Lumberton High School 25th Reunion

I went to my 25th High School reunion this weekend. It was an eye-opening, life-affirming, clarifying experience.

I went into the reunion with a good deal of trepidation. As I've written elsewhere in this blog, I had the impression that I was an "unpopular geek" during High School (see http://timothychenallen.blogspot.com/2007/06/my-25th-high-school-reunion-this-friday.html). After 25 years, it turns out I was the only person in my High School who thought that. I showed up for the initial event on Friday night after flying in from Philadelphia, and had the embarrassing realization that I had problems recognizing even some of my closest friends. 25 years had changed all of us quite a lot. One of my best friends in school, Walter Mobley, was completely unrecognizable to me until he spoke, whereupon I recognized him immediately.

My next realization was that the changes of 25 years had left most of us a lot better looking than we were in High School. I decided that Brian Fournier had gotten to look exactly like Brian Fournier should have looked all along, for example.

I had interesting conversations with people I had been afraid to talk to in High School. After 25 years, these people had stopped being people for me and had started becoming concepts. I found myself saying to myself, "wow, I'm talking with THE Kristi Ransom", then realizing that Kristi is a person who has continued to live and grow for exactly the same amount of time as I have since graduation.

And I arrived at the conclusion that everyone, and I mean everyone, was so self-conscious in High School that it was impossible for us to have an accurate impression of what was really happening around us. As self-absorbed as I am now, I was MUCH more so in High School. We had all found personae that we hoped would work for us, trying out new stuff occasionally when we found that things didn't work. I believe that's what we've done since then as well. But I think that now that we're all in our forties we all seemed to have dropped a lot of the pretense and had come to accept the reality of our situations better.

I found that some of my most beloved teachers in High School were not so very beloved by many of my classmates. This came as a shock.

The first night I was one of the last to leave, sitting in a circle with Jeannie Landry, Laura Miller, and Mike Kelly, hashing out old times. They were three people I had known since I was nine years old. Good lord, that's 33 years now. Jeannie's husband Alexander was with us, and I was pleased with what a nice guy he was. I had been a little dismayed with how many of us had divorced-- it seemed like all but four of us out of the 50 or so attendees had divorced. Surprisingly, almost all had remarried, and they all seemed to be happy with their current spouses.

I went for a run the next morning with every intention of running to the end of my road and back. I ended up running through the entire town. Lumberton has grown so much in the last 25 years. We had one traffic light when I was here, and the High School I went to was newly constructed in our sophomore year. Now the schools have grown to have more buildings to house many more students. There are lots of restaurants (we had Sonic and the Wagon Wheel), an office building, and many more businesses in general. Just about everyone in the class had remarked on this, and how Lumberton had ceased to be our Lumberton about ten years ago.

I have to say that the kids in Lumberton sure looked and acted a lot like we did when I was a kid.

I hung out with Troy Soileau the second day for much of the day. We drove around and saw the entire town and then drove out to Lake Charles for a while. We caught up on our families of origin and the families we were building ourselves. Troy was one of the people who remained married to his original spouse, Pamela. They seemed to get along really well. As I listened to him talk, I thought about how all of us had fought our own personal battles, and how some of our most harrowing experiences had made us what we were. Every one of the 128 members of our graduating class had lived through the exact same number of days since graduation day, and many of those days were filled with crises, disappointments, and occasionally, triumphs.

The second night more people came and I was reunited with three of the four guys who I considered the Geek Crowd (Charles Johnson, Walter Mobley, Paul Smith, and Markel Kelly-- Markel couldn't make it), who I hung out with my last few years. They all seemed to have grown into their lives and were happy. They also seemed a lot less geeky now, more like three guys who had found their grooves.

I was elected "least changed boy". It was nice-- the question came up about who had changed least and just about everyone said my name.

I had a long conversation with Ginger Jenkins. She had become a journalist. I asked if she had done any other writing, and she discreetly said, yes, I wrote a novel. It made me feel really humble-- if I had written a novel, I'd probably have walked around saying, "nice to see you, I wrote a novel" to everyone. She spoke about what an amazing process it had been, and how she was working on another now. I was proud of her. I wanted to read her novel.

