Staring at my computer wondering why every day this week there has been no Internet connection when i arrive at work, i realized that it is about time for a recap. Kind of like when a tv show decides to do a lame ¨best of¨ episode. This will be slightly different bc I wont write too much about things y´all already know about. Consider it my quarterly earnings report. Except there will be no mention of earnings and it can only loosely be defined as report.

First, it is Saturday, and I am at school. This ain´t no snowday make up or anything similar. Ok, it is similar kind of, but I am going to ignore that because it makes my complaint stronger.

As I feel the need to reference billy madison all the time (and I do think some of this stems from the fact that I am from madison county, va and my name is billy, to some) I also have kind of skipped some grades in my learning of Spanish. I started, as you might remember with third grade. The pictures, the charts, the dearth of hard words or concepts; those were the days. However, as I knew practically no Spanish, it was not all that easy. Fourth grade rolled around and I was more determined. Unfortunately, the authors of that book were ready for me and they supplied me with lots of useless words (I know they are not useless but I found myself looking up words like ¨chapapote¨ which means asphalt. Right. I use that one every day).

Anyhoo, it took my longer to get through those pages than I anticipated. Then I skipped a grade and went directly to sixth grade. There were short stories and grammar in this book (because it was a Spanish Spanish book, intead of a Spanish history book) and suddenly I was in my element. I rocked through the 200 pages in about two weeks and I was on a roll. I took a slight detour to begin reading ¨Olor de la guayaba¨ a book of interviews with Gabriel garcía marquez. The book is amazing; he discusses so much and references all the works of his I have read. It is amazing to finally be reading the words of this author in his native language. Best of all, it is an interview book, so I am getting a feel for intelligent conversation at the same time. But instead of reading that straight on through, I am back into the school book phase.

Brace yourselves. I am now in my second year of high school. I know. I went from 6th to 10th grade overnight. Rockstar. I know.

The best part is that so many of the words are cognates or, amazingly, part of my vocabulary. i should clarify this first. When I read a word or hear a word, I know what it means. I cannot actually remember all these words to use in sentences of my own creation, but I am letting that go right now. I am feeling pretty confident.

My speaking and listening ability could of course be better, but I am where I want to be with my reading ability, so I am going to focus on that positive right now.

I came to the centro de nada, knew no one, met a bunch of people, then began weeding out the baddies. First, there was psycho roomie. No more needed there. Then, I was hanging out with some seemingly cool guys who later turned out to be jerks. Arrogant, ignorant and/or pathetic. Ok, there are only two like that, but out of 5, that is a high percentage. I have since moved on and mingle with a slightly different crowd during the week. I no longer go out to eat with the boys or hang out in the square and listen to them babble about crap that never concerned me. I go home and read. I am much happier with this self-imposed solitude.

Basically, I have streamlined. It means I have no real social life right now, but a social life in these parts is quite the relative term anyway. Fun is there to be had, I just do it with different peeps or by myself.

Doing more things alone, going to the bank, doctors, etc. has forced me to be more self-reliant in my Spanish ability. I am a fairly self-reliant person, but I was super nervous down here bc at first I understood no one and could not make people understand me. I still have issues with the super backwater peeps whose Spanish is so horrible that they cannot tell when mine is correct (I only say this bc my friends have told me on certain occasions that I have said things correctly and that the other person just did not get it).

A big breakthrough was last weekend when I went to get a telephone. I know I said I did not want one, but as I am travelling over vacation it is safer to have a phone. I am meeting some mexi friends in different cities and now I can text them when I arrive and they can tell me where to meet them. Not too expensive and I am only going to use it for that, so it is ok. Also, it is a prepaid deal so I don’t have some monthly bill, I only pay for the texts or calls with a prepaid calling card (plus, I received 300 pesos worth of free calls and texts when I bought the stupid thing so conceivably that could last me another six months. Each text is one peso and each call is 4 pesos a minute, so it will take me a while to use them up).

So the breakthrough was that when I bought the phone, the guy at the store handed me the phone as it was ringing. I had no idea what was going on, but basically I had to talk to an operator and tell him my information and answer some q´s. I was stoked bc I understood everything he said on the phone! Normally, phones are intimidating as they are unclear and I cannot see the person as s/he talks to me, which makes understanding more difficult. But I did it! I was very happy and my confidence has continued to grow since then.

The number is 971-115-4109. not sure what the country code is or how you call it from the states, but if there were an emergency, there you go.

Am I fluent in Spanish? Hell no. can I understand most things people say? Depends. But, I can do everything I need to do and have some random conversations about topics that are interesting to me and be fairly comfortable. The next six to eight months should just build on this foundation and so I am hopeful.

Here I am. Almost 4 months in and pretty comfortable with everything. It feels good to be here and each day keeps getting easier. Some things are just difficult: heat, lack of rapid transport (buses are slow), a large group of tight friends, but whatever. If it was going to be easy, it would not have been this much fun. I sometimes cannot believe I have made it this far. Conversely, it is funny that I ever doubted that I could. Life, in short, is still good.

I was reading my high school book last night and it said that there is a link between happiness and genes. Basically, some people are predisposed to be happy and others, no matter how hard they try and going to be unhappy. I don’t know if I really believe this. Amy, what do you think about it? It sound like crap to me but they quoted some study done at uni of Illinois urbana which seemed official. Is this true? Is this an oversimplification? Are people born happy and sad? Kind of scary to think about if it is true.

Oh well, don’t believe everything that you read. Is this English 105 at NAU again? Have fun grading argument papers Cuban b. we are watching a movie in my classes today, so I am essentially taking the day off. My sickness has not really improved that much so I look forward to a day off tomorrow when I can sleep and rest and read. Then, back to work on Monday for my last week of class before vacation. Yahtzee.

Ok, how frustrating is it to realize that the moment the freezer ladies (computer people) get to work the internet connection comes back. I swear they simply unplug our connection at night and then everyone, 90% of the faculty, who start work at 8am have to wait until 9am for their lazy asses to roll into work. Absolutely ridiculous. They don’t even try to play it off like they fixed something and it took ten minutes. I hear their door close (the refrigerator, their office, is next to mine) and then the connection appears. I love the unistmo (the uni where I work)!