texas – Page 12 – hannah ananas

Singing, Showering, and liking you better…

Today, I sent a message to my best friend that read, “For some reason, I regularly think about messaging you when I go to the bathroom”

Her response was prompt and simple. “Lol,” followed by, “You like me so much better when youre naked”

“Duh,” was my casual response.

You see, the whole thing started back in college. Freshman year, I was Skype-ing with Christine one day, probably early morning. I had gone into the common room to chat with her, but, since we were in an all-girls dormitory, and it was too early for visitors to be around, I wasn’t fully dressed (probably just a t-shirt and underwear). When we started the call, she let me know that a friend of hers was with her, and that it was a guy (because it was already afternoon in Cambridge, England, so it was normal to be hanging out with people already there). So, I had to go put on some more clothing before we turned on the camera. (At least, I think that was the case… she might have just checked to make sure I was properly clothed, because I regularly would be not fully clothed. Either way, the next part did happen.) When I commented about this, the guy friend of hers made a comment about liking someone so much better naked (I forget if it was about Christine liking me, or what, but it was totally silly, and seemed such an odd comment.) We both were lacking in understanding at first, but he explained that there was an actual song (by Ida Maria), and that that was the line the girl used in it. (See, it made sense and wasn’t actually weird at all.)

The chorus goes like this:

But I won’t mind
If you take me home
Come on, take me home

I won’t mind
if you take off all your clothes
Come on, take them off

‘Cause I like you so much better when you’re naked
I like me so much better when you’re naked
I like you so much better when you’re naked
I like me so much better when you’re naked

We found it hilarious. We found the actual song and music video, and fell in a sort of this is silly and utterly ridiculous, but I still love it kind of love with the song.

I shared it with my hallway neighbor, who played guitar, and we tried playing it a bit on the guitar. I eventually played it for Christine one day on Skype. My greatest, proudest achievement with the song, however, was the time I snuck into the bathrooms (they were shared, and had loads of stalls and multiple showers) one day, just after Jessie, the neighbor, had gone in to shower. Once I knew she was actually in the shower, showering, I walked into the showering area (mind you, not into her stall, just in the showering section of the bathroom), and began playing the song on guitar, and singing it to her. I could hear her snorting, gurgling, guffawing laugher emitting from the shower stall as I sang and played. It was spectacular for the both of us. I shared the story with my best friend, too, and she loved it.*

So, the song has always held a special little place in our hearts, minds, and lives, all three of us. Everyone else probably just thinks we’re crazy, whenever they overhear us mentioning or quoting or singing it. 😛

Here’s a link to the music video.

*This reminds me… I sang to a friend of mine in Japan while she showered one night. We were chatting on the phone, just hanging out one night, after we’d both gotten internet, and so didn’t have to hang up after every five minutes anymore, and she really needed to shower, but we weren’t ready to end our conversation/hanging out. So, she set the phone to the side on speakerphone, and I sang to her while she showered. I had been humming and singing quietly already anyway, so what was the difference if I just did it a little louder, right? It was spectacular, of course. Then a night or few later, when I mentioned to another friend that this had happened, he complained that I didn’t sing for him and that that certainly wasn’t fair. And so I sang to him over the phone… and he fell asleep. 😛 Spectacular in a different sort of way, I guess, but still spectacular. 🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Snow in Houston, Texas (and t-rex Christmas cards)

Last night, it snowed here. In Houston, Texas. It happened yet again. What miracles lie before us? It began after I went to sleep, and didn’t begin to stick until after I woke up for a bathroom break in the middle of the night. So, I woke up to snow covering everything that wasn’t concrete this morning. Which, when you think about it, is kind of the best kind of snow – you don’t have to shovel or worry about tire chains or anything, but you get to have beautiful snow everywhere around you.

The hit of the morning was arriving to school. My mom drove me in, because we were going to a Christkindlmarkt (German Christmas market) together after school, and the market was too far away for me to drive home first and then go, and it didn’t make sense for us to drive two cars out there. She was staying for a bit, because we had Mass at school for the Immaculate Conception, and this was a chance for her to see the school a little bit. Pulling into the parking lot (vacant of teachers, because we were so early), we discovered a sort of snowball fight happening in the picnic table area next to the lot. We didn’t have much snow on the ground, but the kids were making some snowballs out of it, and throwing them around at one another. It was adorable.

