Allison, old enough to have used a Windows 98 as the family computer, she/her, professionally a scientist, casually.....I mean, I watch a lot of Youtube. I don't know if that explains more than it doesn't
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I actually really like the thing when you’re starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn’t natively finnish but did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me “every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week.” And I understood.
I don’t think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words for “nosebleed”, “humidity”, or “stress”, I managed to string together: “This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me.” And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it’s better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn’t know the spanish word for “hurry”, but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english “I have all the time in the world.”
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn’t expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole keeper and master of the very concept of time.
This is terrible but today when I was playing volleyball outside with some friends one of their children (18 months) was sort of ambling around on his stumpy little toddler legs and so we were all trying to be careful and like not spike the ball onto the baby but then he wandered over to his father, who picked him up bc dad reflexes, and then the ball got passed over to the dad and he sort of had a no thoughts moment and instinctively used his child to smack the volleyball over to the next person. Like he just swung the kid and used his legs like a baseball bat. I’m never going to forget his face of premature regret mid baby-manuever right when he realized what he was doing AND the instant he realized his wife saw it happen. Anyway the baby was fine he didn’t make contact with the ball all that hard and he was just mad his dad wouldn’t use him as a club again but I had to sit down because I laughed so hard I cried.
