Tuesday, November 08, 2005

Stuff I Noticed Today

The village we live in is in a series of intersecting valleys. When we get fog—like this morning—it really settles in to fill them up. In the ten minutes since I dropped D.D. off at the door to her classroom, it has been creeping uphill and is now at the level of her school (a 15-minute walk up from the level of the river). But while we were walking to school, we had a good view of one fog-shrouded valley below us. It looked like a cloud had fallen out of the sky, as D.D. was quick to point out. Then she expanded on her theory. Maybe God dropped his blanket. Also, God is a super star (you know, like a musician), so he sleeps in a different hotel every night, and last night he must have been sleeping over our village. Maybe he had a nightmare, about the devil melting him or something, and he kicked off his blanket then. Then I pointed out that maybe God is really enormous, and maybe the “fog” was really just one of his socks.

Are Americans actually loud? Like can’t-help-ourselves loud? A girl on the bus, 4 rows behind me, was perfectly audible as she explained feudalism, Marxism, etc. to her seat-mate, but I couldn’t make out more than a phrase or 2 of the conversation between the guys on the seat facing me. Maybe it’s her idiosyncracy, because I just noticed her seat-mate leaning away from her as she spoke.

Hey! Chatty McLoudmouth! Pipe down back there!

Nope. Her seat-mate is finally able to get a word in edge-wise, and she’s almost as loud as C McL.

Am *I* loud? I make an effort to speak loudly-ish and clearly in class (in German), so I can be heard over all the private conversations, but am I automatically turned up to 20 when I speak English? Now I’m haunted by the thought.

1 comment:

Yoda said...

I suspect that *I* am a Loud American.