TL; DR In this post I discuss the benefits of gender, the convenience of Godliness, and the disadvantages of being from Iowa. All of these topics could be grouped into an umbrella category Cate on Dates.

I thought about what to write today as I did my daily run. As of today, I have the confidence to run in the bike lanes in the street. I’d seen a couple of professional runners doing that to avoid the crowds, so I figured if the locals were doing it, I could give it a go. Going almost at a gallop, wearing a green Basque T-shirt that one of my host moms gave me, and with my dark curly hair, at first glance no one can tell that I’m some kind of American with a death wish. If I were still running stoned, I wouldn’t have the reflexes to run in the street. But if I keep my wits about me and my ears open for buses, it’s a great way to get past the few bridges that bottleneck this city.

So, I have been in this city for all of thirteen days. In that time, I have gone on four dates. Not bad! It’s been one date with one guy, and three dates with a second. Tonight, I have my first date with a woman. It’s Thursday night, which means that a lot of bars in San Sebastián put on a special called pintxo-pote. You can get a drink and a bread + meat/cheese/egg/fish etc for 2 euros. For context, a one-way bus ticket is 1.80 Euros. Americans might be familiar with this tradition as Thirsty Thursdays.

I hope it goes well! To be honest, seeing men is gender affirming. But on down side, there’s more psychological distance between me and men. Plus, it makes me feel more straight than I claimed to be (think I am?)

The guy I’ve seen three times now is from Madrid. The first date, we went to the beach. The second date, we went to the beach. And the third date, we went to the beach.

This guy is a bit of a weirdo, but he’s funny. Here’s an example:

He takes me up to his place, apologizing in advance for the “poverty aesthetic.” We get to the flat. I see now that he meant minimalist. For just him, it’s huge. He has a white rug (it’s shag, clean, and feels nice on bare feet) and a fridge as bare as a single girl’s. I look around for his books and don’t find any. He doesn’t have any in his room. Then I see one book on the couch.

It’s Lolita. Joder… I check it out. It has a bookmark stuck in it. Apparently, he’s thirty pages from the end. He comes up behind me. I ask him about Lolita. The conversation devolves into talking about God as we leave the flat and walk around the city. God is a good third-date topic.

From what I could tell, the essence of his God is being the one among many. Moments of huge emotion that just hit you. It also seems that he’s a religious man that frequently encounters God. For example, while eating, tortilla de patatas con jamón y queso, and while dry-humping on his couch. Which was, weirdly, good enough for him and me. In fact, he’s pretty conservative about sex. I guess, if dry-humping makes us feel closer to God, then hell. Why not?

The gender roles in this interpersonal dynamic are much more important than what I’m used to. It makes me wonder, if my gender is mostly based on my partner’s; if my femininity is mostly called into play when it’s contrasted against someone else’s masculinity.

In a foreign place, my femininity is one of the things I can rely on. It’s like a fallback. I know how it factors into situations and I know how to control the volume on how feminine / not feminine I present myself to be. Although, because I still struggle to dress myself here, among Europeans in their European Pants, I usually oscillate between slob and whore. It’s a forty-minute walk between his place and mine, and on the walk of shame home I had to wear the date outfit that I had worn the night before. A Thursday morning, before 8am, a translucent white dress (if it had rained I’d been fucked), my denim jacket with a snake on the back, black tights, black boots (Garfield socks.)

It was actually the earliest I had ever been awake in Europe, plus I had to find my way home, and I didn’t have my glasses, so I really had to focus on being observant. I observed that I could hear the buses, so I went that way to a major throughfare, then I could hear the ocean, so I followed it. Then I could see Mt. Ulia, which towers over our flat in Gros, and I was home free.

I went home, activated slob mode, and got coffee in my pajamas. It’s nice to have at least one friend in this city. My last attempt at meeting people didn’t go so well. I took the guy from Iowa to a bar called Iguana, as I had heard from My Fellow Americans it was the place to go. I was hoping we could bond over Iowa things. My dad is from Iowa, so I could pull out maybe one or two pig-themed stories.