I stayed until the end, sitting around as the staff cleared the tables, talking with the Marianne Blackstock, Joy Carter, Paul Smith, Laura Miller, John Crowe, and Mark Mitchell. I think we were all a little in awe of what we had just done. We talked about doing it again in five years. I hope we do.

My 25th High School Reunion this Friday

I'm headed back to Lumberton, Texas for my 25th High School reunion this Friday. I'm not quite sure I'm expecting. I was kind of an unpopular geek in High School, though I have some very fond memories-- especially of some of my teachers like Michael Perryman and Glenda Peacock. They were good folks.

I guess everyone grows up, and though I'm still a geek, I'm a lot more comfortable with that fact (of course being a geek these days is not a big deal).

Anyway, I am looking forward to seeing some of my old buds. Funny, my first ever girlfriend, Carol Weil, won't be there. Probably just as well.

MS Access: VBA Regular Expressions (RegEx)

As a Perl programmer (hey, I founded Barcelona Perl Mongers), I always am looking for Perlish features in other languages. I know VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) is not a beautiful language, but I run into so very often that I actually use it more than Perl now. And I've found that it has plenty of Perlish features. Two of the most useful for me have been Associative Arrays (i.e. hashes) in the form of the Dictionary object, and Regular Expressions. Recently a friend asked me how to extract ZIP codes from a field in a Microsoft Access table in a SELECT statement. For example, she wanted to say:

select some_function(ZIP_expression)
  from some_table;

on a table with values like "Philadelphia, PA 19107-1234" or "Lumberton, TX 77657" and have it return just the ZIP. I couldn't make an unwieldy version of this using just INSTR, MID, etc. Maybe there is a way. However, there is an elegant solution using regular expressions. You have to include a new Access module, and put this code in it. Prior to putting the code in, you have to include a reference to "Microsoft VBScript Regular Expressions 5.5" (Tools->References):

Function zipfinder(t As String)
    Dim re As New RegExp
    ' Look for five digits.  Optionally, look for a dash and four digits
    re.Pattern = "\b(\d{5}(-\d{4})?)\b"
    ' This version finds the first match.
    ' If you want the last match, set Global to false.
    re.Global = False
    Dim m
    For Each m In re.Execute(t)
        zipfinder = m.Value
    Next
End Function

Then you can use this as a function in a SELECT statement:

select zipfinder( ZIP_expression)
  from some_table;

How we evacuated from Hurricane Katrina

I'm laying in bed, listening to the rain tapping the window of our house here on Rodman Street.

It's been six weeks to the day since we evacuated from Hurricane Katrina. I was sure we would return in a couple of days-- New Orleans had always been spared in the past. I grabbed an extra shirt, my guitar, and (thank my higher power) the laptop.

My parents and brother evacuated to my our house in Lumberton, just outside of Beaumont, Texas. They urged us to evacuate with them, but we had some Spanish friends who wanted us to go with them. It was a hard decision, but in the end I thought it would be better for my family to go with Elena, Beau, and Luis. As it turns out, it was the right decision: Lumberton was directly in the path of Hurricane Rita, and my parents and brother had to evacuate a second time.

We drove to Lafayette to the house of one of Elena's friends, Antonio. We were all doing pretty well until Katrina went to category five and it looked like New Orleans would take a direct hit.

We had all been in an excellent mood, playing guitar and watching movies. But then someone turned on the Weather channel and we all started getting depressed as we watched the Hurricane inch towards our home. After about an hour of this, we were all ready to jump off of a bridge.

At that point, I made the smartest decision of the evacuation: I switched the TV back to Jack Black's "School of Rock". Immediately everyone snapped out of it. Pads of paper came out, and we started planning. Soon we had decided to evacuate further west, to Houston.

