Background: Those of you who read my posts may already know this, but I suffer from (actually, no, I quite enjoy) a near-crippling addiction to Mexican-born women. I can’t explain it, but it grabs a hold of me, and does things to me that no drug could ever dream of accomplishing. Fortunately for me and my GDA (Gene Distribution Apparatus)–which, as it turns out, gets even more excited than I do upon my encountering such a woman–I have a Darwinistic advantage: I speak Spanish quite well for a gringo, generally well enough to carry a nice conversation with such a woman and sacar un número de teléfono.
Foreground (I guess): Today I stayed about 45 minutes after class to listen to a bit of the new Red Hot Chili Peppers album with a classmate. I would later learn that the stars had aligned to make me stay those 45 minutes at school so that the destinies of my GDA and one particularly gorgeous MBW could intertwine; as I boarded the bus at school, I found myself sitting behind said MBW. Is she really Mexican-born? Does she speak Spanish? Can I use my knowledge of the language to further the goals of myself and my now-excited GDA? My questions were quickly answered as she fielded a telephone call in Spanish.
Our bus landed (so to speak) at the transit center, where it turned out we were both taking the same trolley. Well, I wasn’t supposed to take that trolley–it wouldn’t take me home–but I honestly had no idea as I was concentrating more on what my GDA thought of the MBW. I actually had given up at this point, thinking I’d been hanging around her too long without talking to her to pursue it further. So I entered the light rail in question through another door. Turned out the only free seat was directly facing her anyway! So I sat there, listened to my music, and eventually worked up the courage (not of the liquid kind, like the last time I used my Darwinistic Language Advantage) to start a conversation.
So I pull out some gum, take one out and start chewing on it, and then I ask her “¿Quiere chicle?” (In retrospect, I could’ve thrown a word or two in the middle to make it sound less…American.) Anyway, she didn’t want one, so I tried another tack (asked her about having came from near my school), found out she wasn’t a student, and I said “OK, you’re not a student…what do you do?” I expected a specific answer like “I sell shoes” which I could then somehow extend into some other conversation, but what I got was “Trabajo” (“I work”). I thought, OK, I’m getting one-word answers and that’s not really good for my GDA, but I’ll give it another shot or two.
Then a couple of Mexican-born non-women who apparently knew her–friends? cousins? exes?–got on the trolley and started talking to her in Spanish. Well, I’m great at Spanish when I talk to one gorgeous Mexican-born woman, but when there are more people–males especially–in the picture I clam up like a fetal clam…an American fetal clam. So I did. I clammed up. I tried to follow the conversation and failed. Having no idea what they were talking about, I felt I had no choice but to return to my music. As the Who were just about to start soothing me with their story of a young pinball wizard, I saw her smile to her friends and say, “Ya no me quiere” (“He doesn’t want [to talk] me anymore”). She got off on the next stop, then I realized that I was on the wrong trolley and in fact was on the opposite side of San Diego from where I needed to go.
Darwin weeps in his grave.