It was not to be. Iguana was cool, la vibra was not. It was patronized by a bunch of European college kids on exchange, and there no place to sit. The drinks were about 5 euros each, big as my face, freezing, and almost too heavy to carry in one hand. Like every other bar here, they played Queen / The Temptations / Stevie Wonder / George Harrison. We were the only ones speaking English, and our American accents stuck out. Plus, the conversation was flagging, so we got drunk. Then, we went to the discoteca (club). (At last!)

Yes, apparently they play Bad Bunny in the club here. I don’t know what I expected.

In line, we ran into his so-called friends. If I had suspected it before, I knew it now: this guy was at the bottom of the University of Iowa – whatever pecking order. His friends were masters of that passive aggressive Midwestern thing where you kind of just ignore someone until they go away, but I hadn’t wanted to go away. I wanted to dance with a large group of people, not just one guy. They found a great reason to ditch us immediately. He knew it, I knew it, he felt humiliated, I felt humiliated.

There was only one thing left to do, and that was to ghost him at the end of the night. Even though I told him (while drunk) that sure, of course we’d get drinks again!

I don’t know why it’s so hard to say the truth, or just say how I feel to people. When me and the Madrileño were talking about God, I told him God is change. But of course, like most things I say, I got that out of a book (Parable of the Sower.) So, what do I really believe?

Kaixo!! Hello!! This is one of the few words I know how to say in Basque, a language which coexists along with Castellano here, on the northeast coast of Spain. My host family speaks Basque/Euskara, Castellano/Spanish, and English, all during dinner, usually all talking over each other and/or singing.

In my last post, I made it seem like ‘Castellano’ is a common term for ‘Spanish’ here. It’s not. But, it’s a useful term, as Castellano is native to a specific region on the Iberian peninsula, just as Catalan is native to Catalunia. Also, the term ‘Castellano’ indicates that it’s slightly different from Latin American Spanish. With time, distance, and niche comes divergence, just like with Darwin’s finches.

This is all to say, there are some categorical reasons that saying Castellano is not the same as saying Spanish. Even so, I’m more comfortable with the term Spanish. Mostly because only the self-assured old-timers here say Castellano. For me, not a native speaker, it feels a bit archaic.

Today, like most (good) days, I went for a run. It was searing hot today and I waited until the shadows were long, about 7pm. It was the kind of dead, burning heat that made me think of icy blue swimming pools and cryogenic naps. However, a kindly neighbor reminded me not to complain, as it’s still spring. It will get much, much hotter.

Lucky for me, I’m an experienced enough runner that I can take some heat.

Water is too heavy to carry on short runs. It’s better to carry a clementine- juicy, and you can chuck the skin.

In fact, while running here, despite the heat, I have felt absolutely amazing, the kind of bodily pleasure that’s as rare as a good lunch at school. I’m sure this has a lot to do with my proximity to the Basque mountains. The running here is the best I’ve ever had, with the one exception of the Pacific Northwest in the United States, also a mountainous region. Compared to this, running in concrete LA is pure torture. You feel like such an ass weaving in between the desensitized, perfumed crowds, and the sidewalks are barely wide enough for a Chihuahua.

But the boardwalks and trails here are wide. I catch dense, wet smells here that I associate with three things: the UCLA campus before 9am at the height of summer; weed; and rotting vegetables.

Today, I was doing my regular 5k loop. Up to the statue of the Sagrada Corazón de Jesus, which overlooks the city and the beach, and then back down. I don’t know the elevation gain, but I promise you it isn’t anything impressive. I’ve seen pigeons waddle most of the way up.

Sidebar: I’ve been able to bond with a few neighbors about our mutual hatred of pigeons, aka el ratón de la tierra (the rat of the earth). It’s funny, because in school I learned that the word for dove in Spanish was la paloma. But here, la paloma is pigeon. But are doves and pigeons the same species? Not exactly. So the word la paloma has an information value that’s not universally true, but locally true, and mutually intelligible between bird-haters of different places.

Close sidebar. No, what’s most interesting about this story isn’t the setting, but the characters. I’m running, and despite the late hour it’s still hot. Later, I’ll jump in the ocean to cool off. You can bet that felt good! After sweating, ocean salt is strangely (too) delicious.

