Dondeques

Look at me, going to a professional training conference.

I went to a conference on Friday in A Coruña, one of the biggest cities in Galicia, for language teachers. I went with the special education teacher, who is my friend, a woman who used to teach French at my school, the principal, and a Gallego teacher.

The first presenter was a guy from the US who had developed a strategy for teaching English. He didn’t talk about his strategy, just did a motivational speech for teachers, so it was pretty useless. I did, however, love the presentation because he spoke amazing Spanish and had clearly mastered the language, BUT he still had several pronunciation mistakes that I make, such as the stupid United States “r” sound. Rather than make me feel hopeless about overcoming my pronunciation problems, it made me feel great, because that means I’m not an idiot; I am at nearly the highest pronunciation level I will ever reach.

While the United States-ian (I continue to be uncomfortable with “American” and surely will be for the rest of my life) made me feel great, another guy made me feel horrible. He was a French guy who does the same job I do. He gave a presentation about his work, not in Castellano, no. He gave his presentation in Gallego. And I was like “fuck you, you arrogant prick. Here I am barely able to speak Castellano at times and you’re whipping around up there having learned fucking Gallego?!”

Let’s see if I can explain myself better. It is great that he knows Gallego. It’s an endangered language, so the more people that know it and spread the good word, the better. But, fuck, man. You make me look and feel like shit because I struggle massively with it, and at times can barely speak Castellano with the teachers because I am so nervous around them. And fuck, man, your presentation could have been useful to me. I could have gotten ideas from it. But you did it in Gallego, you freaking show-off jerk. I hate that guy. I don’t know him.

I liked the United States-ian guy more, but one wierd-ass thing he said was when he was talking about how students can’t learn a language just by studying it—they need to be talked to as well. He gave the example of “I can’t just go to New Guinea and give a stack of Bibles to the natives and say ‘here, study this, I’ll be back in two weeks to test you’. I have to go there, give them the Bibles, and talk, talk, talk to them.”

…Well, no. You have to not be an imperialist pig, you imperialist pig. What the hell is wrong with you?

And speaking of imperialism, the conference was supposed to be about language teachers. Language teaching in general. But it was almost entirely about English.

How to put my feelings about this into words…the current craze in Spain for speaking English bothers me sometimes. People say things like “Oh, Spanish people speak really bad English” in a derogatory way, and it’s become sort of a national identity and national source of shame that Spanish people speak bad English. Which they fucking don’t. They speak English at the same level (or higher) than United Statesians speak foreign languages. And you don’t see us deriding ourselves for our deficiency in this category. Why is that? Oh, right, because we’re a freaking superpower bully and we have the privilege to not have to learn other languages because we’ve nearly forced the rest of the world to their knees bowing to our damn language. (I do happen to love English as a language very much, I just don’t like what speakers of it have managed to do.) United Statesians can choose to learn a new language. It is a choice, not a requirement. And that is a privilege we have.

The emphasis on English made me feel scummy inside because my job right now is to be complicit in this cultural overtaking and perpetuate this mad desire for learning English. Butts. It’s one thing for the native Spanish teachers here to teach English, but it is another thing for me to traipse over and start blah blah blah teaching English to these kids. That was not expressed well, but I’m not sure how best to state that vague thought. You can count on the fact that with my small groups of older, more advanced English students this coming week, I am going to open up a discussion about what they think of this scramble to learn English and the cultural take-over. I will let you know what they say.

Luckily, the United States has not permeated too much of Spanish culture. They are so much more chill than we are. After we ate lunch, the teachers from my school and I were walking back to the conference, when two of them saw a store they wanted to go in. We had like 20 minutes before we had to be back, so we went in and poked around while the principal stood outside, checking her watch. Well, we poked around until 4:05, five minutes past the time when we needed to be sitting in those chairs listening to a speech. We leisurely walked back, and arrived at 4:10 to a speech that wouldn’t start for another five minutes. At least half the audience arrived between 10 and 20 minutes late. I just sat there laughing to myself, because that is absolutely unheard-of in the US. You arrive late, you are a freaking leper for the rest of the conference. Not here.

