Category Archives: bad habits

On divination

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All divination is just so much malarky. All due respect for the Divination class at Hogwarts for which none of the other professors have any respect, by the way, but divination is a lot of hogwash, meaningless, empty, wrong, void. I think it is very telling that even in the fictional world of Harry Potter, characters which believe in and perform magic do not believe in divination, reading tea leaves, looking into crystal balls, signs, reading palms, tarot, bones, shooting stars, or anything else that might be read or construed as a sign of things to come. In Spain's 13th century, divination was a real problem because there was so little difference between what might be understood as science and what might be understood as pseudo-science--astrology, quiromancia, necromancia, fortune-telling, and a host of other "mancias" which followed everything from the shape of a dog turd to random feathers found on a street. Black cats, scorpions, bats, goats, any horned animal, a white dove, unicorns were considered in turn to be good, bad, evil, a blessing, all of which is completely meaningless. Unless you find lots of bugs in your house, which might mean you need to take out the trash more often and clean, but this has more to do with deduction and nothing to do with divination. The planets do not guide anyone's future, and their arbitrary alignment at your birth has nothing to do with who you are as a person. Perhaps I understand why people struggle with divination. Given the chaotic and unstable nature of life, we all want to know what is happening tomorrow--should we invest, look for a new job, buy a new house, get married, have children, break up, undertake a new project, accept a new position, advise someone on their uncertain future? Yet, the future is an unwritten script and will be ruled by the millions and millions of decisions which are made at any given moment as we move forward. The idea that the future is chaotic and unknowable makes people uncomfortable, but the markets will go up and down, students will fail or succeed, couples will get married and breakup, you will make mistakes or your plans will finally come to fruition, but all of that will happen not because you don't know what will happen, but because you work hard now to make things happen and come true. Everyday, however, people throw away hard-earned money to consult charlatans, quacks, and thieves who have convinced them that they can tell them the future. Predictions are general, over-reaching, non-specific, and the victims (or fools) fill in the blanks, thinking that they have finally found someone who can really tell the future. Why is it, then, that psychics never win the lottery? All psychics are phony, false, criminals. All divination is dishonest. No one has a gift, and all attempts to prove otherwise have proved that things such as ESP don't exist outside of what is statistically possible to predict. The fact that my colleagues in the 13th century had to wade through such a morass of conmen, fakes, phonies, charlatans is disheartening because the difference between science and non-science was confusing and unclear. No one had the great scientific vision of a Bacon or a Galileo. Questions of mystic visions or psychic revelations, diabolic incantations or black masses, necromancy or palmistry were everywhere because there was no scientific paradigm or orderly scientific method against which these weird and meaningless practices could be debunked. Even today, however, it is mind-blowing that so many people still waste their time and money with these empty and foolish practices. The future cannot be predicted, divined, or foretold--end of story.

