The Eternal Student

After living in Spain for this long (6.5 years) it still isn’t difficult to see life here as new and interesting. I still have a long way to go as far as learning the language but I’ve come a long way. Whatever shortcomings that plague me in my Spanish skills I don’t think that anyone could fault me for not trying hard enough.  Of course, I could do more but that goes for everything almost all of us do in life.  So just what have I been doing these days to improve my listening, speaking, and reading?

First of all, I have been a fanatic about listening to Spanish podcasts on my MP3 player throughout the day.  I came across a website for downloading podcasts and audio books in Spanish that is a veritable gold mine. It’s called iVoox and it was like an answer to my prayers (if I were the praying type which of course I’m not).  I have been listening to boring talks about the Spanish economy to comedy dialogues by my favorite Spanish comic, Luis Piedrahita as well as a translation of The Canterville Ghost.

I made it through a nine hour radio broadcast made back in the early 1980s about the Spanish Civil War. I would have learned a lot more reading a good book on the subject but I especially liked the interviews of people who lived and fought in the war, something that would be impossible today as even the youngest combatants of that conflict would now be really, really old.  Of course I side with the republicans as I live in what was then the capital of the republicans.

I haven’t really sunk my teeth into a book in Spanish in quite a while even though I read constantly. I took a detour and read a few books in English in the past couple months. It’s nice to actually understand everything I read but I know that if I don’t keep plugging away I will never get to that point in Spanish…and I desperately want to get to that point in Spanish.  I have been rereading a lot of stuff just to help incorporate the new vocabulary from those books into my speech. As I have mentioned before, when I read a book in Spanish I underline new words with a red pen and then write the meaning in the margin. When I reread a book it always surprises me when I still don’t know the damn word.

I’m hyper self-critical when it comes to my Spanish but I sometimes have moments when I think that mine isn’t completely horrible

Baseball Memories

In the Bleachers in Baltimore

    "If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?" - Yogi Berra

What I loved about being an Orioles fan back in the day was that a bleacher seat was $4.50 at old Memorial Stadium.  When we had nothing to do we’d head through the bowels of Baltimore and catch a game. We’d sit in the left field line bleachers and watch our mediocre Orioles with a few greats on the team like Cal Ripken and a tornado of a closer called Gregg Olson who in 1989 was the first reliever to win Rookie of the Year. During many games we were like the stadium security, making sure the drunks remained civil and often we would heckle the most obnoxious or profane hecklers.  On one occasion we refereed a skirmish as we sat between some rednecks and a group of preppie punks. When the hicks started to make like they were actually willing to fight over a baseball game we told them to shut the fuck up and watch the game. They did.  At a game against Texas I screamed out at the top of my lungs to their runner on third, Julio Franco, “Julio, I have all your albums!” Granted, not a great joke but the entire left side of Memorial Stadium laughed at it.

My First and Only World Series Game

     "You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock.  You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance.  That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all. " - Earl Weaver

The Florida Marlins made it to the 1997 World Series after only five years as a team. Bill and I set off for Joe Robbie Stadium for game one without tickets convinced we could get in somehow. Unwilling to pay what the scalpers were charging we were resigned to watching the game on TV in a parking lot beer tent.  After the first inning Bill came back from the can to say that they had opened up another section of the stadium and we got tickets for $20! A great game between Liván Hernández and Orel Hershiser with homers by Moisés Alou and Charles Johnson.  Rob Nen threw the ball over the goddamn plate and got the save. The Fish won 7-4.  To quote James Thurber (in his story of a cigar smoking, beer drinking, trash-talking midget) quoting Casey Stengel, you can look it up.

Loosen Your Tie and Act Your Age

   "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" - Satchel Paige 

   "The trick is growing up without growing old." - Casey Stengel

I like the fact that at a ballgame you can act like a complete idiot and people actually encourage you to do so. When you’re 21 you can act like an idiot anywhere without attracting much attention but at a ballgame even seniors can get crazy. It’s a game where everyone is expected to stand up and sing a silly song. In Seattle after “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” most people remain standing to shake their ass to “Louie Louie” hoping to get captured on the jumbo cam.

The Longest Game of My Life

“The clock doesn't matter in baseball. Time stands still or moves backwards.     Theoretically, one game could go on forever. Some seem to.” - Herb Caen

June 8, 1998. Bill and I again at Joe Robbie stadium to watch the Marlins take on the Toronto Blue Jays in interleague play with Roger Clemens on the mound for the Blue Jays (I didn’t even remember that).  There were 17,414 fans at the start of the game.  17 innings later (and if I remember correctly there was a rain delay) the Marlins prevailed 4-3. That’s ten innings without beer if anyone is counting…and we were. At the end there were less than 300 people in the bleachers if you count Bill and me (like we had anything better to do). A five hour and six minute game; sometimes baseball is hard.

Bored

Grammar Nazis Put on Notice

The goal of a writer is to write something that others care to read.  Correct grammar may or may not play much of a part in achieving this end.

As a student of foreign languages I will take vocabulary over grammar seven days a week. This isn’t to say that I don’t study grammar but if you don’t know a word no amount of good grammar is going to bail you out linguistically.

If you’re going to be enough of an jerk to correct someone’s grammar you had better be right 100% of the time or you are the biggest jerk in history. Even if you are always right that might not keep me from punching you in the neck. Grammar isn’t in itself communication; it’s simply a tool that can make communication clearer. Language is the wine and grammar is merely the glass. Sometimes people like to drink right from the bottle. Get over it.

I am a very firm believer in the Oxford comma.

Please Don't Call This Paella!

This is without a doubt the strangest Valencia-style rice dish that I have ever dreamed up. I love chicken livers so I thought I would give this a try. Don't blame this dish on Spanish cooking because I've never heard of anyone making anything even remotely similar. If I didn't think that it tasted great I would have never finished making the video.