Post-Convention Reacclimation, 4/25/08

Marianne and I agreed we are completely sick of ourselves. So we’ve decided to make today a photo and video free post and we’ll all just have a chat, you and I.

Ahem.

Here’s a snippet about what it’s like when you’re in a foreign country and people find out you’re a writer.

So those who know me well know that I travel quite a bit. I’m often returning my friends’ calls from airport gates.

I flew back from Buenos Aires the day before conference congratulating myself and my high school Spanish teacher Senorita Azevedo (She seemed so old back then, and now I know she wasn’t. Sigh.) for my ability to succesfully communicate with the good people of Argentina.

I was there for about five days and as the cab driver squired me to the airport for my flight back to the States, he asked me what I did for a living. Now mind you, he asked me in Spanish. Luckily, it’s the verbs that stick. The tenses tend to be the first thing to go out the window, I find, but the verbs and the nouns are loyal. So, I told him I was a novelist. And he asks, what’s your favorite book? And I said Wired, because it happened to be my favorite book that day. And then he lowered the boom. He said, “Tell me what your book is about.”

This is where I looked desperately at the time and realized we had a good 45 minutes left and I was going to have to describe to him–in Spanish–the alternative reality, slightly existential, funny but science-fictiony, actiony but romancey nature of my book. I suspect if I were a native speaker it would have sounded something like this:

“My book is complicated. My book is about many different realities. It is love. It is time. It is…love…and time…and fantasy-like…and science-fictionalityish. But it is also very funny. There is activity. Many activities. It is a complex book. There are many…what is the word…complications. Of love. And time. And realities. Many of them. Many…oh, hell.”

But he seemed to understand and we began to discuss–still in Spanish–his philosophy on life and death. At this point my brain really hurts. You know how there’s that whole thing where if you know a language well, you don’t actually translate it word for word? It just comes out naturally? Yeah. Well, I don’t have that.

So we moved through his belief system which involved the idea that there is no death, but only change…(Cambiar! I remember cambiar!)…I think he was trying to say something very deep that I could only interpret to mean that we are the same as trees except we aren’t, and then we headed straight into how the Aztecs have predicted that there will be a disaster of cataclysmic proportions in the year 2012. He then said that everybody knows that the Aztecs are extremely accurate.

Dude.

15 minutes to go, we discussed the Chinese zodiac and found out we were both Year of the Dog. And then he produced a funky card with a bunch of symbols and told me to go research the “Blue Palm.” I’m still a little freaked out about the year 2012 so I have yet to research the Blue Palm though I do intend to at some point.

And all this is to say that writers fascinate people all over the world. You go straight from “Where are you from and are you pleased with your caipirinha?” to discussions that really get into a person’s gray matter.

I think that’s super-cool, don’t you?

Of course, my little “we are the world” and “isn’t my Spanish amazing!” buzz kind of hit a roadbump as I was returning home after the conference. I’m in the airport and I go into the restroom just before the flight. (Is this an overshare?) I have to blink my conference-addled eyes twice to take in what I’m seeing. It’s a small poodle. The owner has placed some sort of blue hospital urine pad down on the floor of the bathroom and is pleading with it. “Hace pee-pee, baby. Hace pee-pee!” And you don’t need high school Spanish to know that it’s basically an idiom for “please do your damn business now so you don’t do it thousands of feet in the air in my carry-on bag area.” Que horror.

Hasta manana. (Wish I knew how to get the tilde and accentos happening.)

Liz Maverick