I was sitting in my Rudolfo Anaya class today (Anaya is a Chicano writer), and our professor was passing around two more books he wrote recently, and one of them, The Man Who Could Fly and Other Stories, was published by the University of Oklahoma press, which made me all excited, because ohmigosh I lived there, and when I opened to it to see which short stories were in that collection, I saw that the book is actually part of a series edited by Robert Con Davis-Undiano, who happened to teach one of my classes that I took at OU (a class on Chicana writers). He is also the editor of the journal World Literature Today (in Norman), where I did an internship for a few months. How cool is that?

On my way home tonight I was talking to an American friend, Caley, in English, when a very drunk German girl (DGG) - drunk as in we smelled it from 10 feet away - interrupted our conversation.

DGG: Where in the States are you from?
Me: I am not, I am German.
DGG: Well, your English is fucking good.
Me: Um, thanks.
DGG: I don’t believe you.
Me: Who, me?
DGG: You are not German, you are American.
Me: No, I am German.
DGG: But you grew up in the States. You know, I lived there for half a year, in Massachussetts.
Me: Nope, I am German, I grew up in Germany.
DGG: Then you grew up around Americans.
Me: No, I did not. I was born in Germany, grew up here, and lived here all my life, except for one year that I lived in the States.
DGG: Hah, you just gave me the answer.
Me: What?
DGG: You grew up in the States.
Me: No! I grew up here, lived in the States for one year!

Very amusing conversation. Since she kept speaking English, I played along and spoke English as well. If I didn’t believe someone was German (however, if someone told me they are, I would probably not keep telling them “no you’re not”), I would simply start speaking German to see if they speak German at all and see if they have an accent. By the way, while her English was definitely American-English, she had a German accent that was pretty easy to hear. I guess since she had a stronger accent than I do, she couldn’t hear mine.

She then got bored and told some other random people (in German) how she is half-Arab and half-German, and how she is currently blonde, but her hair is actually black, and how her eyes change color. Iiiinteresting, I am sure these people were just dying to hear about that.

Totally made my day.

Well, getting an A in my Spanish Linguistics final might have helped, though, as well as surviving my last two finals, and seeing a super-cute movie, The Holiday. Jude Law has such a cute English accent; normally I am not very much into British English, but it can sound cute, and they have some funny words. (And yeah, I realize I just used the word cute three times in two sentences, and now I am all cuted out.)