I'll get on my soapbox here: I hate the news. My parents are news junkies. During the Hurricane, they had Fox and the Weather Channel on 24/7. When I called them, everyone in the house was depressed. I, on the other hand, had to shush the people on my end and eventually take the call outside, as the Spaniards were laughing (albeit nervously) so loudly. The news is a good thing. We should all watch the news. Then we should turn the news off and go live our lives. Hearing that you are about to take it in the shorts is bad enough without listening to it over and over from a series of vacuous baritones in gimme caps. If you hear bad news enough, it stops shocking you. You come to expect it. You come to believe that you deserve it.

We didn't buy it. We got in our cars and went to Houston.

Elena is a woman from Extremadura in Spain. She's pretty and smart, and just enough sarcastic that you know she's an española. Her boyfriend, Beau, looks and sounds like a Louisiana good ol' boy, but he's got a degree in Physics and a really big heart. Luis is funny and tries to cheer you up even when he is frightened. He has a great smile and was really great with Daniel.

I miss the people I evacuated with.

We were kind of like the party from the Decameron.

When we got to Houston, it looked like New Orleans was really going to get hit. We went to dinner at Chili's and generally had a good time, but wondered what was going to happen to our city.

The next morning we found out. Devastation. When the levees broke, our world changed. We would have been okay to get back to New Orleans and go on with our lives with the damage from the storm (in fact, our house was not at all damaged), but with the flooding from the levee, New Orleans was suddenly a very dangerous place to be.

That Tuesday, I talked on the phone with my boss. He told me that I was officially on vacation, and that when my vacation days were over, I would not be paid anymore. That was sad, but understandable: Phoenix Health Systems just doesn't have the cash flow to float a month of paychecks for the 60 people in its New Orleans office. And it put me in a weird position: I could not take my family back to New Orleans; not with reports of Cholera and Typhoid. I am still not sure about these reports, but I wasn't going to risk it with a four year old boy. I've seen people with Cholera when I was in Bolivia, and it is horrible.

I also could not leave Sonia and Daniel anywhere by themselves. Sonia's English is good, but she is not confident enough about it. Besides, there was a disaster-- I wanted to be with them.

Sonia and I talked it over. By a very odd coincidence, we had tickets for the weekend to go to Philadelphia from the New Orleans airport. We were going to check it out as a place to live, because after Ivan, we had gotten tired of evacuating from hurricanes. We were going to check towns that had direct flights to Barcelona to see if any were livable. We had gone to Atlanta over the July 4th weekend, and I thought it was nice, but too big, hot, and trafficky. So we had tickets to fly to Philadelphia now.

Now we would not be able to make the trip from New Orleans. We decided to try to change the dates on the tickets and go see if Philadelphia would be a good place to live. I called that Tuesday, and they managed to get us out on Wednesday.

We flew out with our ridiculously few possessions. By afternoon Wednesday, we were in the Marriott in downtown Philadelphia. We were clean, safe, together, had some clothes, and a maid. We watched our neighbors waiting on rooftops, dying, on the television. Again, I switched the TV back to PBS kids and we watched Barney and Caillou.

I started sending out emails, searching for headhunters. The first day was a little disappointing-- Google found a lot of dead headhunter links. But I found one-- then another. I sent an email to the USNA alumni association. They sent my resume to a bunch of headhunters.

That Thursday, I went down to Starbucks to get coffee. I asked for a "Hurricane Discount"-- I felt stupid doing it, because obviously I was not starving to death standing in line at a Starbucks. I wondered why I had asked... then I found out. A woman behind me said, "I heard you say you were from New Orleans. My family and I were talking last night about how we could help out. Can I do anything for you?" Her name was Linda. She offered to let us stay in her house. I told her we were set on that, but that I needed to get my resume in front of people. She said she would do what we could.

On an aside, Sonia and Daniel and I had dinner at Linda's house last night. We've been friends since that day she stuck out her hand. Sonia and her really clicked. She's rallied the folks from her synagogue to collect toys and clothes, furniture, pots and pans... they've really helped us out. Her sons, Abraham and Noah, have played with Daniel tirelessly, even though they are both over ten years older than him. Her husband, Ira, has been a generally good guy, and also plays with Daniel patiently and treats him like the smart little guy he is. Linda really has been a true friend.



