Ok, so I´ve been meaning to post this since Friday but, as usual, it took me a few days to get inspired and actually sit down long enough to go to wordpress.   I just want to vent briefly.  I am studying portuguese at the Complutense and we are on the food chapter.  My professor (and this is not the first time she has made a reference to this) insisted this past Friday that the favorite food of American children is hamburgers because, of course, all americans live and breathe off of hamburgers.  I disagree.  I like hamburgers and even in my nearly-vegetarian days where meat was eaten once or twice a month I ate them buuuuuut I really believe that in America we eat more than hamburgers and I said so to my profe and I´m sticking with it.  The kids here in Spain go crazy for tortilla española and sopa de lentejas but what about the good ol´days when chicken fingers, pizza, and God knows what else was in? America, America, please tell me you eat more than just hamburgers?!

so everyone who knows me well knows that i am a hopeless romantic and i just want to say that yes i believe in love. i´ve been sick for the last couple of weeks and thus have been spending way too much time on my computer but surfing blogs (something i very rarely do) i found a blog about another guy who saw a beautiful girl on the subway and wrote a website all about her in the hopes someone would see it and connect the two because they didnt talk. He initially posted this website: http://nygirlofmydreams.com/ and someone recognized her and got them in touch. Then they met. the Video is on yahoo video´s under the title “subway love at first sight”….

i love love!

In Daniel Sanchez Arévalo´s Azuloscurocasinegro the main character falls for his brother´s girlfriend who he is visiting in jail and trying to impregnate (see the movie. it is strange but good). Anyway, in more than one scene Jorge, the protagonist, asks Paula, the brother´s girlfriend, “if I had met you under other circumstances would you still have noticed me/still have been interested in me?” Isn´t that a strange idea? or maybe not. maybe it´s totally “normal” to posit the question about all relationships: If i had met you under other circumstances, would you still have been interested in me? I don´t just wonder about that for relationships, although that is curious, I wonder about it for friendships too…and maybe even professional relationships (at times). Are all these different types of relationships just a question of circumstance? If I had met this friend or that friend when I lived in New York or when I was in high school or college, would we still be friends? Or what about this man or that man? Am I only with him because now is a good moment? Or what about the person I met who perhaps would´ve been my friend if I had met them before but now will be somebody I met with whom I never had chemistry? Or what about that man? Maybe I loved him infinitely and maybe he loved me infinitely (or at least quite a bit ) but it doesn´t work because I met him too late or too early in the game? How do you know if it´s just timing? And does that even matter? So what if timing is why it works? It worked, right? But then again, maybe that makes all the difference. Timing is a factor for why it works but there has to be more…. or maybe not. Or maybe this question is like so many others I ask myself, totally unanswerable.

Today I was in Barajas picking up a friend who has come to Madrid (for the third and perhaps permanent/final time) to live. As I waited for her flight, I thought about the movie Love Actually. Yes, I am a Siegel so I can admit, without shame, to watching (and sometimes even crying) at cheezy movies.  It´s true, though, that movie (although I never really got how they all ended up in the same airport and what that had to do exactly with the movie) was right.  In airports, love is all around you.  Not when you are the traveller (well, or perhaps, but the hours of security and sitting and waiting ahead of you blitz all that out), but while you are waiting at the other end, knowing your loved one is going to come out of those big doors lugging suitcases, et cetera, well, you can´t help noticing that love is all around you, that every one is excited, that every one woke up early today with the enthusiasm of seeing someone they love.  Grandparents, parents (note screams: mommy! you´re back!), lovers, spouses, and good friends….it makes you forget all the hoopla in travel nowadays and just focus on the destination

Chuck Klosterman writes in his “Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs” about Billy Joel´s “Just the Way You Are.” He says, “It makes me think about all the perfectly scribed love letters and drunken e-mails I have written over the past twelve years, and about all the various women who received them. I think about how I told them they changed the way I thought about the universe, and that they made every other woman on earth unattractive, and that I would love them unconditionally even if we were never together. I hate that those letters still exist. But i don hate them because what I said was false, I hate them because what I said was completely true. My convictions could not have been stronger when I wrote those words, and–for whatever reason–they still faded into nothingness(page 54).” When I read these words, I was quite sad. I, too, have a number of love emails floating in my inbox and am sure there are a few of mine floating in the inbox of past loves. Why did those convictions fade? Are they gone forever? Have they floated off into nothingness?

