when i grow up

learning a foreign language can be embarrassing and sad.

yesterday, in class, we had to interview each other to learn the forms of "to be" in the past tense. e.g. i WAS in fargo in august. you WERE my friend before i fired you. we WERE eating rocks. just kidding. but not really.

anyway, i interviewed this australian girl i sit next to. right off the bat, she is a bit different from everyone else - she is 6'2" and a dancer, which is great she can use her height for something cool. she also has bright magenta hair. not red. not pink. magenta. and her voice is kind of... kind of funny. she's nice although i don't feel as if i have 'connected' to her. so we interview each other and here are the questions and answers:
[we were instructed to talk about when we were 10 years old]

did you have any siblings?
"no" [sure - nothing out of the ordinary here]

did you have your own room?
"yes, i had a small room" [ok.... why would you admit to having a SMALL room? why not just say, 'yes, i had my own room'?]

did you have any pets?
"no" [no big deal]

did you have a lot of friends?
"no" [and then because i felt kind of bad for her answer, i ask, "well, did you have A good friend?" to which she answers "no, i didn't have any friends." !! i didn't know how to respond. then she said, "we moved to new zealand." and i was like, "ok..." but i didn't know how to say "yeah, its really tough when you move and you're young." sad.]

did you like school?
"no, i didn't have any friends"

so two things about this: 1) it must be hard to have to remember this and 2) if you had such a horrible childhood, why not make a new one up??

this other woman interviewed me and i was like, "yeah, i had lots of friends and cousins and i liked school because i was popular." and she laughed and then i told her "once i was in junior high, i was no longer popular." and she said, "oh, were you too smart?" and i was like, "yeah..." although now that i think about that, i am not sure thats why i wasn't popular anymore. i peaked in mrs. toay's 3rd grade class - that was my most popular year of existence. the boys used to chase me at lunch and i was kind of head of the girls and along with the head of the boys agreed that on odd days the girls would chase the boys and on even days the boys would chase the girls. and they used to call me metal toe because i kicked all the boys i liked. not in the place where it would hurt a lot, just in the shins. and it actually made me more popular. it was all downhill after that year.

so, anyway, back to class. when the teacher called on me i tried to make magenta sound happier "she didnt have a LOT of friends" (not mentioning that she didnt actually have any friends) and didn't bring up the small room thing "she had her own room." i thought i did a pretty good job of answering the questions without making it seem sad. but then the chinese girl who also sits at our table and mostly never knows whats going on, when called upon, talks about magenta all over again. "she had a small room and no friends" we all kind of looked at each other like, "didn't she have anyone else to talk about? magenta was already presented."

so the morale of the story is, when you move to a new country, you can make up a whole new past. i guess you could do this even if you haven't moved, but people might find that weird.