Naturally, my mom declared that I had to make a snowball, as we were leaving the car. I grabbed an already-made snowball from the ground, which had lost only a bit after originally falling there, and showed it to her. As she eyed me up while she finished off her own snowball, I realized that she intended to throw hers at me.

And so the fight began.

My mom and I, shuffling around a parking lot and a small grassy area with snow about it, picking up and throwing odd snowballs at one another, practically screeching with delight. When I was turned away, a snowball hit her square in the back of the head. No one was too near us, though, so it had come a long way. And these were a little tough for regular snowballs, so it definitely hurt her a bit in the moment (stung, perhaps, is the appropriate word here). It didn’t ruin out fun, of course, but merely added to the silliness of the whole affair – one of my students had attacked my mother with a snowball*. No part of that declaration makes sense for living here, in Houston, Texas. 😛

In class, before Mass, kids lined up at the windows to stare at the snow in the courtyard below and on the roofs within view. This was only the second time in their lives that it has snowed here, so their fascination with it was completely understandable, and utterly adorable.

Today had some magic, that’s for sure.

*I found out later that the student who hit my mom actually was a student of mine. He asked me ‘who that teacher was, walking with me earlier,’ and, when I asked for clarification, he described the morning snowball affair. “That was my mom.” In shock, he declared that he thought it was a teacher and asked me to tell my mom that he was sorry for what he did to her. (My mom and I laughed at the thought that he apologized for having hit my mom, but that is seems to be the case that he willingly would hit a teacher in the head with a hard snowball, without question.)

P.S. My task today was to “[d]raw a Christmas card”. So, I drew one on the roof of my mom’s car tonight as we were leaving the Christkindlmarkt. Frost had begun to reappear all over the place.

Post-a-day 2017

My well-worn boots

Tomorrow, I am to wear boots. They are cowboy boots. I got them in Vienna, while I lived there a few years ago. For my best friend’s wedding, the bridal party all wore cowboy boots. The night before the wedding, we had a fire outside in the cool, January first air. I had my foot resting on the edge of the ring around the fire pit, not realizing that it was a metal pit (as opposed to a ring around a dirt pit), and the edge was connected to the part holding the fire. I felt a stickiness when I adjusted my footing, and checked my boot to see what its cause was. No, it was not tree sap, but rather the melting of the sole of my boot.

To this day, I recall the incident every time I think of the boots, and I smile goofily (or so it feels to me, anyway) when I see the deep line going across the forward sole of my one boot. I am also grateful that I noticed it when I had, and that the sole still remains entirely functional, despite the sort of gash – I could have burned my foot if it’d gone through the sole much farther!

Just an interesting story about my boots, I suppose. 🙂 Oh, and they’re from a store called something like “New York”.

Post-a-day 2017

Missing…

I miss my bed in Japan. My bedroom, especially, is one thing I miss most these days. It was a haven for me. No matter what kind of chaos or boredom lurked in my life, every night, my bedroom awaited me in calm, open, and empty space… in beauty. I shut my doors, and was safe in my retreat from everything else. Only love and blessings were ever allowed into my bedroom. I wasn’t even allowed to walk in it if I hadn’t recently showered. Clean clothes, my ukulele and ukulele music, my nighttime books, and water and tissues were just about all that ever went in there, aside from a clean me and my bed.

My bedroom now is slightly larger, but filled with boxes and stuff… a sentimentality to which I am not so sure I still want to cling. I think I am afraid that I will forget the memories, if I get rid of the objects. I do not, for the most part, want the objects, but the memories and the ways I felt. Without the objects, what will remind me?

Post-a-day 2017

Hers, mine, & ours

I have been teaching during someone’s maternity leave recently, and I discovered something today – when the teacher returns, I will have been with the students more than she has. Just now, I checked the calendar, and it seems that I have already been with them for longer than she was, due to Hurricane Harvey. It is odd to me to consider that these kids would be more my students than her students. It is her class, and I have always seen it that way. So have the kids. And so we likely will continue to live in this odd little my world within her world setup, where the kids are, indeed, mine, but we are all hers. Something like that, anyway.

