Thursday, May 01, 2008

habla ingles?

karen's been getting on to me for being so delinquent with my blog. of course her blog is taking off now with people all over the world and web-famous people viewing it. if you're looking for pictures of kate, most of them will be probably be on her blog since they're on her computer and not mine. i will include an occasional pic, especially if it's a funny one that karen doesn't find as funny and won't put on her site like the one of kate with formula all over her face.

i guess i never mentioned that we bought an imac, my first venture into the world of apple. to this point we still had the gigantic monitor i bought six years ago with so many cords and things running from it to the hard drive. now we have a pretty elegant looking machine, monitor and hard drive all in one flat screen. steve jobs oughtta give me some money for this promo but it did free up a lot of space.

so as karen mentioned on a recent post, i was in las vegas recently, coincidentally for a friend's bachelor party and also my brother's surprise 40th b-day celebration. quick story about my brother, he's not exactly the most talkative person at times unless you get a few in him. he recently told a funny story recently about how a lady in his neighborhood was talking to him or something and in his annoyed sort of look he just kept staring at her without saying anything which inevitably brought up the age ol' question from her "do you speak english?" he was so taken aback that all he could blurt out was a convincing "yeah." of course later he thought of many other clever things to say but the moment was lost. well, like brother like brother. on the flight back home from vegas i was in an exit row so the flight attendant was asking a few questions, do we feel comfortable opening the door, etc. and we were all nodding our heads. then she asked something like "do you know you're on an exit aisle and we wanted to make sure you didn't have any more questions?" basically whatever she asked, the first part of the question was meant to be answered yes but the way she phrased the second half, the answer "no" or a shaking of the head would have been the proper answer. kinda like when people ask "do you mind if ... " and most people say yes, meaning yes go ahead but really the answer is no, as in no i don't mind. well, when she finished, i was shaking my head as in "no, i don't have any more questions" but then she looked at me and asked, "do you speak english?" i had flashbacks of my brother yet as fate would have it, all i could get out was "yes." then she tried to cover it up by saying "you know, a lot of people who don't understand just nod their heads to all the questions." not surprisingly, i did think of many other clever things to say like "que?" or go off on some other spanish phrase but sometimes the ol' reaction time isn't fast enough. the more i thought about it the more i felt that was such an ignorant thing to say. of course if i was white she would not have said that although there are plenty of white tourists who don't speak english and plenty of asian americans who do. what can you do.

on another note, i forgot to mention in a previous post about all the girl names in addition to the boy names i've been called when people are trying to get my name straight--tina, tammy, dana. i was actually in an elevator at work recently and a lady was in there with her daughter and the mom kept looking at my name tag and asked what my first name was and i said "tanna." the lady was so excited because her daughter spelled her name the same way except she pronounced it t-on-na. ha ha ha.