and Words
Me pides más
Después te vas
Indecisión, contradicción
Tus temores anclados en mi amor
No arriesgas nunca el corazón
Siempre adelante la razón
Robas mis fantasías con tu voz
Lyric excerpts from Musixmatch.
On a typical afternoon, I sit on a wooden table in our library. The Ritcher Library, the main library at the University of Miami, sits centrally on campus. Mere minutes separate this library and our cluster of classrooms and the student union. Most of us meet in The Zoo, the large meeting room just off the main entrance. Two walls of this room are lined with windows to the exterior of the building. Hence any student could glance into The Zoo and see if our friends had yet to arrive. In the dark days of the late 80’s and early 90’s, e-mail and mobile phones were rare, so we relied on verbal coordination.
The second floor was reserved mostly for periodicals. My friend Max, short for Marisela, worked at the periodical counter. I met her in engineering school. She is bright, soft-spoken, and funny. She’s Mexican, and we often speak in Spanish. A short distance from the periodicals sat a small computer lab, reserved mostly for word processing. I’ll occasionally reboot the computer and run my programming tools instead (Turbo Pascal), finding an alternate place to accomplish my work.
Continue reading “My imperfect romance with language and culture”