(To be continued...)

Andorra

THE WEAKLY TIM

Bon dia! Howdy!

I hope everybody's doing great. After almost six months here, I finally got out of Spain for a day. Some friends and I drove into Andorra, which is a country so small that it usually gets mistaken for a dog hair or something when you're looking at it on a map. It sits between France and Spain in the Pyranees, and is the seat of the Association of Ridiculously Small Countries (which includes Luxembourg, The Vatican, Rush Limbaugh's Butt...)

A few facts: No one knows anything about the history of Andorra. Every article I looked up started with a statement like "The history of Andorra is obscured by the fogs of the past" or something. They do have a charter called the Carta de Fundacio d'Andorra signed by Charlemagne (conveniently locked away, and commonly believed to be a forgery with the sole purpose of giving the Andorrans claim against France and Spain). In 1933 a Russian declared himself King Boris of Andorra (I'm not making this up) but was escorted out of the country by several burly guardsmen.

Anyway, sometime in the last hundred years some genius decided to remove sales tax in Andorra, making it the Delaware of Europe. Every weekend, zillions of Spaniards from the south west and Frenchmen (Frenchiards? Froggians?) from the north east invade to buy watches and cheese. This weekend was no different, or maybe a little different. This weekend there was a Texan, too.

The French drive like hell. The Spaniards drive like hell, too. My friend Sònia was driving, and I got to see a side of her that I'd never seen: the brutal, French-hating, goddam-it-this-is-my-lane- so-go-back-to-France side of her. It was cool.

We looked at watches and violins and bought groceries. It really was a lot cheaper (eight yogurts for 500 Pesetas: ¡Guay, tio!). We saved about 3000 Pesetas ($19.38US). We filled the tank twice, for 5000 Pesetas. You do the math.

Woof, what scenery! The drive from Barcelona into Andorra was breathtaking. We kept passing shimmering reservoirs to bring tears to your eyes, followed by winding switchbacks up undulating hillsides to put lumps in your throat, and vast herds of sheep to put plugs in your nose. The city of Vella d'Andorra itself is a single street, and unfortunately, by the time you get there, you're so cranky at everybody that you want to punch anyone who has a French accent (or Spanish or Catalan). But it's pretty, in a little bit too modern way.

One thing that really is worth buying there is cigarettes, but I stopped smoking 16 days, 7 hours and 11 minutes ago. Thank god for one thing: The day after I stopped, Oracle Spain instituted a new rule saying that you could no longer smoke at your desk (did you American folks get that?). As you can imagine, this did not go over big with the locals. I don't like to generalize about the Spaniards, but as a people, they do not like rules that restrict their personal freedom (you wouldn't either if you had had Franco for 40 years). This extends just about to the ridiculous, with laws prohibiting smoking in Elevators only taking effect a couple of years ago.

As part of my campaign not to smoke, I started working my Rubik's cube again. I can do it in like three minutes now. I do it on the metro. I do it at work. The other day I was going to meet some friends for the opening of a club called "The Wild West", which is a Texas theme bar, basically. So of course I wore my Stetson and my Cowboy boots, and my Lumberton High School letter jacket. I looked real Texan (cuz ah am). I was standing in the metro, in my cowboy hat, working my cube. When I got off the train, I heard the kid behind me say to his girlfriend, in Spanish, "man, these tourists sure dress weird" (tia, estos guiris se visten gillipollas). I turned around, looked at the kid, and just smiled. "Um, um, except for you, sir" he said (Excepto que usted). Tim: 1 Spain: 0. Cool.

My friends Allie and Bibette came from Seychelles a couple of weeks ago. It was great, I got to see a lot of my city that I hadn't seen. I also got to play translator (fun, fun, fun). I kept looking at my Catalan friends and speaking English and looking at Allie and Bibette and speaking Spanish. We went to Sitges for a day and met an older Indian lady who tagged around the city with us. We didn't see a single dang Transvestite, which is kind of the whole point of going to Sitges. We had a blast.