But, let’s rewind to the middle of the story, the good part. Midway up the mountain, a scruffy white figure crashed out of the bushes. It was a fellow Midwesterner… just kidding, it was a huge dog… this Mutt’s eyes were so bloodshot, he had either drank too much and not slept for several days, or (much more likely) he spent much of his time in the ocean, chasing fish and waves. If that were the case, his bloodshot eyes were a quasi-permanent fixture. He was so striking that I composed a spur-of-the- moment poem for him…

La campana me busca (The church bell seeks me out) un perro con ojos inyectados de sangre (a dog with bloodshot eyes) me muestra a tráves de la ciudad (shows me through the city) que se repican, se refresca (the bell pounds, the city refreshes itself)

For a few minutes, that dog kept me company. There wasn’t another person in sight… I said to him, Perrito, it’s just tú y yo (you and me)… it was nice to run with a dog again.

I have learned from lived experience that most people don’t leash their dogs here, unless they absolutely must. Even so, I’m almost positive that that dog was a stray dog, without human contacts. He was too large, scruffy, absentminded, and friendly. Like yours truly…

Mariví (the M. From the previous post, and the grandmother of my host family) taught me an idiom in Spanish: el bacalao está vendido. The fish is sold. I taught her, time flies.

I have been trying to make sense of my context: I’m here, in Spain: the eastward plane is landed: the fish is sold. And I feel like I’ve landed in a silken net of neighbors… every move I make is understood, and in turn affects, the compound eyes of the neighborhood, the women of the neighborhood. Poca a poca, bit by bit, I’m learning to conduct myself among them… but here, I am so foreign: only among strays and kids can I relax, tú y yo.

Learning bit by bit means that my goal is to acquire chunks of Spanish, not isolated words. That way, I speak without thinking. Each chunk carries an informational weight. In my native language, to speak without thinking would be a sign of thoughtlessness. But in a foreign language, it’s a sign of familiarity, of automatic thought… It reminds me of the difference between idiom, and idiomas…

An idiom, in English, is a pithy saying that’s packed with meaning, like you’re trying to convey the regrets of years through one sentence. And they’re often jokes.. Don’t count your eggs before they’ve hatched…

But las idiomas in Spanish means the languages. Polish, Afrikaans, Castellano and English are all idioms. It makes me wonder to the extent at which the English idiom and the Spanish las idiomas mean much the same thing… if language is a sediment of undivisible idioms. That is to say language is all contextual, acquired meanings. You can only approximate, or imitate, a speaker’s intent when translating… perhaps when I achive my goal of Spanish fluency, I will contradict myself.

And this is one goal I can’t afford to take lightly. I have one summer and I need to give it my all. My future employment in the States is dependent on my acquiring these language skills now.

Untranslatable, undivisable: idiom. Layers of idioms: idiomas.

At the end of the day today, I was on the phone with my dad, telling him how the Spanish are constantly using a general ponerse nerviosa, to become nervous, where I would, in English, diagnose a more particular emotion. Some examples: “the technician was angry he couldn’t finish fixing our refridgerator by himself and therefore had to call in his superior, who was younger than him” or “that kid has been crying for an hour and I am very frustrated” or “I went to a cafe, bought a coffee and loitered before the shopkeep came to tell me she was trying to close.” In all of these cases, the native speaker used “nervous” where I would have said irritated or embarrassed. But a more generalized description could be helpful, as it makes it clear immediately both what’s wrong and how common the wrong is.

Anyway, that’s what I was explaining to my dad, on the phone, walking past the park, when an orange hit me in the head. I looked around to exercise some Spanish curses on my attacker, saw it was a sorry-looking kid of about seven, whimpered Fuck under my breath, and exited the scene at speed. I had orange in my just-washed hair. My dad of course though this was just soooo funny! Until he saw I wasn’t laughing and then he became nervous I was hurt. (By the projectile orange.) I told him my pride was hurt and hung up. Unfortunately, I’ve never been good at keeping face when my pride is injured.

Now I feel homesick, and I keep thinking about some graffiti I saw earlier: GO HOME TOURIST. Don’t worry, graffiti artists! Eventually, I will go home. And I can’t deny that some times I feel humiliated. Like eating outside on a restaurant terrace alone, on a cool cloudy day, wondering why no one else is sitting outside, and then it starts to rain. But, I came here to speak and learn and live in Spanish. And it’s hard, but I’m doing it.

TL; DR in this post I wrote about idioms, las idiomas, a dog, and my feelings.