Oh, and sorry to make this entry longer, but I went out for drinks last night with Maria, the teacher of the younger children, who has a tendency to just leave the classroom when we’re working together. She is much more fun outside of the work environment. I think she was surprised by how fun I was, too. She told me some crazy shit. Crazy shit. Like how one of the 8th grade girls is dating a senior boy. I’m pretty upset about that, especially since there is no formal sex education in our school (or in Spanish schools in general, I think). What they have instead are “tutors” which is a class every week with one teacher assigned to a few students. That teacher chooses what issues to talk to the students about. And Maria is the 8th grade tutor and I think she does a really good job informing them about issues and they feel close to her, so they go to her to talk when they have a problem. So hopefully the girl already knows some things about how—-oh my goodness, look at me. I just realized I am putting all of the responsibility on the girl. I’m not even going to delete or edit that because it’s a reminder to me not to be a fucking idiot. I’ve got something sexist in my teeth. On the flip-side of that coin, I know that the senior boy has a terrible tutor, because it’s Julian, who is afraid of the senior class and no way would ever talk about sex with them. Maybe this boy has had sex education in the past. Let’s all hope.

Spanish Feminist Graffiti

Yay for feminist Spanish graffiti! This one was in Granada,

and these two are in Lugo on the wall right next to the grocery store. In Gallego, they say “onward with the feminist fight” and “death to the patriarchy”. It’s nice to know that there are some people in this city, somewhere, that think the same way I do, except in Gallego.

And just because…Doo Pies, the donut restaurant in Seville. “Because you know what you want…COME AND VISIT US! …and recuperate your forces” (I’m not really sure what English phrase makes sense for the last part. I am terrible at translating.) I kind of wanted to go in this place, not even for the name, just because I wanted a donut and the only donuts in Spain are the grocery store kind in packages. It wasn’t the right moment for a Doo Pie, though, so we kept going.

Brenna made a mistake by telling me she likes long posts. Sorry, everyone.

I went to Fisterra this past weekend, or ¨The End of the Earth¨ to the Romans. It was beautiful. I´ll post some photos later.

In a moment of down-time during the trip, I vividly imagined returning home and seeing Travis, Andrea, Krissy, and Brenna for the first time in months. I gave them all hugs (twice) and then we went to the Blue Colony Diner to sit around and say stupid stuff like we always do. I felt like it was really happening, but then I opened my eyes and they weren´t there. So it´s a new policy tonotvividly imagine seeing my loves because it makes me real sad afterwards.

Topic change—when I got back to Lugo Sunday night, I was invited to go watch a movie at a friend´s apartment. As I was walking over, the feeling popped into my head that that night, I was going to get into a fight with the two boys that were going to watch the movie. It´s not like it´s an inconceivable idea (I get into arguments with them pretty often) but I don´t know why my brain warned me of this time, why this night specifically. I´m not saying I´m psychic, but it happens to me pretty often that I get a feeling of something and then it happens.

So needless to say, I got in a fight with the boys that night. (It could have been because I was expecting it, but I did not want to fight—it happened pretty organically.)

The reason is because we watched a movie called ¨Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels¨, which could alternately be titled ¨Men Doing Things, More Men Doing Things, Oh Look—More Men Doing Things, A Black Guy¨. But I exaggerate. There were two white women in the film. They said about 12 words between the two of them.

I could not resist pointing out the bare fact that there were only two relatively silent, mostly absent women in the film. The boys had not noticed. The justification was given that the movie is about criminals, so it´s a mostly male cast. Pretending that justification makes sense for a moment, I´d add that there were no female police officers either.

The real kicker came when the protagonists called each other ladies as an insult. I made a sarcastic comment about how OK it is to exclude members of a group and then use the name of that group as a derrogatory term. The movie was paused so that the boys could give me a retort in rapid Spanish (which I didn´t understand the entirety of, which frustrated me further). I responded that women are 50% of the population and therefore should be half of the people who appear in movies. I was told by one of the boys that this was the stupidest argument he had had in 20 years. That is when I stood up, put on my coat, and walked out in the middle of the movie.

I fumed the entire way home. I know shitty movies like this exist all over, and if I let myself get mad at every one I see, I will cause myself to explode in a nuclear fashion, but I was insulted by what they had said to me. I have the reputation of being crazy here, and I think those boys especially are inclined not to listen to me. I can accept this by avoiding feminist conversation, but when the topic is opened, I lose me cool.

I do need to talk to one of them one on one so that we can explain ourselves—not about the content of the argument, but so that I can tell him why I react the way I do to him. A lot of it stems from my handicap in understanding and expressing myself in Spanish arguments, so I get frustrated and lash out at him in my anger. But no matter how much I beleive in the cause I am fighting for, it is not OK to hurt people´s feelings. And I think it is rude to walk out of someone´s house the way I did. So we have some making-up to do. I hope it goes civilly.