On divination

Posted on by
All divination is just so much malarky. All due respect for the Divination class at Hogwarts for which none of the other professors have any respect, by the way, but divination is a lot of hogwash, meaningless, empty, wrong, void. I think it is very telling that even in the fictional world of Harry Potter, characters which believe in and perform magic do not believe in divination, reading tea leaves, looking into crystal balls, signs, reading palms, tarot, bones, shooting stars, or anything else that might be read or construed as a sign of things to come. In Spain's 13th century, divination was a real problem because there was so little difference between what might be understood as science and what might be understood as pseudo-science--astrology, quiromancia, necromancia, fortune-telling, and a host of other "mancias" which followed everything from the shape of a dog turd to random feathers found on a street. Black cats, scorpions, bats, goats, any horned animal, a white dove, unicorns were considered in turn to be good, bad, evil, a blessing, all of which is completely meaningless. Unless you find lots of bugs in your house, which might mean you need to take out the trash more often and clean, but this has more to do with deduction and nothing to do with divination. The planets do not guide anyone's future, and their arbitrary alignment at your birth has nothing to do with who you are as a person. Perhaps I understand why people struggle with divination. Given the chaotic and unstable nature of life, we all want to know what is happening tomorrow--should we invest, look for a new job, buy a new house, get married, have children, break up, undertake a new project, accept a new position, advise someone on their uncertain future? Yet, the future is an unwritten script and will be ruled by the millions and millions of decisions which are made at any given moment as we move forward. The idea that the future is chaotic and unknowable makes people uncomfortable, but the markets will go up and down, students will fail or succeed, couples will get married and breakup, you will make mistakes or your plans will finally come to fruition, but all of that will happen not because you don't know what will happen, but because you work hard now to make things happen and come true. Everyday, however, people throw away hard-earned money to consult charlatans, quacks, and thieves who have convinced them that they can tell them the future. Predictions are general, over-reaching, non-specific, and the victims (or fools) fill in the blanks, thinking that they have finally found someone who can really tell the future. Why is it, then, that psychics never win the lottery? All psychics are phony, false, criminals. All divination is dishonest. No one has a gift, and all attempts to prove otherwise have proved that things such as ESP don't exist outside of what is statistically possible to predict. The fact that my colleagues in the 13th century had to wade through such a morass of conmen, fakes, phonies, charlatans is disheartening because the difference between science and non-science was confusing and unclear. No one had the great scientific vision of a Bacon or a Galileo. Questions of mystic visions or psychic revelations, diabolic incantations or black masses, necromancy or palmistry were everywhere because there was no scientific paradigm or orderly scientific method against which these weird and meaningless practices could be debunked. Even today, however, it is mind-blowing that so many people still waste their time and money with these empty and foolish practices. The future cannot be predicted, divined, or foretold--end of story.

On complaining

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I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don't live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own--seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don't care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor's offices--not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don't do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed--by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it's very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog's gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I'm sure this is a short list--there are more things I can complain about--but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On complaining

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I must admit a major failing in my character: I complain way too much. In an ideal world, all machines would work, everything would occur on time, there would always be an empty parking spot, the food would be hot and tasty, the drinks cold and refreshing. People would not text and drive. Drivers would pay attention to what they are doing, and waiters would always get their orders right. Yet, I don't live in an ideal world: potholes are real, delays are common, waiting in line is the order of the day, so I complain. I complain about slow service, high prices, a lack of time. I complain about complainers. I got caught in a huge traffic jam on I-35 this afternoon through no fault of my own--seven cars had suffered a chain-reaction collision and the wreckage was blocking two lanes of the highway. My biggest complaint in life has to be a lack of time to do the things I really like to do, such as eat and sleep. Being both hungry and sleepy at the same time is depressing. I love to complain about the endless lines at check-outs in big box retailers, who don't care at all about making me waist my time waiting to by a pizza. I have the same complaint about some doctor's offices--not all are horrible, but some are just unbearable. We should be able to bill them for wasting our time. I endlessly complain about the weather. Bugs, enough said. Rude people everywhere. Students who cut class, don't do their homework, fail exams, and then contact me because they are worried about their grade. I complain about the airlines, but I realize that airlines are complex and prone to scheduling disasters. I complain about the prices that certain professions charge: plumbers, mechanics, doctors, lawyers. Why should they have all the fun separating hard-working people from their cash? I complain about bumpy, pot-hole filled roads. I hate stoplights with a pure passion and have an endless series of complaints about how stupidly they are programmed--by people who never drive through them. All parking lots need to be complained about. I complain about how loud television commercials are, how stupid most of the ads are, how idiotic their arguments are for buying their products. Do the commercial makers think we are all cretins? Sometimes I complain about how fat the rest of the world seems to be getting, but that seems like a rather useless complaint when you look at all the food opportunities we have everyday. I hate the aggressive driving I encounter everywhere. Photocopiers are often the object of my ire. It bugs me when people cannot answer their cell phones. I complain about people talking and texting while they drive. I think it's very thoughtless when a dog owner leaves the dog's gifts where someone might step in them. I complain about politics, but no one wants to hear what I have to say. But does complaining actually help? I often complain without thinking about the pointless nature of my complaints, the fact that no one cares, that I am just making myself more unhappy by articulating, lustily, my disagreement with the world. I'm sure this is a short list--there are more things I can complain about--but by complaining, I can get my cares off of my chest, and maybe put some of it behind me. The problem is this: my complaints are often well-deserved but the wrong people are hearing them, which makes them irked and me sad. Yet, unless we complain will we ever change the world? Sometimes complaining can make a difference, and passive indifference will only make a bad problem, worse.

