I yell at old men

That's right, I am a mean, mean person.

Actually, I think I'm just really getting into the whole Spanish thing. A great thing about Spaniards: they hardly take anything personally! You can yell passionately at someone for several minutes of heated discussion and once the issue is past, you can give them a big hug or the double kisses and wish them a great day. No hard feelings. It makes for constant therapy and less stress in one's life as feelings are not kept behind bars, but rather, are allowed to bound freely. There are feelings all over this city, especially on the metro and restroom walls.

So anyway, this week in my lesson with Juan Viduarreta, my 78-year-old student who has begun learning English over 20 times and who wants to learn now so he can eavesdrop on and talk with other golfers, I lost it. Juan has a learning disability and a bad memory, which makes reading articles, doing exercises, or any other method of learning, ridiculously hard. He gets frustrated easily and yells at me in Spanish, things like: “Just tell me in SPANISH what you want me to say and I’ll translate it!” or “I told you I can’t remember what I just read two minutes ago! Why are you asking me about this article?!” or my favorite, “Why are you making me read this article with words I don’t know? I want to read the stories I’ve read with the words I already know!”

Usually I simplify the exercise or explain to him that I just want him to look back at the article and answer my questions, not answer from memory, or I remind him that it is supposed to be hard. This week, I snapped.

The poor man didn’t know what hit him. It was a white girl’s rage. I felt it rise within me and it exploded in one big “Mira, Juan! (Look, Juan!)” I went on to shout as if I were his Spanish mommy that I would not, in fact, refused to be there in the future, following him around on the golf course, telling him things in Spanish for him to translate into English. This was an English class, not a translation class, and by God, if he wanted to eavesdrop on duffers, he would have be up to the challenge because I wasn’t going to do the work for him. I already know English, thank you very much.

He was silent for a moment and then laughed. “You’re right. Let us make this exercise. And, oof ***classic Spanish hand wag***, que dura profesora tengo (what a hard-ass teacher I have.).”

I agreed that I was in fact a hard ass, and then we moved on.

Later this week I went on to get into 2 shouting matches with my old next-door neighbor who has taken to calling me and my roommates “los blancos.” (We live in a big condo complex where there are few foreigners, so our whiteness is quite a spectacle.) The details are boring, but let’s just say, he’ll think twice next time before admonishing me about trivial hoo-ha. (That’s right, hoo-ha!) Otherwise, he’ll be in for another dose of my incomprehensible, rage-filled Spanish. And even worse, when it’s all over, he’ll have to smile through my purposely-sloppy double kisses. ***slobber slobber***