But I burn inside. It´s like my feminist awakening has tossed a match into the apparently limitless reserve of gas that I had inside me that I didn´t know how to release (I´m sorry, I can´t resist talking about this in the funniest way possible). So now I´m on fire, and I see no end to it. It´s actually an amazing feeling—nothing has lit me up this intensely before, and I´m driven forward with a passion that burns anyone and anything in my path. It´s terrifying and enraging and energizing and wonderful.

Continuing on the theme…

Of gendered language, I would like to talk about English, Spanish, and Italian swears. In all of them, many of the most offensive phrases are those that reference women’s or gay men’s roles: to get fucked or screwed, to take it up the butt, “blow me” or “you can suck my dick”. We use these phrases when something bad happens to us, and they are all referencing typically female or submissive roles in sex.

My completely unscientific linguistic study uses the equivalents of the phrase “what the hell” or “what the fuck”.

English comes out the winner in terms of being least offensive—hell and fuck are fun to say and reference no gender.

Italian comes in second, with “che cazzo” (kay cat-zo) and “che palle” (kay pah-lay), meaning “what dick” and “what balls”. It’s funny to use male anatomy for swears, but is it really necessary or nice or helpful? No.

Spanish comes in an obnoxious third. It has no good swears in my opinion. They are all wimpy, gross, or super-duper machista, such as the equivalent of “what the fuck” which is “que coño”, meaning “what pussy”. I freaking hate this phrase and sort of hate anyone who says it. It sounds ugly, too. Con-yo. Ugh.

On one of my first days at school, I was taught the phrase “coñazo”, which is their equivalent of “a pain in the butt”. The teacher who taught me it did not explain the derivation of the word and I did not make the connection that it was “coño” mixed with “azo” which is added onto the ends of words to make them larger. For instance, a “heladito” is a small ice cream, a “heladazo” is a big ice cream. (I do not know if those words exist at all—I was just trying to come up with something.) After using the word once in a very embarrassing situation, its meaning dawned on me and I have refused to use it since. So now I have no way to say “a pain in the butt”. I hate everything. Me cago en todo.

In Italian, however, the word “figa” (fee-ga), which means “pussy”, is used when something is good! Figa means cool! Can you believe it?! When you are dressed up looking really nice, you are figa, when you see a pretty painting, it is figa, when you do something really great, you are figa. How cool is that?

Italian also has some disgusting swears, like “porca troia” (pork-a troy-a) which literally means “pig whore”. And I’m sorry but it’s sort of funny and very fun to say. I say it sometimes. I’m sorry. Francesca tells me that there are so many swears in Italian that you can’t translate them all—after a while, you’ll just be translating them to the same swears in other languages. Which is also funny.

So that’s my comparison of the three languages. English always wins with its use of gender-neutral swears (what could be more neutral than butt?). Italian is pretty cool for thinking vaginas are great. Spanish just sucks. (cue me accidentally using a misogynistic swear as the last word of my post.)

Protests

I went to a protest on Tuesday night that I didn’t give a shit about. Normally I love protests, but I couldn’t have cared less about this one.

Here is what we were protesting: In Valencia, Spain, governmental budget cuts forced a high school to shut down the heat, lights, water, and electricity. When the students and teachers held a protest, the police responded violently.

So on Tuesday night, in Lugo, Spain, on the opposite side of the country, a bunch of people cleared the playing children from the gazebo in the center of the main plaza, climbed in, made a speech denouncing the events in Valencia, and proceeded to make a buttload of noise. The noise started with the clapping after the speech and elevated banging pots, yelling, and blowing shrill-as-hell whistles.

I didn’t want to be there. I went because a friend of a friend helped organize it, and I ended up leaving the gazebo early because my ears couldn’t stand it anymore. I didn’t care if a bunch of shitty high school kids who were probably enjoying the break from the usual didn’t have electricity. I realized that anyone who cares about education (and I certainly do) should care about this. It just seemed such a stupidly miniscule problem to protest about.

But at the same time, I am amazed and inspired by what I saw. These people cared. They cared so much about something so simple and so far away from them that they climbed into the gazebo, then marched around the plaza and onto the outdoor stage where a concert was being held, shouting and whistling and banging pots to make people aware that there was something unjust happening.