Outkast in the song “Hey ya” says, “thank god for mom and dad for sticking to-together because we don´t know how”. Is that why there are so many e-mails like that floating about? Have people of our generation simply forgotten that one is enough? Do we keep passing from one person to the other hoping the next cracker-jack box will have a better, more-perfect prize? My parents got together and they were in it for good. It was a promise for life. Can that still exist? Is there someone (or two someones) that can meet and make that kind of promise truly and honestly and til the day they kick it? It´s easy (relatively) to say it on your wedding day but can you commit to be a “team” (as my parents say) and stick it out? I hope so. My grandparents have been married for over 60 years, my parents for 35. I´m not sure. But today I´m feeling optimistic about love so I´m gonna say “yes” and that maybe some loves you have fade away but that´s because the ultimate promise/compromiso is not just about love and passion but about a whole lot more…

When I was studying pedagogy with regards to learning languages in a foreign country, I remember that my professor discussed how after arriving at a certain level of fluency, there is a rejection of the language before finally arriving at the sort of goal/end point. Yeah, well, three and a half years after learning Spanish and achieving a fair amount of fluency, I find myself rejecting the language. Ever since I came back from my visit to the States (more or less two weeks ago), I have had almost zero desire to speak in Spanish. I have found myself avoiding all friends with whom I can´t speak in English or minimizing our time together to a quick cup of coffee. I feel impotent trying to express myself in conversation and totally disconnected from the vocabulary and grammar I once felt I dominated. Does this mean something? Is it all symbolic for how I´m feeling about my life here? I´m not sure…Such a quick turn around from my first couple of days back. I felt so energized to be here. I feel good about being here still but somehow, linguistically, not so much. Hope that changes soon.

In Elena Poniatowsky´s short story “El recado” (The Message) the narrator is sitting outside the house of the love of her life and says the following:

Quisiera tener la certeza de que te voy a ver mañana y pasado mañana y siempre en una cadena ininterrumpida de días; que podré mirarte lentamente aunque ya me sé cada rinconcito de tu rostro; que nada entre nosotros ha sido provisional o un accidente.

(More or less translated by me as: I want to be certain that I´ll see you tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and forever in a chain of un-interrumpted days; that I´ll be able to look at you slowly and carefully, although I already know by heart every inch of your face; that nothing between us has been provisional or an accident.)

I read that story in the Summer of 2005 and, at the time, this passage spoke to me of the love of my life (or so I felt/thought at the time), one who lived in a far-off land called Great Britain. I felt, before I even really truly knew him (do I even now?), that he was it. I still have no idea why I felt that way but I was certain. This quotation spoke to me of how much I yearned (yes, I did use the word “yearn”) to be with him and to get to look at his face and study each line of it. These words rang true in my heart from that summer onward for quite some time….

Now, here I am in the beginning of the Fall of 2007, and those words still speak to me. They remind me of the enthusiasm I felt for that love but now it makes me also think about how a woman can grow to love not just a man (although that is a particularly great kind of love) but rather that she can grow to love many things and how through distance and time she can still feel so very powerfully convinced that all these things that have happened to her have happened for a reason, that it´s destiny, that every day she might not (she being me) wake up with a man at her side and get to study his face, subtract hair, add wrinkles, add panza, et cetera but that she (she being me again) might get to wake up with a life she´s chosen for herself and look over the rinconcitos and feel good about it, feel certain about it.

I want to believe that where I am in life is where I am meant to be and that all the things I´m experiencing (good and bad) are happening for a reason. The town of La Carolina is approximately 168 miles from Madrid but was this Carolina (es decir, yo) meant to be not far from Madrid but rather living in it? The day before yesterday, yesterday, and today I felt I was meant to be here so, hopefully, that will continue for a while…