Me gusta español

If it's true that most people's writing is reflective of their experiences, I want to be the author of a Spanish textbook... based on the example sentences alone.

Who wouldn't want to live like those folks?!  I mean, they practically reside at the discoteca... that is, when they're not busy sitting around in el café assigning genders to words.  Occasionally they swing by la biblioteca, but it's probably just because they need a quiet place to nurse their hangovers so they can rally for the evening's fiesta.  Why get a job when you can just lounge around in el parque giving directions to the bathrooms all day?  The constant memory loss, coupled with frequent hamburguesa and papas fritas cravings, lead me to wonder what they're really buying at el mercado.

But, occasionally, you glimpse the darker side.  One of my college Spanish textbooks used the sentence "I'm going to kidnap a woman" as an example of the future tense.  Oh really, Pablo?  I guess I missed the chapter where you stopped strolling along la playa long enough to develop a Grande Theft Auto addiction.  Dónde están la policía when you need them...

Are your desserts gender-neutral?

I wonder why the spongy, espresso-soaked cakes in tiramisu are called "ladyfingers." Based on the girth of the biscuit, it would seem more appropriate to call them manfingers. Or were all the women in the bakery where tiramisu was first created on the husky side? Goodness knows I would be morbidly obese if I worked in an Italian bakery... I can barely make it through the ice cream aisle at Safeway without causing Ben & Jerry's stock to go up (they call it "The Rachel Effect".) Or is it a sexist thing? As a society, perhaps we are more comfortable depriving ladies of their fingers than their male counterparts. After all, one can knead the dough and wash the dishes without those pesky appendages turning the pages of books and filling the little woman's head with all sorts of dangerous tomfoolery.

In the end, it doesn't make one speck of difference to me. They could change the name of tiramisu's key ingredient to "Neanderthal toes" and I would still eat too much of it at dinner...

Thank you?

Apparently we are in the midst of "celebrity doppelganger" week on facebook, a time when each obsessive, constant-status-updating member is prompted to change their profile pic to the famous person they believe they most resemble. After a few moments of deliberation, I opted to go with a DQ-clad Parker Posey from the (epic) film Waiting for Guffman.

Why, you ask? Because she's the poor man's Sandra Bullock and, if the bar is dark enough, so am I.

Shortly after uploading Ms. Posey to my profile, I received a wall post from a lad I used to know: "I was thinking ur dopple would have been julia robberts." Now, atrocious spelling aside, I was flattered. I mean... she's Julia Roberts! People has ranked her among the most beautiful celebrities in Hollywood for years! Just as I was beginning to polish my Blackberry screen and admire my own reflection, he added a clarifying comment: "80's julia." With that small addition, what was initially ego-boosting became... a complisult.

Since I just created this term, I'll explain. The way I see it, there are compliments, insults, and statements that, depending on the speaker's intent, could be either. For example: If you're told your hair looks nice, you feel great. If you're told your hair looks ugly, you feel awful (and go hat shopping). But if you're told your hair looks "different"... well, the bolder among us venture into a series of clarifying questions while the less confident offer up a sheepish grin before sprinting away in search of a second, less enigmatic opinion.

"Complisultors", preferring to maintain an air of social pleasantry at any cost, have mastered the art of speaking words without conveying meaning. Statements like "Your boyfriend is certainly an interesting young man" and "That's a very unique dress" manage to simultaneously confuse and mollify listeners by hovering in the ambiguity that is the complisult.

So, how's a girl to feel when she's told she resembles an 80s Julia Roberts more than two decades later? Should she assume he meant a younger Julia and take pride in the comparison? Or is this just a polite reminder to keep the straightener charged and the neon stirrup pants in the closet?