And there were nationwide protests over the Valencia incident; there were a thousand people at the protests in larger cities, such as Alicante and Castellon, and they are still protesting in Valencia:

And there were many other protests in lesser-known, farty little Spanish cities like Lugo. There may have been only 50 of us, but we made a hell of a lot of noise.

And in the US, we’ve got enormous threats looming over us with the reproductive rights restrictions that are happening all over the country that are getting closer and more real. I’m not saying we haven’t done anything—the people who lined up outside the Virginia capitol probably changed the direction of the transvaginal ultrasound bill. I’m just saying: what if people in the US joined together and stood in the way of the approaching Goliath that seeks to eradicate our freedoms? What if we in the US took a page from the European book and turned our anger and fear into unifying energy? What if we mounted nationwide protests against these human rights violations? What then?

Teaching Feminism?

So Brenna’s response to the “Inspectors and Beeches” post has got me wondering about what kinds of feminist-leaning lessons I could do with the kids, and the ethics of even doing so in the first place.

I mean, feminism is an ideology, and no matter how right you think your beliefs and ideologies are, they are not facts and you will always find people who disagree. So can you weave ideologies into your regular teaching? Because these students are not taking any sort of feminism class voluntarily here. They are just taking English, so what right would I have to add my views into my lesson plans?

I know you can’t teach without transmitting some element of your point of view, and I know that teachers use ideologies such as “you are all valuable people and deserve love and respect” all the time and those are important for kids to learn. But teaching feminist material in a non-feminist-designated class seems slightly like a grey area to me.

So that is what I am wondering, and I welcome disagreements and discussions.

My mom’s cat, Ricky, will preside over this discussion:

A Dufus Goes to A Coruña

I went to A Coruña yesterday, a city on the coast of Galicia—

right there, in fact.

I spent 10 hours there, 6 of which were spent walking, and for 5 1/2 of those 6 hours, I was lost. My feet and legs really hurt today, but I had a really nice time. I will probably go back again soon so I can actually see some things. I went by myself, which was nice because I could wander around and choose places to eat according to my own whims.

The only problem with being a woman walking alone is that sometimes men see you as vulnerable. At about 11am, I was walking down a street and an older man passed me and said “you’re very pretty, aren’t you?” I know that this had absolutely nothing to do with what I looked like, just that no one was with me to possibly object to what he was saying, and one angry woman is a lot easier to deal with than an angry woman and her several angry friends. (Luckily nobody offered me tea in any restaurants, right Laura and Alicia? I guess all of us looked weak and shy and cold that day in Barcelona.)

Also, as I was getting to the bus station at night, an old man who did not seem to be quite with it came stumbling towards me with his arms open and said something, but it was so jumbled together that I couldn’t understand it. I walked by him, and he turned to watch me go and continued yelling and snorting. (I don’t know what it is with snorting, but one time the three Italian girls and I were walking on a main street in Lugo, and an old man walked up to us and snorted very loudly and very purposefully at us. We kept walking, glancing back every now and then, and he had stopped and was staring after us. Very weird.)

Anyway, I took a stupid amount of pictures (14). Here are some of them:

This is the Tower of Hercules. It is basically the symbol of the city. This is a very zoomed-in picture from across the bay. I did not actually manage to see the tower itself.

Feral cat! Actually this was an extremely ugly animal when seen up close, but it was exciting to see a cat!

Seagull splat on the rocks near the cat. Did the cat catch and eat the seagull? Did the seagull wash up onto the rocks? Did the seagull fly into the rocks with such velocity that he flattened himself to death and stuck there? The mystery occupied my mind for 9 of the 10 hours I was in A Coruña.

Man, Ryan is really outdoing himself. He’s got an airline, he’s teaching the world English—what next?! Oh, you think they are not the same person? Well how many Ryans do you know? Yeah, I thought so.

The elevator for men, women, and people who are adamant about not being classified as either.

This is a normal building. Everything about this building is completely, utterly ordinary. There are no vials containing diseases unknown to mankind but a few scientists, no enormous stockpiles of limestone, no monkeys running loose and out of control. Andrew Lloyd Webber is not in here. There is no time portal and there is definitely not a verified-to-be-accurate painting of what God actually looks like. So please go away and don’t tell anyone about the normal building you saw today.

Letter to a Sad Boy

So last night, one of our friends came over for dinner and afterward, as we were all cleaning up and he sat at the table by himself, he became sad.

“I want someone to listen to me,” he said.

“We are listening to you, and have been all night,” we told him.