Well, really no more to report. Drop me a line, I'll probably write again in a week or two. -Tim

My Own Private Lumberton

The Weakly Tim

Hola, Bon Dit!

Hi again! Well, okay, it's been a lot more than a week since my last installment. I have to admit that a) I got busy, b) nothing all that funny has happened recently. The trouble with living in an exotic, exciting place like Barcelona is that after a while you realize that it has stopped being so exotic and exciting and has turned itself into your boring old hometown. You end up yearning for other, more exotic places, like Lumberton. For more on this, see "The Weakly Tim, Washington DC edition".

I lived in DC for like 8 years. When I first got there, I was a 23 year old hayseed from Texas. I still had shoes with, well, stuff on them, really (sorry, Mom). On my first trip back home, one of my aunts asked me if I thought I was old enough to live in DC. Which made me laugh at the time, but, heck, maybe she was right. Anyway, When I first arrived in DC, I was going down to the mall to look at monuments, staring morosely at the Vietnam memorial (too dang big), and generally being a tourist. By the time I left, I was travelling entirely in a radius of about five miles. The mall had become an annoyance, Pennsylvania avenue had been closed between 15th and E to accomodate terrorist attacks, and I was begging my boss to send me out of town. Which he did.

So I ended up in Spain. Hey, I painted my apartment (yippee). Well, one of the hallways (orange). But I'm doing the whole place (not in orange, that would be too... too). The thing is that when I rented the flat, there had been a wardrobe against one of the walls in the living room. They removed the wardrobe when I moved in, to reveal-- Jimmy Hoffa! No, but there was a huge patch of non-standard wallpaper from when Janice Joplin was alive behind it, with big avocado colored ovals from when avocado was a color. This made me morose every time I walked into my living room (too dang big). So after watching "The Birdcage" in Spanish fifteen times, I decided to do up the entire apartment South Beach style. We'll see what the council or the board or the generalitat or whatever it is this week has to say when I'm done.

I ran into my busking pal from Mexico, Hector, again, walking around Las Ramblas with a guitar. We ended up busking in a cafe right next to the birthplace of Joan Miro. This time I'm positive: no one has ever done "I wanna be just like you" from "The Jungle Book" on Las Ramblas before. We even did a little scat singing (you know, zaba daba zee etc). You'd think that Barcelona would be too big to just bump into people on the street, but I really do see the same folks all the time. There's a guy here who plays guitar and panpipe, who built a little stage for his tiny little dog, who wears little glasses and a hat (the dog, not the guy). The dog sits there and howls. My god how the money rolls in.

Work is so boring right now that it's hardly worth mentioning. The reason for this is that the entire country of Spain has gone on vacation for the entire month of August. These people (me included now) get 25 days off a year, plus a handful of holidays, and the entire week of Easter. For those of us unfortunate slobs who do have to work, the schedule is cut back so I only have to work until 3pm. Is this civilized or what? Imagine asking for 25 days a year off in an interview in the US. The interviewer would have you doing a drug test in no time flat.

I realized three days ago that I had been in Barcelona for four months. I was reckoning on speaking like Cervantes by now. I'm not going to lie to you: I can speak Spanish now. It's far from perfect, I'm sure I sound like a four year old, but I'm getting by. I've started learning Catalan by osmosis. I was watching a soap opera the other day in Catalan (yup, they do their own shows here) about a salesman with Tourettes syndrome who loses a sale because he says something off-color to the client, then shows up for work in shorts and a Hawaiian luau shirt. They cribbed most of the story from Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", I think. At least that's what I understood of the story.

Anyway, I can say stupid little Catalan things that make the locals smile, like "Molt be" (that's great) and "Bon Cap d'Setmana" (nice weekend). This is like watching a dog dance, it's not so important that he does it well, but that he does it at all. The next step will be the swear words... the great thing about the very first part of learning a language is that you can say wonderfully off-color things ("Is being a great day, I'll be damned!") and everyone just smiles, smiles, smiles. As you can see, I'm doing my best to change the idea of the "Ugly American".

