime or "Sad Songs and Waltzes", Cake. Ah, the discography of college. Also, Sublime's version totally leaves out the threatened infanticide and the slaughter of the speaker, so added points. Really anything from these guys would work, except, you know, it's all wildly inappropriate.

Or from our post college years, "I Crush Everything" by Jonathan Coulton, or "No Children" by the Mountain Goats. We sing these to each other on long car rides. We've figured out how to sing "No Children" as a duet.

So we have crazy person taste in music. Maybe the wonderfully recursive "Do You Want To Be In My Wedding" is the perfect choice here. It's everything I hate about country music and the wedding industrial complex in one neat package.