The Whatever Case Situation

"A lo mejor..." said Joan and stopped, looking at me inquisitively.
"How do you say that?" he asked. (Joan is a man's name, the Catalan version of Juan.)
It translates literally as "at best" but that's not what it means. These instances are called false friends, where two seemingly identical words or expressions mean different things in different languages. My favourite is constipado which means congested, resulting in a ridiculous number of times every winter that my students inform me with bleary eyes about their terrible constipation. A lo mejor simply means maybe.  I figured this out years ago when a roommate once answered a question of mine with "A lo mejor si, a lo mejor no," giving me no clue as to which was actually the preferred outcome.
I gave my students the explanation and the story of my discovery of it. Anna thought it was hilarious, saying it showed cultural differences, with the Spanish unwilling to commit to an actual statement. This echoes something that the language and culture geek in me has been fascinated by since my arrival. What do linguistic choices say about the culture that made them? When like and love are the same word in French, and want and love are the same word in Spanish, does this reflect their view of what love actually is?
Perhaps (a lo mejor) the most extreme example of this is the Spanish use of impersonal verb forms. Se ha roto means it broke itself. You never break anything. If you want to admit your involvement in the events that led to the item in question's current state, you say Se me ha roto, or It broke itself to me, making you the victim of the item's nefarious breakage agenda. Likewise, should gravity snatch it from your noble paws, Se me ha caido. (It fell itself to me.) Never do you drop anything.
Sure, in English, it fell or it broke absolve you of the blame, but Se me ha olvidado? It forgot itself to me. I think when you report this situation as a memory escaping from your brain of its own volition, we can safely say that the Spanish have removed all notions of personal responsibility from the language.
This goes a long way to explaining the politics of this country. They are not necessarily more corrupt than other countries where those in power continually game the system to their own advantage, but consequences here are different. SPOILER ALERT: there are none.
This week's outrage is courtesy of the ruling right wing Popular Party (PP). It was revealed that the former treasurer, forced out due to a previous corruption investigation, had squirrelled away 22 million euros in a Swiss bank account. Maybe (a lo mejor) I'm being idealistic, but I think that in other Western democracies (with the likely exception of Italy) when the guy in charge of the country's money is found to be taking that money for himself, hiding it with the keepers of Nazi gold and using it for illegal payoffs to his own party members and South American politicians for land acquisition deals, that government would be out of power by the end of the week. Here, the government sent threatening messages to the TV station reporting it and promised an internal audit. My math skills are weak, and my accounting knowledge nil, but I'm pretty sure that money circulating under the table won't show up in the ledgers being audited, since the money was UNDER THE TABLE in the first place.  However, the PP seems to feel it has done enough to address the situation and got back to the important business of running the country by introducing a law that says being a convicted felon is not a legal impediment to running a bank.
Spain has a national inferiority complex vis-a-vis the western world (mostly due to the racist shame of having been ruled by Arabs for centuries) and when their institutions act this way, I want to pat them on the head and give them an E for effort.
They might (a lo mejor) want to look into it.

A Bad Neighbourhood and a Knife

My job is to help ensure the dominance of English across the planet. Every time I show up in an office or home, I'm committing a manager or child to the path of Western-led globalisation. Yesterday, I added cultural hegemony to linguistic hegemony when I cycled out to a government-assisted language school to teach the savages about Halloween. 

It's not a widely celebrated holiday here. Children dress up in February for Carnaval, and there's no set day for a massive candy giveaway. My first Halloween here, I turned heads and stopped conversations dead in their tracks as I walked through the streets painted blue with a Frankenstein bolt through my head. 

It's becoming more known now. Some stores decorate their windows in black and orange with skeletons and such. The kids I teach have learned about it at school. But this is not enough. While the local custom dictates that the 31st be dedicated to roasting chestnuts and eating little cakes, I took it upon myself (for a fee) to explain to a bunch of adults what the day was really about.

