This side of that conversation.

Today I walked over to Sbarro to order me some spaghetti. I noticed a girl was sort of hovering around the area...you know, where she's not really in line, but she's clearly thinking about eating there and she's sort of weighing her options. You could tell she was concerned or confused about something, because she kept stepping like she was about to get into line, but then she'd sort of change her mind, step back into her hovering position and look even more flustered.

I didn't really think much of it, and walked over to the back of the line. As I grabbed a tray, I heard an accented voice say behind me,

"Excuse me?"

I turned around. It was that girl. I don't want to make fun of her, so I'm adjusting how/what she said to represent how a native speaker might express what she said. In reality it was very difficult to understand her, both because of her word choice/order and accent. So here's more or less what she said to me:

"Um...I'm new here...could you please explain how I order and what to order?" You could literally feel her embarrassment.

Oh boy, do I know what that feels like. I know what that flustered pacing feels like, when you really want to order food but you don't know how this place works or even how to pronounce what you want. When you don't get lettuce on your hamburger at Burger Bar because you can't remember the word for it. When you point at the word in the menu for you want because, even though you know what it is, you don't know how to actually pronounce the word. A lot of the time I would try to avoid this embarrassment by just buying food at the supermarket--you don't have to ask for things there. If you see something you want to eat, you just take it without ordering. The only thing you have to say is "No" when they ask you if you are part of the club or if you want to buy something from the sales. But ordering food at a restaurant or food court would turn me into a nervous wreck.

So I explained to this girl the process of ordering food at Sbarro. She asked me what I was getting, so I said spaghetti and meatballs. She asked me which dish that was, so I pointed at it. She said, "Okay, I'll get that too....but how do you pronounce this? (pointing at the card labeled 'spaghetti')" I told her, and then she quietly repeated to herself, "Spuhgeddi......spuhgeddi...spuhgeddi" so she wouldn't forget.

It really made me wonder why I didn't ask people for help in Israel. I guess it's because I'm shy in general, but also I was afraid of getting made fun of. But here I was on the other side of the conversation, and I have to tell you, there wasn't anything funny about it. I don't know if maybe my past experiences made this not funny to me, or if it's sort of a general thing that no one would make fun of another person for. My instinct is to say that an Israeli would have laughed at me for asking for help in this area, since I got made fun of for a lot of other things relating to language, but I guess I'll never know for sure since I never really asked an Israeli to help me with Hebrew at a restaurant.

At that point the man behind the counter handed me a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs, then handed me a breadstick. The girl then looked confused all over again, and asked, "Please explain this to me."

Me: "The breadstick?"
Her: "....yes?"
Me: "Well...it's a bread....um......stick---uh, I guess it's just bread. But it's good. You should get it."


Eventually we both finished ordering, and as we parted ways we gave each other a smile and a thumbs up.

It was sort of like doing the immigrant full circle. I wanted to be like, "I've BEEN you before." In any case, I have to tell you...it feels REALLY good to be back on this side of that conversation.

Aztec Curses

Say what you want about how important the cause of Zionism is, but some things just work better in the United States.

No, this isn't a reference to our democracy or our lack of dysfunctional government offices. I'm talking about swearing in Hebrew.

Back in Israel, if I swore in English people (even Israelis) would know I was making an attempt to be rude or vulgar, and they would understand immediately the vile or insulting thing I just said. The same goes for swearing in English in the US.

And swearing in Hebrew in Israel was...embarrassing to say the least. I didn't even really have to worry about offending someone by being vulgar. Mostly the problem was that my accent was not convincing to any resident of Israel. To fully appreciate what me swearing in Hebrew sounds like, try to imagine a Russian guy yelling in English, "Well, go shits yourselfs on your cousins, sisters-fachers!" Like, I couldn't come up with the correct combination of words and to top it off I mispronounced everything.

But swearing in Hebrew in America....is fantastic. So far I've sworn at strangers and police officers. Now I know how my nanny must have felt. I used to crack up whenever she would yell at people in English in her fits of road rage, "I DON LIKE YOU, MATHER FLOWERS!" She seemed so silly. But truly terrifying was when, having pulled her head back inside through the car window, she would then swear under her breath in Spanish. Long before I understood the full meaning of words like "pendejo" and "puta" and whatever, I understood that this was an angry woman. A woman not to be trifled with. There was something extremely powerful about swearing in a foreign language, under your breath, in a sort of growl.

Now I wield that power. Sure, any Israeli knows I have an accent....but your average American doesn't have to know. Today a girl was rude to me as we waited in line for our professor to answer questions for some stupid reason, and I just sort of glared at her. Without speaking a word of English, as I started to walk away I growled in Hebrew, "Whore..."

