The REAL Post

Hardy har-har guys. I hate you all. Picking on a poor, stressed girl for accidentally clicking the wrong button and publishing her notes for her next post.

You should be ashamed of yourselves.

And now that this post won't be a surprise to any of you, why even bother? Oh well.

As you know I returned home from London rockin' a nasty cough and swollen nodes. As fashionable, and elegant as it may have been to cough up globs of phlegm, it has been unpleasant and I am still not entirely better. I am well on my way, but oy, I'm tired of blowing my nose and gagging in the morning (aside from brushing my teeth).

I have company though. I have company in the form of the mysterious stranger who lives in the apartment above us who I hear performing a variety of bodily functions every morning and throughout the day. The poor man's forte appears to be smoker's cough (to which the majority of the population here is well on its way). Any time I'm in the bathroom I may be startled by a loud burst of moistened hacking. I feel so badly for him.

If I didn't think smoking was an addictive, pointless waste of money and quality of life at the expense of other people's respiratory tracts before, that man has scared me straight. That and the video I watched in high school where the man's broken voice gurgled out of the hole in this throat and made me gag...like most things.

Sorry if that seems harsh, I've just been downwind, or right next to, or forced to move because of smokers so many times here and I have always been paranoid about/felt suffocated by cigarette smoke. Por ejemplo, last week, there was a time when I couldn't breath at all because I was really sick and out of breath from running to catch the bus. I walked down the street, straining to catch a good breath of air, but everywhere I turned, I would start to deeply inhale toxic fumes which my lungs would then reject, causing me to start hacking demurely and approach an asthma attack threshold.

Not fun. Don't smoke.

On a lighter, healthier note, I know I spend a lot of blog time being boggled by María's lack of short/long term memory, and although today, during lunch, she asked me for the 10th time what exams I had this week, asked for at least the 10th time why Ellen doesn't have the same number of exams as me, and she has been repeatedly and adamantly denying the sacredly held belief that I have red hair (don't ask me why; no, I don't know what other color it would be, and yes, I do find it a little upsetting...Steph will understand), I think it's high time I gave María the props she deserves for being a fantastic Madre Española:

1. María spends her day in the house wearing her nightie, but whenever she goes out, even if it's for 15 minutes, María gets really excited, gets totally arreglada-ed (done-up) and often comes and talks to us, calling us pet names and describing excitedly what she's going to go do that day or who she's going to see that night. She dons this little satisfied smile on her face--and I actually think one of my photobucket photos demonstrates it quite nicely, if memory serves--and when she returns, she always tells us with equal excitement what she heard about this-and-that or so-and-so. So cute.

2. This is selfish, but I like María because María really likes us. She really likes us. She calls us "hijas" and she's always telling people what good girls we are and she wants Cam to live with her next year, because if we say Cam is a good girl then she must be a good girl. She's always complementing us and she always wants to know about our days or what's going on in lives (no matter how many times we have to say it). To illustrate, whenever I talk to Tyler she says something akin to, "You talked to your--your boyfriend, your love today, no?...."What's up with you two? How is he?"..."How long did you talk?"..."2 hours? Oy-yoy-yoy-yoy-yoy, believe it, listen, 2 hours! Look, chiquita, believe it"..."Ah, love. How nice. You miss your boyfriend. Talking for 2 hours. Oy, chiquita." Ellen is probably vividly imagining this interchange as she reads it, though it doesn't possess quite the same tone in English.

3. I think it also reflects quite well on María just how hard it is to make her mad. When the upstairs neighbor's washing machine broke and it flooded our apartment, she wasn't cranky at all. She was industrious, yes, but not angry. All she kept saying was, "Oh, pobres, this is the 5th time this has happened, the pobres. They thought they had it fixed. Oh, the pobres. They can't help it. It's not their fault." And although she has a prominent tendency to declare whether or not people are decidedly ugly or pretty, whenever she talks about her friends, you can tell that she really cares about them. She talks to several people on the phone every day and is always telling us about her extended family, which may or may not be massive. She talks about what they do, and even if something bad happens, she never seems upset by it, she just tucks it under her wing and keeps going, never crying over the spilt milk of life. She just says she'll make a special errand to mass and pray for people.

Finally, in summation, in conclusion, fourthly (I know how you like that Mom), I like María and as I hear more and more about others' señoras, I feel more and more blessed to have such a good relationship with her. I've heard stories of señoras threatening to cut a girl's hair because she was shedding too much, or a señora telling girls they will never get husbands because they can't make their beds properly, or a señora harping on one roommate to the other. I know confidently that María would never do anything like that. I like knowing that.

I also like knowing that María likes it when the older construction workers call her 'guapa'.

A particularly aggresive construction worker around our building is very excited that I'm a redhead while another was so loud and obnoxious yesterday that I accidently started laughing. Not a good idea.

You know what? I was going to vent in this post about a lot of frustrations I have been experiencing lately: feeling like I haven't done anything with my time here, like my Spanish isn't mejorar-ing, etc., but I don't think this is the post for that. I think it's more important to seize this final month (and a month exactly from today it is).

However, there is a small tale from Oxford that I forgot to tell (Ellen, you will not want to read this last part, like bullfighting-presentation not want).

When Kelsey and I strolled throught the covered market in Oxford, someone walked by me and I backed up to let them through, my hand brushing a strange texture as I shifted. I turned around and peered upwards, only to see two hooves strung together from which dangled the tawny corpse of a barely-doe/almost-fawn...bluntly decapitated, in all its horrifying lifelessness.
I very soon after left the covered market, not feeling too well.

Anyway, two presentations and three exams down...one to go. I'm hoping to kick Zurbarán, Murillo, and Velasquéz in the face.

Hope everything is going well, and in parting, here is a real haiku for Mom:

"Stole your thought?
I do not read minds.
Tyler wins"

Points for creativity though!