“No, not like that, I mean really listen to me.”

Yes, ok. I recognize your very human pain. But without even getting into the topic of privileged white boys, I don’t happen to care about it and here’s why: you have to learn to see others’ pain before you deserve to have yours acknowledged by others.

Earlier that night he had been talking about the girls he knows “with mustaches” who “need to shave them”. And he tried to imitate my laugh, but when it didn’t sound right, he said that it “came out retarded”.

You must learn to recognize the also very human pain of the people you mock, my friend, before you get all sad about how nobody pays attention to you when you’re hurting. Until then, I will continue to not really give much of a damn when you are upset, and not really listen to you in general because I’m constantly flinching, waiting for the offensive statement you so often make.

A List of Feminist Songs

So here is something that I’m actually truly embarrassed about and don’t tell people unless I have to: I really like reggaeton music. Scratch that. I love reggaeton music. I just love dancing to it. The genre, however, is rife with misogyny and basically encourages sexual assault, as does much of mainstream music.

SO WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU ARE A FEMINIST AND ALSO LIKE MUSIC THAT YOU CAN DANCE TO? I really do not know. I have made a small list, carved out of the long list of music I like. I was very strict with my standards and had to take out some of my absolute favorites because there is a deep-seated, slimy inference that women who are dancing in clubs are there for men to take home and devour.

Therefore, I have been left with a list of not necessarily dance-y songs, some are just nice-to-listen-to songs:

Little Black Sandals, Sia—A song celebrating ones own strength in decision making. The identity of the “giant man” is up for interpretation, depending on the listener.

Romeo and Juliet, Indigo Girls—It’s about clingy co-dependence, which isn’t cool, but when sung by a woman, it’s about lesbian/unconventional love, which is cool! This particular video is a collection of inoffensively bland photos.

Heartlines, Florence and the Machine—In examining the lyrics of this song, I realized that the interpretation is not as simple as I initially thought. But the chorus is lovely: “just keep following the heartlines on your hand”.

I Am Not My Hair, India.Arie and Pink—There is a version with Akon that I honestly like a little bit better, but from a feminist perspective, two women talking to each other about the social implications of hair is…better.

Paid My Dues, Anastacia—Great kick-butt song. And who hasn’t been punched in the face in L.A.? Ugh, what am I doing making fun of the songs on my own list?

Just Fine, Mary J Blige—A fun song about being comfortable with who you are and content with your life. The whole video is just Mary J boogie-ing down to her own song, as it should be.

Video, India.Arie—The ultimate love-yourself anthem.

Second post!

I’m doing it! Look at me! I can commit to something and follow through! Celebration photo:

It’s something we found in a paella once.

Ok, but now here’s me actually following through: first I will tell you what I’m doing in Spain. I’m a classroom assistant in English classes at a high school: 

it looks like that. It has 130 students and is in a lost mountain town of 1,000 people called A Fonsagrada. The kids are ages 12-18 and I teach each grade for an hour every week. I prepare a game or activity for every class and execute it while the teacher is in the room (usually).

I work 12 hours a week, Monday through Wednesday, which seems really great, and might be for some personalities, but for mine it is terrible. I’m used to putting up with lots of abuse on a farm for 10 hours a day, whereas now no one speaks to me and I barely work at all. The school is a 50 minute drive from my house, and I carpool with the teachers, so I’m stuck there for about 8 hours every day.

Soooooo, to fill my free time, I began reading Feministing from the laptop in the English Department, which is the size of a closet. It’s a feminist blog that links to all sorts of great articles that mostly make you angry but in that good, riled-up, I’m-going-to-go-do-something sort of way. Except I’m in a closet. So I have a lot of extra energy.

I’ve exposed to feminism before; my roommates in college, Brenna and Krissy, 

are hardcore feminists who I often had to ask to stop talking about it, please, it’s getting old. And now here I am, a newly-born, extremely angry feminist with all this energy and no one to talk about it with.

My friends here (three Italian girls and on Spanish boy) are wonderful, but are not feminists. Oftentimes things come up that don’t bother them, but enrage me, and I try to express it, but my Spanish is only upper-intermediate and I get carried away by my emotions, so it sort of just comes out in a series of stutters and roars. I learned pretty quickly that nobody wants to hang out with that. So that is pretty much why I created this blog—purely to help me keep my friends. I need an intangible, basically nonexistent collection of words in order to have friends. Make way for the Queen of Social Graces.