The trouble is that my English is getting bad. I really didn't expect this. I had to address a group of folks from London about our product the other day, and I was reeeeeaching for words. There was a Glasgoweegian or something in the group, and I absolutely couldn't understand him (I'll be damned!).

I know what you're thinking. This is like when you're standing in line at the airport and some guy in a Jimmy Buffett shirt ahead of you in line is saying, loudly, "well, the trouble is that now I've got all this currency from Nepal and Pago Pago..." and you're thinking, stick it bud, they've all but chained me to my laptop. Ha ha.

Well, enough. Anybody coming to visit? Drop me a line, I'd love to hear from you. I miss the states, less, but I miss it. Oh, hey, I registered with the US Embassy, finally, which was great, because the entire transaction took place in Spanish, there wasn't any fooling around in English just because we were, oh, in the Embassy of the USA. Anyway, take care... -Tim

Hola del centro del universo conocido

...or rather hello from the center of the known universe...
THE WEAKLY PUBLISHED TIM
Hola everybody!

Well, I just realized I haven't sent an update for a while-- it wasn't for lack of desire to write, more an over-abundance of something that hasn't been very abundant until recently: WORK. My god what an ugly word. It was such fun here pretending that I was the independently wealthy son of the Count of Lumberton. Now I pretend I know how to write computer programs and design data warehouses (don't ask, I don't understand it either).

As was quite familiar to me for the last two years, I'm traveling four days a week for good ole Oracle again. I'm assigned to Mallorca-- this big island the size of connecticut (I think) in the Med. It's a really beautiful place. Michael Douglas is there now with his new girlfriend Katherine Zeta-Jones, I saw it on Antena Tres... and how does a guy like that end up with a woman like that without the universe imploding? Kind of like Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porcegoddesskova (or whatever her name was).

I'm not always in Mallorca, tho. They let me stay here in Barcelona on the weekends. My friends Steve and Caroline and their kids Bavard (I know I just slaughtered that) and Kyle came to stay for a while, down in Sitges. I have an exceptionally long and excruciatingly detailed story to tell about the trip, which I really don't have the energy to tell. Suffice to say that the story is about my almost failed attempt to take the train to Sitges to visit. There was a part about boarding the wrong train, and another about a conductor who spoke more rapidly the more I appeared not to understand, and a poorly printed ticket in a town some 50 miles from Barcelona, and how because of said ticket there ensued a blinding sprint to catch a second train on platform 14 (which looked exceptionally like platform 12 on said poorly printed ticket), and how there ensued a lot of gasping and foolishness. Whew. Oh yeah, there was also a part about how all of these mistakes added up to me passing accidentally through the valley where they make Freixnet Champagne, and how mind-bogglingly terrific that was, and how that probably would have been like accidentally turning the wrong corner and tripping over the holy grail for me five years ago, but how now it was just kinda ehhh (I passed on the free samples). It was a great story, if you can imagine it.

Sitges was pretty fabulous, or rather faaabulous. Lotsa transvestites and German tourists in shorts with black socks (not that there's anything wrong with that, or maybe there is) and faaaantastic houses built by people who probably would have been kind of weird in their own countries but who ended up being very rich and very weird here. That happens all the time here. I was with my friend Beatriz in Mallorca on Wednesday, and we went out to look at the sea from this 100 foot high cliff, and she pointed out the house of Keerk Dooogless (Kirk Douglas). Earlier we were walking through this little town called Vallereal which appeared to have been built by gnomes during an overly productive stage, and she casually pointed out the house where Frederik Chopin had lived (and died). Ho hum. I live in Spain. I grew up in Lumberton, Texas, the smallest town known to anyone, anywhere. Parece mentira.

I'm not going to gripe about learning Spanish this time. As usual, I have good days and bad days. The good days I think I've finally got it and it'll never go away. The bad days I think that I must have been out of my mind to come here and that I'll never learn the staggering mountain of words, phrases, and rules which I must learn before I can stop sounding like a four year old. Actually, the four year olds sound better, I probably should hire one to interpret for me.

