Thursday, July 24, 2008

School sucks, I know

Every week we have to attend a lecture, or una conferencia. The next day, I listen to everyone lie to the professor about how much they enjoyed it. The first one was given by an old professor who pontificated on Argentine history. He clearly knew his shit, but I suspect he could have talked about Harry Potter or orgasms or some hot button issue and still have put me to sleep. The next week it was the same guy talking about Argentine politics, with two girls who translated what he said into English every so often. Their English is marginally better than my Spanish. Their pronunciation is worse than my pronunciation in French. Their sense of how to avoid what´s known as un calque in French (example: translating¨"Aapka naam kya hai" into "Your name what is") was much worse than mine. Well yesterday we had a different speaker who was more engaging, and it was on Argentine art and literature. It was mildly interesting for the first hour and a half, but he was long-winded, and he had the translators, which meant twice as long a duration, and he used powerpoint even though that was absolutely useless, but it still meant the lights had to be off. I had already had a bit of throbbing in my head, and the darkness and my boredom and his yammering on and on and their yammering on and on and the darkening of the sky outside was too much. Even thinking about sex didn´t help me, it only gave me a headache. Thank God we only have to stomach one more of these things.

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