I will miss these kids. If I really think about it, …well, no I don’t do that. Whenever I begin actually to consider it, my eyes grow hot and threaten an outpouring of tears. I suppose I really do love the kids so much, even though they drive me frustrated so often as they do. They know I love them, and so do I. And it is difficult to consider that I no longer will see these people who have been part of my daily life for so long, and as we all have worked through so much together.

A teacher friend of mine sent me a message tonight, saying how we needed to do something, because she missed me. It turns out that neither one of us has done much other than school lately. This time in particular, even more so than other times I have taught, the students are my social interactions in life. I call my mom in the evenings, because I am craving adult interaction. I don’t have interaction with friends. I just have these kids. In a sense, they are my friends, and I have no others (whom I see, anyway). And so I will miss them all greatly, and even some of the stupid stresses they force upon me, like throwing ice at one another in class or unknowingly rejecting a beautiful opportunity to learn and to help themselves become beautiful successes in life. Yes, I will miss these kids who are not mine, but mine. I love them dearly.

Post-a-day 2017

‘One Spanish-speaking Boyfriend, please’

I said to myself yesterday that I needed a native-Spanish-speaking boyfriend, or else a native-Spanish-speaking friend, because I need Spanish in my life, and I need to use the language more than I currently do (hardly at all).

Tonight, at dinner, the waiter, who might also be the manager or owner or something, brought over to our table a handsome-looking young man, probably right around my own age, and explained that the guy knows very little English, and, if I would like, would be willing to work with me on improving my Spanish, if I would help him learn English. And no, I hadn’t told him about yesterday’s declaration.

Isn’t life awesome? 😀

To give a little context, – the waiter was not being crazy or anything, with his suggestion that the helper and I work on language together – I had asked the waiter, after interacting with him a few times in English, if he would speak to us in Spanish from now on. My mom had studied Spanish in high school, and then briefly in college, and has had plenty of interactions with Spanish in the years since then. I spent a summer in Spain while in high school, and had just used Spanish all over for a couple years after that. So, while it could be difficult at times, I figured we could handle it.

The waiter was delighted at the request, and instantly spewed out fast Spanish. My mom told him almost immediately (in Spanish), “But you have to speak more slowly, because I am a gringa.” (It’s essentially a term for foreigners.) We all laughed, and he acquiesced.

As the meal went on, the waiter would pause and chat with us here and there. He moved here from Mexico when he was 17 or 19 (I forget which), and don’t even know how to say ‘please’ in English. To help himself learn English, he watched the American movies, and had on the English subtitles, and action I fully approve and support, and which I have done plenty myself. He also spoke of how strong the Spanish-speaking community is in Houston, and that I need only get involved, and they will turn me into a Latina. He learned that we are not studying Spanish; that I speak Spanish, but just never use it; that I just lived back from Japan; and that I just have no friends here who speak Spanish. So it made sense that he brought over the guy later. And it wasn’t weird.

When we left, a while later, I gave the young guy my number on a napkin.

Post-a-day 2017

Good morning… fancy an earthquake?

This morning, I woke up around five in an extreme panic. My bed was shaking, and my subconscience was sure that the building soon would be tumbling down – this was a massive earthquake, and it was lasting… already almost a minute before I could get my bearings and turn on a light.

And then, as I discovered where exactly I was, – in the USA, and specifically Texas – it took me another moment to discover what was happening. I knew that it was not an earthquake. It was not the gymnasium over my head, either, as it was in a place where I briefly worked immediately after arriving to the US. So, what was it? ‘What is going on?!’ my insides demanded to know.

And then I heard it: a wind-filled noise, accompanied by a soft chugging sound of deep iron. It was a train. While the sounds of trains have never much bothered me, even when I lived beside tracks in the past, I’m not sure that I ever noticed a shaking tied to the passing of one. Nonetheless, I experienced it in full force this morning.

After I realized that it was simply a passing train, – though, I was still surprised at how much it shook the house and its contents – and not an earthquake, I mentally noted that I didn’t even have to start panicking. A few seconds after this noting, my body finally began to respond to the threat of the earthquake. It had been as though I were in a fight or flight mode, and so hadn’t had the various responses tied to the fear in the perceived situation. Once I was safe, they all kicked into action, and I began shaking all by my self. I was physically panicking now. My breathing tighted to a near non-existence, and my heart raced. My skin prickled all over, and I had to force myself to swallow and then take slow, deep breaths.