On coughing

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If there is a more useless and annoying bodily function than coughing I don't know what it is. Maybe sneezing, but I digress. Sometimes when you get a cold, you also get a cough--a persistent, dry, hacking thing that makes you sound like a hoarse seal on its last flipper. You put your hand up to cover your mouth, but you fail and phlegm goes everywhere infecting the entire world with plague. Perhaps this is the secret of the common cold: it spreads itself through uncontrolled coughing, and let's face it, all coughing is uncontrolled and ultimately, uncontainable. You pop cough drops as if they were candy corn and the cough doesn't go away, but now your stomach hurts as well. A bad cough always coincides with a concert where most of the music is very quiet--no, you will never have a cough if you have to go to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overature w/ canon. You will cough during an Arthur Miller play where everyone talks and says lots of really profound stuff and you can't get your cough drop unwrapped because maybe having a stomach ache is a little less horrible than coughing all the time. You buy new, very strong cough drops made with menthol eucalyptus jam that is so powerful the vapors make your eyes water (but now your eyes water and you cough). Good bourbon will help temporarily until you out of bourbon, but now you are tipsy and you have a cough. At the height of your cough you are scaring people who are expecting you to cough up a lung. Your ribs are sore from coughing because your stomach muscles can't keep up. And then you finally kick the cold which has lasted about 14 days (or if you take zinc it will only last two weeks, so try that), you still have the bloody cough, which is going to hang around for another five weeks--maybe 35 days. Why do you always cough while chewing a soda cracker, spewing everything in eight directions at once. When you cough, people walk away from you, and if you go to the movies you either get hushed or the usher asks you to leave. You get one of those scary, raspy coughs that sound like a part of your throat is actually breaking loose. Some people cough as if their lungs were tip-toeing. You cannot stifle a good cough. You just threw-up a little in your mouth because the cough was so powerful it made you gag. Cough syrup, unless it has serious drugs in it, will do nothing to stop your cough, but it will keep the big drug manufacturers in business smiling all the way to the bank. You may have tuberculosis if you cough that much. As much as I hate to cough a lot, don't every sneeze and cough at the same time, you will either sprain your head or have to change your clothes because of the wild spray pattern from the snot. Do not let others see the things you cough up and never do it in public. Go off in private--and that means out of earshot--if you have to cough up something like a cat with a persistent hairball. Nobody really wants to hear you clearing a nasty throat. And don't forget the old adage, "It's not the cough you have, but the coffin they carry you out in." And I just ended this note with a double stranded preposition. Priceless.

On coughing

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If there is a more useless and annoying bodily function than coughing I don't know what it is. Maybe sneezing, but I digress. Sometimes when you get a cold, you also get a cough--a persistent, dry, hacking thing that makes you sound like a hoarse seal on its last flipper. You put your hand up to cover your mouth, but you fail and phlegm goes everywhere infecting the entire world with plague. Perhaps this is the secret of the common cold: it spreads itself through uncontrolled coughing, and let's face it, all coughing is uncontrolled and ultimately, uncontainable. You pop cough drops as if they were candy corn and the cough doesn't go away, but now your stomach hurts as well. A bad cough always coincides with a concert where most of the music is very quiet--no, you will never have a cough if you have to go to Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overature w/ canon. You will cough during an Arthur Miller play where everyone talks and says lots of really profound stuff and you can't get your cough drop unwrapped because maybe having a stomach ache is a little less horrible than coughing all the time. You buy new, very strong cough drops made with menthol eucalyptus jam that is so powerful the vapors make your eyes water (but now your eyes water and you cough). Good bourbon will help temporarily until you out of bourbon, but now you are tipsy and you have a cough. At the height of your cough you are scaring people who are expecting you to cough up a lung. Your ribs are sore from coughing because your stomach muscles can't keep up. And then you finally kick the cold which has lasted about 14 days (or if you take zinc it will only last two weeks, so try that), you still have the bloody cough, which is going to hang around for another five weeks--maybe 35 days. Why do you always cough while chewing a soda cracker, spewing everything in eight directions at once. When you cough, people walk away from you, and if you go to the movies you either get hushed or the usher asks you to leave. You get one of those scary, raspy coughs that sound like a part of your throat is actually breaking loose. Some people cough as if their lungs were tip-toeing. You cannot stifle a good cough. You just threw-up a little in your mouth because the cough was so powerful it made you gag. Cough syrup, unless it has serious drugs in it, will do nothing to stop your cough, but it will keep the big drug manufacturers in business smiling all the way to the bank. You may have tuberculosis if you cough that much. As much as I hate to cough a lot, don't every sneeze and cough at the same time, you will either sprain your head or have to change your clothes because of the wild spray pattern from the snot. Do not let others see the things you cough up and never do it in public. Go off in private--and that means out of earshot--if you have to cough up something like a cat with a persistent hairball. Nobody really wants to hear you clearing a nasty throat. And don't forget the old adage, "It's not the cough you have, but the coffin they carry you out in." And I just ended this note with a double stranded preposition. Priceless.

