Forgetting How To Read...An Old Blog I Didn't Post Because I Was Probably Drunk and Fell Asleep

Its a pretty stellar thing to live in a place where a plethora of languages are spoken around you and where your job requires so much guest interaction that you are forced to learn those languages. The list of Korean words floating around in my brain is growing by the day, and while I haven't set my sights on Japanese yet, I can most certainly pick it out when I hear it and respond with the appropriate hello or goodbye. Learning to communicate without a common language is also a crazy-satisfying endeavor, because you realize, after struggling through instructions to people who speak one of three different languages that aren't English, and wrestling through a nighttime conversation with your roommate about where furniture in the room should go, that communication is bigger than a common language. Hurray.

The flip side to all that learning is a loss of the eloquence of your native language, and an overall simplifying of communication on the whole. I already find it appropriate to make whole sentences out of two words, "No more," "everytime" "ok," "Off today?" etc. A complex sentence sounds something like "You going dinner?" "Where are you from?" and "No fighting/running/diving," which is then followed by a very obvious no-n0 hand motion. I think a lot of us have a secret fear of degrading our English to a point of permanence. This carries over into reading, because I am finding my attention span is waning when I sit in front of my computer to catch up on the world. It may not just be the language issue though, but the constant kind of stimulus that this job requires is making it hard to engage in any other kind of continuous down time besides sleeping and drinking. Regardless I am suddenly an impatient child with ADD, and it is a miracle that I can even write this blog and an even bigger one if I bother to post it.

 

It doesn't end here. Not only are my English skills possibly sliding away, so are my skills at reading people, that, or my entire cultural competency meter is getting shaky. Specifically, while in Seattle I know how to not get hit on by guys, and they also have the sensitivity in Seattle to pick up the gay vibe and generally not hit on me. Mutual happiness. In Guam, where all the ladies harbor a slightly harder, get-shit-done look and attitude, the dyke/femme binary has to be thrown out the window. Pair that with the over friendliness and slight feminization of the men in Chammorro culture, and every interaction is one big grey area where you can't rate the amount of sexual interest existing in a conversation to save your life. 

Until they call you- at 3 in the morning. 

I was so full of codene for my hacking night coughs that I didn't even understand the noise blaring from the phone until the 3rd ring, and I was even more confused when I answered and a male non-korean voice asked for ME, using the correct pronunciation of my name. 

"Who is this?"

The unknown on the other line told me his name and it meant zero to me, and it continued to mean zero for all the times that he repeated it until at last he gave up and said, "Ah you don't remember me...from the surf party. I told you I would take you surfing. I don't usually call people at 3 am, I just wanted to make sure you didn't fake number me. Have a good night. I will call you tomorrow." 

The end.

What the fuck? It was brought to my attention by my friends after that party that maybe when I said I met someone that would take me surfing I had the wrong idea. Damn, I guess I did. Why didn't I fake number that guy? Because I really believed we were going surfing, I was at a god damned surf party, everyone there was in this surf club and that is the reason I went in the first place. Out here you can't just find a beach and surf on it if you are white, you have to be invited along with a local or just wait until you vacation in Hawaii- these beaches do not belong to us. The only way in is to know somebody, and holy hell that was what I was looking for. So i read it wrong, just like when I read my contract wrong and missed the part that said I had a drug test. When I met this guy he reminded me of someone that I work with out here, and was just totally friendly and chill  about taking some rando clubmates to good surf. Give him my number? SURE! And the poor fucker thought I was fake numbering him because I gave him an extension at a damn hotel. No no guys, really, I live in the hotel.

Anyway, I solved the guy mis-read by just never calling him back, and the only other awkward time that I had to talk to him was accidently answering the phone thinking it was a friend of my roommate, The Stoic Korean. He asked about dinner and I pussyfooted around the truth that I didn't want dinner, just surfing, and then "accidently" threw his number in the trash. As for my slowing demolishing reading and speaking skills, I probably can't just ignore those like I ignored the guy. I have to motivate back to writing and reading and editing and critical thinking, and I need to do it quick, or else learn another universal language fast to aid in my communication. 

Maybe I'll learn the language of dance.  (If Erika and Kate don't read this that reference is pointless)