I know that what I’m about to say is going to cause all sorts of hissy fits, and people are going to get all fussy and up in my business, but what’s the point of a personal website if I can’t whine?
It’s just, the only Spanish I know I learned from The Simpsons and Sesame Street, and so if you’re looking at me like I’m crazy because I don’t know what you mean when you say “ocho,” the look I’m giving you is, “Repeat it all you want lady, but I’ve got to count to ten in Spanish silently on my fingers in order to figure out how many fingers equals your ocho.”
By the time I get to eight you’re so upset with me that now you’re offering only “cinqo,” which, luckily, I remember is only five, so I tell you, “No mi gusta.” Trouble is, I knew a guy in college who spent two Mormon years in Brazil so don’t think I don’t know that you just told me to kiss your ass.
No, no besa su culo, or however you say it, you bitch.
I’m not having a garage sale so that I can just give away all this stuff. I know people are used to getting things for pennies at little sales like this, but I paid $279.99 for that chair a year ago, and you can’t have it for cinqo. Or for “Ocho! Ocho! Ocho!” for that matter.
Maybe for “Ocho!” times cinqo, but I’m not budging.
So two hours later I sell it to another lady for tres, and after she’s thrown it into the back of her van she has her kid ask me in English, “Hey, woman, what happened to the wheels that are supposed to be on the bottom of this chair?” And the lady is glaring at me like I just took her for a fool, that somehow, giving her a one-year old chair from the Pottery Barn for only three dollars I was violating the garage sale code of ethics.
And you know, any morsel of humanity left in my little Anglo-bones left me for that particluar instant and I shot that kid a bilingual bird, and said, * “J’ai pas moi!” “J’sais pas moi!”
*oops! I hate it when I’m a stupid American.