On Boston

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As I write this chaos continues to assail Boston, even in the wake of the tragic bombing of the Marathon this past Monday. Perhaps the added chaos this evening is related to that bombing. The FBI seemed to be hot on the trail of a couple of suspects today, so it would not be surprising to find out that a shooting at MIT and further police action in Watertown was related to the terror bombing of Monday's race. Ever since moving to Spain in 1979 I have had to deal with terrorists, bombs, shootings, and all the associated law enforcement that go with the human tragedy of senseless violence in the name of some irrational nationalism or imaginary political ideology. In the end, all you have is dead innocent victims that had nothing to do with any of that fruitless political struggle. Terrorism destroys both the lives of the innocents and their families and the terrorists themselves, who turn themselves into common criminals because they see their only answer to life's difficult questions to be violence. Since they cannot attack an entire country, they attack the innocent, a slaughter of lambs, if you will, but what they fail to recognize is that no government worth its salt will ever give into terrorists. The police just work all that much harder to destroy the terrorists, which really only means that the prisons and jails fill up with terrorists, the political objectives become obscure or forgotten, and new terrorists are born to take the place of those who are dead or in jail. Terrorism is a snake eating its own tail, self-perpetuating, blind, filled with faulty thinking and irrational objectives, and it turns normal people into common criminals--murderers, thieves, liars. In the end, no one is particularly happy with the results. The terrorists are dead or in jail, their objectives unfulfilled; the victims are dead or grieving for with the loss of a loved one; law enforcement is frustrated because they could never prevent any of it--they only get clean-up duties. The big problem with bombers is that they never really understand that no matter how much they hurt the people they hate, those people will, eventually, bounce back. Those who have died are beyond reach of pain and their struggles are over. Those who have lost limbs will learn to walk again, readjust their lives, have families, love, grow old, and will eventually die of old age in God's good time. And all those idealistic political agendas will have served nothing, nothing will change, nothing will be achieved but the destruction of some lives. The funny/ironic part about terrorists is that they are just normal people until they let themselves be lead astray by faulty irrational thinking and a belief that political goals can be achieved through violence. Most political extremism is illusory, foolish, irrational, vacuous, superficial, and/or unrealistic. Bombs will never change the basic objectives of a free market capitalism. If fact, I would hazard to say that terrorism does the exact opposite of what it proposes to do and reinforces democratic objectives and strengthens governments and law enforcement. In the meantime, however, our hearts are broken, our tears burn, the lump in our throats does not go away, and we stare at the ground in shame and horror, unable to understand why our world is so imperfect and broken.

