Don't read this, it's pregnant

It’s an old story. You’re spending some time in Mexico or some other Spanish-speaking country. Perhaps it’s a vacation, perhaps a service trip, or perhaps you’re studying Spanish, no matter. You took some Spanish classes in high school, maybe even in college, but now, with everyone sounding nothing like those language tapes—who taught them how to speak anyways?—your functional vocabulary has been reduced mainly to the tourist trio: hola, sí and gracias.

A limited vocabulary, however, has never prevented any tourist from making a fool of themselves. You are no exception. One way or another you do something that makes you red in the face, which, as science has proven, activates the language centers of the brain. Suddenly, you remember lo siento, I’m sorry, which you tell the nearest person though you fell on your face, not on them. But it doesn’t matter because, joy of joys, you’re speaking Spanish! Even better, your language reserves are now activated. In milliseconds, nay, milliseconds you’ve recalled not just the verb, but the first-person singular form for expressing your state of being: estoy.

In this instant, whole worlds of self-expression open to you; now you can be happy, sad, even tired. Yet, in this moment, you want something more. You want to let them know how shamed you feel that you tripped over your bag in the middle of the hotel lobby. You try, but you can’t think of the word. But you are not to be conquered. This is your hour, well, three seconds of fluent glory. So, as you glimpse your newfound conversation partner looking expectantly at your open mouth, you make a desperate mental lunge and hope for the best: “Estoy embarazada”. And thus countless men and women confide to complete strangers, in moments already marked by embarressment, that they are pregnant.

Thanks to more than one classroom warning state side, I have managed during my time in Mexico to avoid any errors that left me impregnated or otherwise unnaturally compromised. Actually, my mistakes tend to be more metaphysical. I have told my mother that I like sleeping under a little bit of the past (using pasado in place of pesado, or weight) and my father that I like to eat nightmares (pesadillas and not the far tastier pescadillas, or fish quesadillas). Another culinary preference is walls (muros rather than moras, or berries). Despite the hints, neither has shown up on my dinner plate. When tired, I have slurred my way into matrimony (casado in place of cansado), only to be told by my Mexican father, in a whisper and with a grin, that the two words mean the same thing. The problem, more than ignorance, is exhaustion. I make errors when I’m tired. But it isn’t always easy to sleep--and it’s not because I’m in bed with the past. The truth is, I keep getting bitten by boogers (mocos instead of the winged moscas).