Five Things I’ve learned from Drinking in the Streets in Spain

1. Your ability to speak a foreign language holds a direct relationship to how much wine you’ve imbibed. That is to say that around three glasses, you will hit your peak (“I have more wine, please?” or “In all the world, everyone talk about smoke and drink.”), but once you reach five or six, you will begin to fall back on explaining English idioms and saying, “shit,” and “fuck,” a lot.
2. Not every woman in Spain is beautiful, but all of them are sexy.
3. When you pull off a joke in Spanish, you are five times funnier than you are in English. When you fail at making a joke in Spanish, you are 10 times as unfunny.
4. Not speaking the common language is not a disadvantage. Such a barrier in communication serves as an excellent mask for paranoia and depression, and for staring at girls for a long time without being able to muster more than a hello.
5. When you buy alcohol at a convenience store in Spain, you are given small plastic cups to drink from for the night. When you are finished with these, you throw them to ground and crush them underfoot. Cigarettes are purchased from vending machines for about 4 Euros, and when you finished with your cigarette or the pack itself, you throw the remaining debris as far as you can manage. When thousands of people turn out of their homes for Madrid’s weeklong siesta in August, the city wakes the next morning caked in garbage and sprinkled with trash. “We are pork,” my cousin has to say about this, and because he is at his fourth glass of wine, he is speaking English very well. “No,” I tell him, “we all are. Where I’m from, we’ve just managed to bury what embarrasses us underground.” But I am on my sixth glass of wine, and so nothing comes across right in the telling.

The Piano with No Black Keys

Last night I played a piano with no black keys, on which the in-between pitches (those elusive F, G, A, C and D sharps) had to be picked out from among the endless stretch of rough white canvas. Then Conan O'Brien appeared, and because I've always fantasized of preforming on his show, I asked if I could play him a tune. Boy, did I know where to place those off color notes. Though he was quick to shake my hand and leave, he pressed a post-it into my babysoft palm before departing. I could tell he really liked it, especially the part where I sang about sleeping with all the nuns from my orphanage. As I watched him bob off, I noticed that Mr. O'Brien was very short, shorter than I was, and I realized then that I must be dreaming. This was after receiving two literary rejection letters (the emails came through as I lay drunk and dozing in bed), and so I think my brain was trying to make up for things. Thanks brain. I owe you one.