On Boston

Posted on by
As I write this chaos continues to assail Boston, even in the wake of the tragic bombing of the Marathon this past Monday. Perhaps the added chaos this evening is related to that bombing. The FBI seemed to be hot on the trail of a couple of suspects today, so it would not be surprising to find out that a shooting at MIT and further police action in Watertown was related to the terror bombing of Monday's race. Ever since moving to Spain in 1979 I have had to deal with terrorists, bombs, shootings, and all the associated law enforcement that go with the human tragedy of senseless violence in the name of some irrational nationalism or imaginary political ideology. In the end, all you have is dead innocent victims that had nothing to do with any of that fruitless political struggle. Terrorism destroys both the lives of the innocents and their families and the terrorists themselves, who turn themselves into common criminals because they see their only answer to life's difficult questions to be violence. Since they cannot attack an entire country, they attack the innocent, a slaughter of lambs, if you will, but what they fail to recognize is that no government worth its salt will ever give into terrorists. The police just work all that much harder to destroy the terrorists, which really only means that the prisons and jails fill up with terrorists, the political objectives become obscure or forgotten, and new terrorists are born to take the place of those who are dead or in jail. Terrorism is a snake eating its own tail, self-perpetuating, blind, filled with faulty thinking and irrational objectives, and it turns normal people into common criminals--murderers, thieves, liars. In the end, no one is particularly happy with the results. The terrorists are dead or in jail, their objectives unfulfilled; the victims are dead or grieving for with the loss of a loved one; law enforcement is frustrated because they could never prevent any of it--they only get clean-up duties. The big problem with bombers is that they never really understand that no matter how much they hurt the people they hate, those people will, eventually, bounce back. Those who have died are beyond reach of pain and their struggles are over. Those who have lost limbs will learn to walk again, readjust their lives, have families, love, grow old, and will eventually die of old age in God's good time. And all those idealistic political agendas will have served nothing, nothing will change, nothing will be achieved but the destruction of some lives. The funny/ironic part about terrorists is that they are just normal people until they let themselves be lead astray by faulty irrational thinking and a belief that political goals can be achieved through violence. Most political extremism is illusory, foolish, irrational, vacuous, superficial, and/or unrealistic. Bombs will never change the basic objectives of a free market capitalism. If fact, I would hazard to say that terrorism does the exact opposite of what it proposes to do and reinforces democratic objectives and strengthens governments and law enforcement. In the meantime, however, our hearts are broken, our tears burn, the lump in our throats does not go away, and we stare at the ground in shame and horror, unable to understand why our world is so imperfect and broken.

On translation

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I don't trust translations. As a child, however, I did, and had great time reading all sorts of things in translation--French, German, Russian, Spanish--it didn't matter. I took the translators at their word that they would faithfully read, interpret, and re-write a book so that I could read it in English. Of course, I lost my translation innocence when I learned Spanish, leaving behind my career as a life-long monolingual who had basked in the naivete of a one language world. I had always suspected, for example, that when strange species met on episodes of Star Trek that they would have trouble communicating--English-speaking earthlings shouldn't be able to communicate directly with just off the space shuttle Klingons, for example--but I suspended my disbelief so I could enjoy the show. I was, however, skeptical that the Klingons didn't even have an accent of any kind when they spoke, or was that the accent of Los Angeles that they had learned via Rosetta-stoned? Then, I kind, if not well-meaning, teacher taught me that the word for "red" in Spanish was "roja." Again, I was skeptical, but I kept it to myself. In fact, I kept my skepticism to myself for years while I learned this other "language." For the most part, even when using Spanish (I'm not going to brag and say "speaking" just yet), I still felt that English was right there, a crutch, a back-up, that would always save me, that is, until I landed in Spain and English was useless on most any level. I realized right away that none of these Spanish speakers knew any English at all, and their world seemed to work pretty well: the ate, communicated, fought, drank coffee, gave directions, explained, interacted, and a whole host of other things while ignoring English completely. They said "hola, buenos días" as if they meant it. After about a month of this foolishness, it began to dawn on me that there were places in the world that didn't know English, and didn't want to, either, to paraphrase Thorton Wilder. I began to learn and use words in Spanish that I had never seen in a text book, had never written in my notebook, and didn't really know what they meant in English, or at least I didn't know what their English equivalent was. At that moment, a major epiphany struck: English and Spanish don't know each other, aren't equivalent, and you can't make one language mean the other, especially if the discourse is at all complex. "Roja" does not mean "red." Both words refer to a similar darkish shade from the rainbow or perhaps the color of some apples, but words from different languages are not equivalent. The idea is absurd, especially to bilinguals. I joined that group of people in my early twenties, forever ruined for reading translations. At some point I did a translation assignment that concerned a poem by García Lorca, "Canción del jinete." I turned in my assignment, crestfallen because I knew it was a failure--you can't translate that poem and still keep the poem alive, and my horseman had died long before he ever made it to Cordoba--so the poet had been, ironically, right--he never did make it to Córdoba. Whenever I must read a translation today, I always try to keep an original near. I read Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago in English, knowing full-well that the Russian must have been gorgeous. I know why Dante and Petrarch were so good: their poetry sings in Italian in a way that it never could translated into English, but the best way to kill Shakespeare? Translate him out of English into anything else. There is nothing funnier than Hamlet speaking Spanish, except Hamlet is not supposed to be funny. Cervantes is brilliant in Spanish, but he's just funny in English, and so it goes. I guess I'll have to learn Klingon to enjoy their operas, now, won't I.