And oh man. The pay-off was wonderful. Just as I used to tense up and feel irrationally uncomfortable whenever my nanny would growl under her breath in Spanish, so too did this girl when I growled under my breath in Hebrew. All I did was call her a whore. Had I done this in English, a fight would have ensued and I would have been in trouble. But doing it in Hebrew, the girl feels like I've just uttered some horrible ancient Aztec curse at her, one which she doesn't understand and which she doesn't know how to fight about.


Damn it's gonna be a great year...

Back to school...

I promise I'll actually write about something at some point. But for now I just want to say that I've realized that I never bother learning people's names. Just as all the Women of the Wash were ____ Bitch, so now are all of my professors.

Professor Grampa
Professor Pantene Pro-V Commercial (She has great hair)
Professor Mom
Professor Fish/Professor Ackbar (She looks like a fish/Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars)

Also appearing are:
TA Bathed Hugh Jackman
TA Tuberculosis (She's from South Africa I think, so obviously she has TB)

Some random students I might talk about:
Fat Guy in a Little Tie
Man-Girl
Girl-Man
The Bass Girl (the girl has a voice low enough to make males with a bass vocal range blush)
The Dude Who Always Calls Over Some Girl Named Jackie To Sit With Him.
Cleft-Palate Girl (She doesn't actually have one)
"How-The-Hell-Is-That-Guy-Married?" Guy
The Monolingual Retard (he asks the most blatantly idiotic questions during linguistics class about foreign language acquisition).
The Girl Born Without A Concept of Lateness.
The Bathroom Fornicator (the girl whose room is right next to the bathroom has loud sex that you can hear while you're peeing).
The Guy Who Always Asks For Two Burritos In The Dining Hall.

Last night I dreamt I was back in school and had been assigned detention. My response to the teacher assigning me detention was, "Oh yeah? Well I don't remember your name! So HA!" When I woke up I still couldn't remember her name, so I had to look over a yearbook from junior year..... Good times!

Still here. just going through reverse culture shock. expect a proper update in the coming days...

Tonight We Fly

Well, tonight I'm flying back to the US. A weekend in New York, then driving to Chicago, then flying back to LA. I'm excited about eating tacos out of trucks, about apologizing if someone knocks me over, and about seeing my puppy (though that won't happen until Tuesday...).



Today I bought a newspaper. I walked by a group of 40-something year old men sitting outside of a shop chatting. One called out to me, "Hey, can I have the sports section?"

I figured I wasn't going to read it, so why not. I walked over to him, and he seemed a bit surprised when I started trying to pull the sports section out. Finally I managed to get it out, and he thanked me. He then asked if I liked music. I said, yeah, of course. He then pointed to a nearby CD shop and said that he owned said store, and then from now on I'm welcome to come in whenever I want and get a bit of a discount on a permanent basis, since I was such a nice person (at least according to this guy's standards!). We exchanged names, shook hands, and I was on my way.

I walked away smiling, and then I realized....FUUUUUUUUCK....I'm leaving.

It kinda made me think of a fable we read in elementary school, about a beggar man standing in the cold who is given a warm coat from a passerby...and it turns out the beggar man was actually Jesus, so the passerby gets to go to heaven or something. I don't really remember the finer points of the story.
Okay, so maybe I didn't get promised a place in Heaven, but a permanent discount on CD's isn't so bad!




Later I ended up drinking so much water that I knew I wasn't going to make it home. I decided to stop into a restroom in a hotel near my house, but the security guard stopped me. She asked if I was a guest, and I said no. She then asked why I was going in...

I didn't really want to admit I had to pee. First off because no self-respecting hotel would just let random people in off the streets to pee in their lobby, and second because it's just embarrassing to announce to strangers that you have to pee--really really really badly.

So I whipped out a trick from my mom's playbook. "Well, I'm a travel agent back in the states, and I'd really like to just take a look around the lobby." It's actually true when my mom says it, but I figured that since I grew up in the industry I could pull it off convincingly.

The guard looked surprised for a second, then offered to have the manager show me around. I thanked her but told her I didn't have much time (aka I was seriously about to pee my pants), so a quick look around the lobby would be just fine.

SUCCESS!!!!

Bewitched

So lately I've been watching a lot of Bewitched to learn more about the person I'm named after. Yes, it's THAT Samantha. It's been interesting trying to figure out why, of all people, I was named after a TV witch. Apparently it was my mom's favorite show growing up, so I'm also trying to figure out what she liked about the show. I mean, I'm liking the show too, but I don't know if it's for the same reasons..... All in all, it's been an interesting experience.