Hola a todos. Mountains crumble, the world turns, and the premise of this blog is changing for the summer. As I’m living in Spain, I will be writing about Castellano (that’s Spanish) from the point of view of an American (that’s me) straining to get quick with the language. “Essays,” is a bit much, and “practical language lessons” doesn’t really roll off the tongue, but I’m going for a mix of the two. There still will be poetry and fiction- ojalá- but right now, I feel practically urgent about getting these linguistic quirks down and out.

I can’t imagine this kind of content will be helpful to anyone who speaks English and Spanish well already, and it might be only marginally useful to someone who speaks Spanish and reads English, but I have a gut feeling that organizing these lessons will be supremely helpful for… me. There’s already a billion-and-one English-to-Spanish language blog posts / forums / 2 minuted animated YouTube doodles / ect, but as my first and most attentive student is myself, I’ll be working through the content by writing it out methodically. A close friend of mine, who grew up with two public school teachers as parents, is apt to say, “The best way to learn is to teach.” And I think that applies even if I’m teaching myself.

So, as a small child told me recently, “Vamos a fiesta.” Yesterday, I was sheltering from an afternoon rain in a panadería, and doing a language exchange with the grandmother of my host family. We were practicing how to say “Una panadería, dos panaderías. Una panadería, dos panaderías.” It’s hard to say! My mistake was saying: Una paNANdería, adding an extra N sound, and that mangled the rhythm. It should be: PanaderÍa. My pronunciation the first time around was so bad that the grandmother, M, shushed me: “Tranquila, hombre.”

Which also threw me, as I’m nobody’s man. I thought I was misunderstanding her, but no, this Spanish grandmother uses “hombre” the same way Americans use “Dude.”

Anyway, this whole charming episode got me thinking about the regular rules of syllable pronunciation in Castellano. The relability of these rules is one of the many reasons why Castellano is approachable to native English speakers, and I find the rhythm of Castellano hypnotizing. The lsnguage moves like agua corriente because each syllable, and in Castellano almost every syllable is a morpheme, and so contains an almost equivalent information value. Un mano? A hand. Un manzito? Someone dexterous. Un manazo? Someone very clumsy. Mandar? To give commands. Each syllable communicates a bite of information: Is it a noun? Is it plural? What is the noun’s gender? (Obviously gender is indicated in two places- we love categories.) Or- it’s a verb? What tense? And do on. So although word order conveys emphasis, the placement of morphemes conveys the bulk of the information, and the regular rhythm, or stress, is how we mark time across the river of morphemes. It also means that when native speakers cut off syllables: “‘toy’” (estoy) or “Voy a ir pa’ al cine” it totally throws me.

Ok, I’m going to lay out the rules of pronunciation in Castellano here. There’s only three! Then, I’ll demonstrate with a poem. Actually, reading Spanish poetry aloud is a very good way to practice familiarity with stess.

So imagine you encounter a written word for the first time, and don’t know what to stress.

1) if the word ends in A) a vowel B) n or C) s, stress the second to last syllable. EVEN IF THE SECOND – TO – LAST SYLLABLE IS ALSO THE FIRST SYLLABLE. OJos, TANtas, ataDURas.

2) if the word ends in a consanant that’s not n or s, stress the last syllable. soleDAD.

3) in all other sitauations (alledgedly) there will be an accent mark to guide you.

You don’t need many rules, as almost all nouns and adjectives in Castellano end in a vowel or, if plural, S or N.

Here is a poem called Melodía (1902) by Else Lasker – Schüler to demonstrate:

TUS OJos SE POsan EN LOS MÍos, 
NUNca TUvo MI VIda TANtas ataDURas,
jaMÁS esTUvo TAN anCLAda EN TI 
TAN hondaMENte indeFENsa. 

The result is a visually off-putting, but it’s a useful exercise. In English, it reads:

Your eyes set in mine, 
I never in my life had so many leashes, 
Never ever before had I anchored in you, 
So deeply defenseless. 

Y a la sombra de sus sueños 
Mi corazón de anémona bebe el viento nocturno 
Y yo camino, en flor, a través del jardín 
De tu apacible soledad. 

And in the shadow of its dreams
My anemone heart drinks the nighttime wind
And I walk, flowering, through the flower garden 
Of your gentle loneliness.