I Am a Strange Person

Consider for a moment how strange I am.

Ok now stop or you'll hurt yourself.  Yeah I'm pretty strange.  Now imagine how bizarre I must seem in a foreign culture whilst speaking a foreign language.  I am strange to the power of 'Spañol here.  I never really know how much of my weirdness the locals attribute to American culture or to Americans in general, and how much they realize is just me.  I do know that I get a lot of weird looks.

Apparently I have a very scattered vocabulary that constantly confuses my host mom.  She doesn't understand how I can describe something as "mellifluous" but then not know the word for "curtain".  In Mary Shelley's Frankestein, the monster learns to speak by reading Milton's Paradise Lost, a blank verse epic written in language reminiscent of Shakespeare and Ovid.  Think about how freaky he sounded speaking in complex verse with multisyllabic descriptors and extended clauses.  That's how I sound in Spanish.  It's not all the time but when I tell a story or try to describe something, I seem to fall into bizarrely elaborate patterns of speech.  It's my fault, really.  I should have known better than to choose prestigious Latin classics over simple Novelas when deciding what to read in Spanish.  The words for everyday objects escape me but if you want to talk about free-verse poetry or describe a work of art in hoity toity adjectives, I'm your girl.

Foreign languages are weird.  When you learn to read in your first language you are inhibited by your ability to recognize and process what is printed on the page.  So you proceed slowly from easy picture books to more complicated works.  I don't have that check on my reading in Spanish.  So of course I read the same kinds of books in Spanish that I read in English.  In English I read Whitman and Joyce; in Spanish I read Allende and Vargas-Llosa.  Therefore when I speak I sound like Frankenstein's Monster.  Maybe people think I don't know what I'm saying, maybe they think I'm just insane, but I'm certainly not normal.  I still make basic grammatical mistakes with concepts like gender-agreement and irregular conjugations, but I also use words like "lavish".

Así es la vida - that's how life is.