I wonder if it will happen again this morning…

Post-a-day 2017

at night

“Y’all have a good night,” I sat in a casual, comforting, and somewhat raspy and deep, womanly voice.

“You, too… be safe,” they both respond, accompanied by a casual wave, a smile, and a dip of the head by both of them.

This happens as I walk out of the school, close to 10pm, after the theatre production. These two men are the police officers on duty.

I love this…. these kinds of interactions. The men would have been ignored in so many other places I have lived and visited. They are sometimes ignored by people here. But it is also normal for that little interaction to take place, especially around here.

Yes, I love this, I think to myself with a smile, as I walk to the car. I love living here. I love the South.

Post-a-day 2017

My real voice

In college, I spent a summer studying in Germany. It was a language school setup, filled with foreigners, but in such a small town that everyone knew that we were studying German, and so everyone always spoke to us all in German. I had already studied abroad a few times before this adventure, and I had learned firsthand about what works and what doesn’t work, in terms of language immersion. I was dedicated to learning German, and so I made sure that I only spoke in German with others, even if they spoke to me in English. This made friendships hard among the people in my program’s group, since they all used English together; I came across a bit snobby, but I was just really committed to learning German.

I made friends with other foreigners rather easily, though, and especially ones in higher levels of German, which was even better for me. My German was improving immensely. But this led to a unique situation one day.

One day, near the end of either my time at the school or my friend Paul’s time there (he’s British), I found myself faced with a desperate Paul, actually begging me to speak English. Why?! was my repeated question to his pleas.

“Because I want to hear what you sound like!”

I don’t know if he was pleased or not by how I sound in English, but I spoke a little for him. And it was way weird, using English with him, despite the fact that I’d heard him speak English loads, and that it’s our common native language. I had just never used it with him.

And then this brought up a unique and interesting sentiment. He wanted to hear me, and that meant speaking English. I can guess that my native tongue was the one in which Paul believed my identity to lie. I know that it felt like I was setting aside a sort of mask when I switched to English with him. I even felt a little called-out… as though I had been hiding somehow, and it had been behind German. The real me (I) lay in English, in the English part of me.

Yet, years later, here I am, missing the parts of me that belong to these different languages in which I have lived. A part of me, true me (I), exists only on German, and others in French, in Spanish, and in Japanese. So much so that the real me (I) is this whole combination of languages – I feel a huge emptiness and feel not myself when I am using only English in my daily life. I listen to Spanish-speaking radio when I’m in Houston, mostly because I don’t get to use Spanish often enough. I read every night in French, and trade off an English book for a German one at times for my evening reading, too. I regularly pull out a Spanish book to read, or my German audiobooks. And I have noticed that I have been searching for a tolerably satisfying way to have Japanese in my near-daily life, too. (For now, it has just been the occasional music, and a perpetual repeat of a certain song being stuck in my head.) When I don’t have them all, it is as though a part of me is missing, and suddenly getting to speak with someone in them, almost reminds me of that mask I was setting aside in Germany with Paul… like I am again setting aside some mask I have been wearing.

Perhaps it is now a mask of monolingualism, pretending that I only speak English, while I long for the world to talk to me in several languages, all the time.

Anyway… I’m exhausted. And I miss Paul. He was studying opera, and was a really great guy. I wonder if he’s been really successful with opera these past several years. Maybe I can go see him perform one day. That would be awesome. 🙂

Post-a-day 2017

Malts

Today, I did what one would call volunteering while my mom was at work, and then she and I went to a shake place, so we could get a malt. I even called ahead to verify that they had malts. We didn’t want a shake. We wanted a malt. My mom briefly suggested that we just make our own at home, but I pointed out that half the purpose of going to get a malt was to be out of the house.

So, we went to the Galleria, the huge, high-fashion shopping complex in Houston, so we could try out this shake place. We got a chocolate malt to share, and then walked around the complex a bit, drinking simultaneously from straws in the same cup, as though we were little kids who could wait to have their malt. As we first walked out and saw various store names, we discovered that neither of us was even interested in window shopping. So, we finished our malt, watching the kids ice skate below, which was far more interesting than shopping.

It was a good time.

As a whole, today was on a completely different level from yesterday, and in a very wonderful way.

Post-a-day 2017