The first post from Spain

I’m not even going to try to catch up with all the stuff I haven’t written in the past month or two. Suffice it to say that I am now in Spain, have been here for over a month. I have many random thoughts that I could write about. My break from speaking Spanish all the time (which is totally exhausting) is thinking to myself in English. Analyzing Spanish people, Spain, and myself. More on everyone else later, but for now, this is just about me and my realizations about myself. The main realization being that I am totally over moving somewhere new and starting over. I think I’m just too old for it, have grown out of it, etc.

I have moved 13 times in the past 11 years. Not all of these were big moves, some were just to different apartments, one was just downstairs (to a different apartment). But six of these moves were to entirely new cities, cities were I knew at most three people, generally only one. This time around, Tarragona, none. Starting over is hard. It takes a lot of work and I don’t really have it in me any more. I mean, I have to have it in me, but I don’t really feel like it. This doesn’t mean that I’m turning into a hermit here in Spain, but rather, that I’d just rather not deal with the necessary evil of starting life over again.

Is it an age thing? Or do people only have a certain number of starting overs in them and I used mine all up right off the bat? Maybe it’s some kind female hormonal thing and my biology is telling me to nest while my graduate school is telling me to go do fieldwork somewhere far away. Anyway, enough of that. You can really only “not feel like it” for so long until you start going nuts and start striking up conversation with anyone that will listen. And then they’ll become your friend, if only for a little while, and then before you know it, you’re starting over again.

Now for some more lighthearted observations about Spain. Mullets are really big here. REALLY big (not necessarily in size—though that’s sometimes the case—but in popularity). I’m not really sure where the mullet craze stems from. In the past, Spain has borrowed heavily from the US in terms of what’s “cool,” but I don’t remember a mullet phase (not anything on this scale anyway) and the mullets here are definitely not ironic. And while generally confined to people under 40, barring that barrier, it’s basically a mullet free-for-all. Girls, boys, punks, preps, children… The other day I was walking behind a 7-year-old on his way to school, trying to decide it his hairstyle fell more under the category of rat’s tail or mullet. It was like a very wide rat’s tail, or a very thin (starting at the very bottom of his head) mullet. The poor child, I thought. Someone older than him has decided that this is a good haircut for him. Rethinking it however, given the popularity of the mullet, he might just be the coolest kid in his class. His mom lets him have a mullet!

The other observation is that Spanish people refrain from eating food that they know will give them gas. This one is particularly hard for me to wrap my brain around. Most people that I know (Americans) eat gas-producing foods with gusto. They are willing to suffer the aftermath just to enjoy the process of consumption. Hell, I have friends that continued going to the same restaurant even though they got explosive diarrhea after every visit! (you know who you are ☺). But no, most of the Spaniards that I’ve met bypass food they know they like just so they won’t have to deal with gas. And it seems to stem from a concern for those around them. My roommate skipped a meal of delicious chistorra (it’s kind of like fried chorizo sausage) because he had class after lunch and didn’t want his classmates to suffer through his burping. Are we assholes then because we don’t care about affecting other people with our gasses? I mean it seems like we’re more concerned about our own discomfort or embarrassment (not concerned enough to keep us from eating though!). But really I think we just have better practice. From a biological point of view, I’m not really sure how it works in terms of building up the enzymes and flora and fauna to digest things smoothly. What I’m talking about is better control of behavior. We can’t make our farts not smell, but I think most are pretty well-practiced in making them silent. Ditto for burps. So I guess we’ve just found a way to have our cake (and beans, and sausage, and vegetables) and eat them too.