On translation

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I don't trust translations. As a child, however, I did, and had great time reading all sorts of things in translation--French, German, Russian, Spanish--it didn't matter. I took the translators at their word that they would faithfully read, interpret, and re-write a book so that I could read it in English. Of course, I lost my translation innocence when I learned Spanish, leaving behind my career as a life-long monolingual who had basked in the naivete of a one language world. I had always suspected, for example, that when strange species met on episodes of Star Trek that they would have trouble communicating--English-speaking earthlings shouldn't be able to communicate directly with just off the space shuttle Klingons, for example--but I suspended my disbelief so I could enjoy the show. I was, however, skeptical that the Klingons didn't even have an accent of any kind when they spoke, or was that the accent of Los Angeles that they had learned via Rosetta-stoned? Then, I kind, if not well-meaning, teacher taught me that the word for "red" in Spanish was "roja." Again, I was skeptical, but I kept it to myself. In fact, I kept my skepticism to myself for years while I learned this other "language." For the most part, even when using Spanish (I'm not going to brag and say "speaking" just yet), I still felt that English was right there, a crutch, a back-up, that would always save me, that is, until I landed in Spain and English was useless on most any level. I realized right away that none of these Spanish speakers knew any English at all, and their world seemed to work pretty well: the ate, communicated, fought, drank coffee, gave directions, explained, interacted, and a whole host of other things while ignoring English completely. They said "hola, buenos días" as if they meant it. After about a month of this foolishness, it began to dawn on me that there were places in the world that didn't know English, and didn't want to, either, to paraphrase Thorton Wilder. I began to learn and use words in Spanish that I had never seen in a text book, had never written in my notebook, and didn't really know what they meant in English, or at least I didn't know what their English equivalent was. At that moment, a major epiphany struck: English and Spanish don't know each other, aren't equivalent, and you can't make one language mean the other, especially if the discourse is at all complex. "Roja" does not mean "red." Both words refer to a similar darkish shade from the rainbow or perhaps the color of some apples, but words from different languages are not equivalent. The idea is absurd, especially to bilinguals. I joined that group of people in my early twenties, forever ruined for reading translations. At some point I did a translation assignment that concerned a poem by García Lorca, "Canción del jinete." I turned in my assignment, crestfallen because I knew it was a failure--you can't translate that poem and still keep the poem alive, and my horseman had died long before he ever made it to Cordoba--so the poet had been, ironically, right--he never did make it to Córdoba. Whenever I must read a translation today, I always try to keep an original near. I read Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago in English, knowing full-well that the Russian must have been gorgeous. I know why Dante and Petrarch were so good: their poetry sings in Italian in a way that it never could translated into English, but the best way to kill Shakespeare? Translate him out of English into anything else. There is nothing funnier than Hamlet speaking Spanish, except Hamlet is not supposed to be funny. Cervantes is brilliant in Spanish, but he's just funny in English, and so it goes. I guess I'll have to learn Klingon to enjoy their operas, now, won't I.