I cycled across the river at the edge of the city and into Badalona. The name sounds like a joke; some bizarro-world evil Barcelona where everybody has a goatee. That might not be far off, as I cycled past concrete fields of dilapidated apartment towers with graffiti on their walls. I arrived at the Escuela Oficial de Idiomas where my friend teaches and had hooked me up with this Halloween-themed workshop.

A group of about 40 people assembled in the small conference room. I taught them a little about the history of the holiday, history which I myself had only learned in preparation for the workshop. I can now add it to my ever expanding bank of trivia that makes me really fun to talk to at parties. Did you know that 2 billion dollars are spent on candy every year in the US? Wait, come back. 

This was followed by a pumpkin carving workshop. I hadn't actually done it in years, so I spent the last few of my kids classes practicing. I would show up at the unsuspecting students' home with a pumpkin and  knife, and proceed to make a mess of the kitchen as I hacked away at the hapless vegetable and roasted the seeds. The parents were game and the kids were thrilled, and thus I was ready for yesterday's main event. 

It went well, as it's not actually that difficult, and the students finished with their own jack-o-lanterns. 

The artists and their creations

My final jack-o-lantern

I repeated the whole process for a second group before cycling home to don make-up and blood, and head to a party in the city.

Unemployment

Given the distinct lack of the trappings of adulthood in my life, I had pretty much figured that, much like home ownership, a mid-life crisis was something that would remain out of reach. But this summer I pulled a Lester Burnham did away with the one tangible piece of evidence that somebody on the planet considered me a responsible grownup: I quit my job.
I've spent the last 4 years as the director of studies at Business First, the language school where I taught. After growing frustration and stagnation at work, I decided that the title and business card weren't worth the unhappiness that came with them, and handed in my notice. Today was my last day.
Although I have officially joined the 25% of working-age adults without a job, fear not. I have work lined up for the fall that will allow me to continue to enjoy the subsistence lifestyle to which I have become accustomed while giving me more time to focus on my personal endeavors. There are exciting developments lined up that I will address here as they come to fruition or fail spectacularly.
In the meantime, I'm celebrating my new found joblessness with a Bon Iver concert and international travel.

Sayonara!

School of Rock

I have spent my adult life doing two things: avoiding responsibility and judging the shortcomings of others making music and teaching. Like peanuts and bubble gum, this very particular set of skills (skills I have acquired over a very long career) united today in a salty sweet mix of passable competence as I gave a songwriting class to a group of moderately interested teenagers.
My friend, writer Sion Dayson, has been here from Paris for the month of July leading a creative writing workshop for privileged American teens. Over the past weeks, she has had them studying fiction and poetry while leading them around a city she barely knows. Encouraged to bring in guest speakers, she asked if I would be interested in talking to them about the songwriting process, as several of them had expressed an interest in that. And so I found myself facing seven impassive fifteen-year-olds, armed only with a cd, a laptop and ever increasing misgivings.
My usual interaction with teenagers is as a tutor with one or occasionally two kids in their house, often their room. The dynamic is markedly different from a classroom in July, far from their friends and families, exhausted from a month of class and trips. Also, I teach English. There is a right answer, and a wrong answer, and I didn't make it up. Sometimes the reason for the answer is illogical or unknown, but it's there, verifiable. Explaining the creative process is another matter completely. Especially since a large part of my creative process takes place in traffic. I get around the city by bike, and often use these stretches to work on lyrics or melodies that have been bumping around in my head. Combine that with my explosive impatience with cars and pedestrians, and you get a man speeding through the streets with little regard for the rules of the road, alternately singing and swearing.
I decided that was as good a place as any to start, and brought in some songs from both 2 Skinnee J's and Les Fat Jones to listen to and explain a little about the work that went into them. I gave some biographical information, discussed the genesis of particular ideas, the elaboration that goes into developing lyrics and the communal editing and arranging process that I've experienced in bands. And I played them some music.
"Is today Thursday?" asked one girl as a song finished, its dying notes still ringing in the air.
I think they liked me.