The other day I realized it was the fourth of July here, about one minute before midnight. I rushed out to the street (it is *never* late here) with some half-formed idea that I had to tell someone that it was independence day and was as far as Avenida Gaudi before I realized that there really was absolutely no one to tell. On the other hand, I was hanging out on the dock on Monday night in Mallorca (which is what people do for fun there, hang out on docks) and a fireworks display just started up out of nowhere for no reason that I could determine. It was so beautiful that it was kind of ridiculous. It reminded me of the night before I left Pennsylvania and I was hanging out on the porch with my brother Travis, and the town of Carlysle fired off an impromptu fireworks display. We realized that you don't really get the full benefit from a fireworks display after about three minutes unless you're under twelve years old or you're on your first date with someone.

As usual I've written three times as much as I should have, so you'll have to imagine the part where I tell you all how much I miss you, and how you have to come visit (except Steve and Caroline, who now have to imagine that I'm asking them to come visit again), and not to worry cuz I'm having a blast here, and how you really have to write me a letter now, okay? Take care, -Tim

A good plan

Dear Everybody,

Well, I just finished off a week in Luverly Mallorca. It was great, I sat in the office and looked out the window at the second loveliest place I´d ever seen, twelve hours a day. It looks like I´ll be returning there each week until 1 July. I turn 35 on 30 June. I´m going to turn 35 in Mallorca, Spain. I´m from Lumberton. Ha ha ha. I get to come back to Barcelona each week to take my Spanish classes on Fridays. One of the subtle ways that the language sticks it to you here if you´re an American is by changing your nationality. Here it´s Estadounidense. About 50 times a day I have to pronounce the unpronounceable "Soy de los Estados Unidos" or "En los Estados Unidos..." Everyone else gets off easy: Mejicano, or Italiono, or something. After a while, you just stop mentioning the USA. My solution, of course was to start saying I was from Texas: "Yo soy Tejano". Which worked fine. Until I found out that this actually means, "I am a pair of blue jeans", a la JFK´s "Ich bin ein Berliner" (I am a donut).

An Excellent plan:
a. Move to Europe.
b. Insult Europeans

Last night I had dinner with my co-workers in Mallorca, Teresa from Madrid, Maria from Barcelona, and a fellow from France named Richard. Sometimes I just have to stop and let it all sink in. Anyway, somewhere between the Tallerines Negros and Dessert, I asked Richard (of course pronounced "Reesh-ar" just to be French) where he was from. Keep in mind that this whole conversation took place in thrilling technicolor Spanish, just making the high comedy a little, um, higher. He replied that he was from some unpronounceable place in the Alps, near Hen-Ebra. Being American (or whatever I am, good lord this place is complicated) I said, oh, that´s nice, I´ve never heard of Hen-Ebra. He Look At Me In Awe, as if I had suddenly grown an eyeball in the middle of my forehead with the reflection of an American Flag waving in it. "Jou have neaver heeard off Hen-Ebra? Theese Americains! Bouf!" Whereupon I got up on my horse, pulled on my cowboy hat, and let him have it at full gallop: "Hey hombre, have you ever heard of Lumberton? Do you have any idea of where Louisiana is?" (he said it was next to Florida. Hah!) I ranted on in this fashion for a few minutes when a little trigger went off in my head: "Hmmm, Hen-Ebra... Spanish pronunciation Genebra... oh. Geneva.)"

Suddenly my horse threw me, removed its shoes, and refused to budge, claiming that its new European 32 hour work week was over. I realized that I had suddenly become very ugly and very American, and later discovered that the Tallarines Negros had stained my teeth black, making me bizarre to boot. I said the only thing to be said in these situations: "So, how about them Bears?" They didn´t get it, but it was better than, "Gee, I sure am an Ugly, Bizarre American".

It´s been a good week, really. I´m actually happy to be working again. I wonder if I´m going to be travelling constantly again for Oracle Spain like I was for Oracle USA. I´m not sure if that would be good or bad. I´m not even sure if "good" or "bad" can be applied accurately in this situation. Hmmm, this letter is taking on this kind of "¿Quien soy yo, y donde voy?" shade, so I think I´ll close until next week. Take care, -Tim