Thursday, April 7, 2011

Unborn Babies in Spanish

I'm having a bad autistic day, people. My English has left the building completely and I barely managed to mumble my way through a meeting with a student. Luckily, the Spanish is unaffected, and I only teach in Spanish this semester. Still, I feel confused, lost, and keep bumping into things.

In the literature course, I started giving the lecture planned for next week because I thought today was the 12th. Then, a student asked me  how to say "peanut butter" which (together with "snail") is, for some reason, an expression that I forget no matter how many times I look it up. Then, I brought the wrong edition of the textbook to the classroom and couldn't figure out why my page numbers didn't coincide with the students'. Then, I showed up for class 30 minutes too early and freaked out when I saw that none of the students had shown up. At the coffee shop I, inexplicably, ordered a disgusting soy milk beverage that I never drink. Then, I saved myself from drinking it by dropping the paper cup on my desk and making a huge mess.

And in the midst of this disastrous day, a student had to ask me how to say "unborn babies" in Spanish. It took all I got to tell her that I would try to look for a translation after she told me how to say "undead corpses" in Spanish. And don't ask me how she managed to arrive at unborn babies during the discussion of space travel and intergalactic space shuttles because I have no idea.

I need to go home and stop wreaking havoc on everything I touch.

2 comments:

Meredith said...

Oh, that sounds terrible! I hope it gets better once you get back home and can relax in your own environment.

Pagan Topologist said...

It does sound like a rough day. I hope it does not happen too often that way.

Maybe unborn babies being committed to living out their lives in a spaceship was what the student was thinking. The idea of interstellar exploration where generations of people would live and die knowing nothing but a starship as home is very disturbing to me, but it is a common idea in the discussion of interstellar travel.