and then

This morning I completed the Duolingo tree for Spanish. I had expected to receive some colorful animation, musical fanfare, or at least a badge to note the occasion. Instead a new section called “Daily Refresh” simply revealed itself. It’s fine, just as with pilgrimages and birthdays, it’s less about recognition, more about the journey. But a little celebration is also always welcome.

Anyhow, I had already planned to continue with Duolingo. I did not complete all of the sections to Legendary status on purpose, leaving about half of them to review and turn gold. There are “side quests” too — additional exercises and word matches. I’ve considered doing the reverse tree (Spanish to English), or returning to French, or taking on a related language such as Portuguese, or an entirely different one like Japanese or Mandarin.

Of course there are other ways to learn Spanish and other languages. I could focus more on Repaso Total; Clozemaster; and immersion through Dreaming Spanish, movies, music, travel, Pimsleur recordings, and online and in-person classes. To help people move in the other direction, I’d also like to complete my TESOL certification.

Yet I’m still likely to continue with Duolingo. I probably will ease up a bit, after Sunday. I currently hold first place in the Diamond League finals, so it would be great to finish there, making my own way to mark reaching the top of the Spanish tree.

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three score

On my birthday, my sister Joyce wrote

So you’re 16, right?? Hope it’s a good one!

I immediately replied

Jajaja, estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años!

…

When I was younger, birthdays felt more significant. Even half-birthdays, even though we didn’t celebrate them — I used to tell adults my age in half-years. I remember telling my mother before a party at the bowling alley that 10 felt important because I was going into double digits, and that was also around the age where I stopped declaring half-years. Bu then at 15-1/2 I got my learner’s permit, and at 16 my driver’s license. At 18 I could vote but had to register for the draft, at 19 I was legal to drink, but then they changed the age and I had to wait again until 21.

Many of the rest sort of blur together, in part because they don’t mark legal transitions. I do remember celebrating 29 together with friends, although I don’t have a strong recollection of celebrating the 30th. 35 was Dante’s age midway through life (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”), as well as my age when I first read Dante. I married that year. I was aware that I was old enough to be President.

40 was filled with changes, moving from Manhattan to Pittsburgh, saying goodbye to Mookie, buying our first house. However, like 35 before and 50 after, while the year was eventful, the actual birthday, not so much. The years became more important than their passage. The sweeping of the hands on a clock, not the marks where they pause.

…

Increasingly the birthdays, even the half-birthdays, have started to take legal import again. At 50 my health insurance would pay for the shingles vaccine and for a colonoscopy. At 59-1/2 I could withdraw penalty-free from my retirement accounts. At 62 I could begin Social Security as well as purchase a lifetime pass to the US National Parks. 65 is my full retirement age for Social Security and when I become eligible for Medicare. If I wait until 70 for Social Security I could receive maximum payments. At 72 I must start taking required minimum distributions from my retirement accounts.

60 is not a subject of the law, it is pure, important for its own sake. 60 is a beautiful round number, plenty of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, .., just naming them is like counting the passage of time. And 60 is intimate with time: seconds in a minute, minutes in an hour, now years in a lifetime. It is an age when I do not take for granted that I can travel to other countries and walk pilgrimages, decide on a whim to go parasailing or scuba diving, sleep a good night’s sleep on a thin pad when I go camping. It is an age where I have learned so much, forgotten so much, can continue to build and learn too.

Sí estoy orgulloso de haber cumplido sesenta años.

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soñar con lo que aprendo

When I was fifteen, sixteen years old I would wake up remembering dreams about things I was learning at that age. There were dreams of organic chemistry mechanisms floating through space, of driving the streets of my hometown, of speaking French. I don’t recall now if I dreamt at the time about karate, but that would surely fit the pattern.

…

This morning I woke up with a phrase in my head: respeta naturaleza. I was with a group of hikers, including some younger ones who were stomping on some mushrooms on a log, no reason, just to smash them into the rotting wood.

I thought: that’s not quite right. I should have dreamt, I should have said in my dream, respeta la naturaleza. Or if Nature is personified, perhaps respeta a Naturaleza. If I’m addressing one person formally, like the safety instruction cards on an airplane, the imperative would instead have been respete. But hold on, this was a group of hikers, so respeten. Unless I’m in Spain, and then I had to look up whether it was respetad (which is correct) or respeted — my knowledge of vosotros conjugation is lousy, I need to work on that.

…

But at least I dreamt in Spanish! It was wonderful to dream once more about something I’m learning. I’ve been wondering for a long while if this could ever happen again, whether I would ever dream in Spanish. For some months now I’ve reached other milestones. Sometimes these are delightful: during the last year when I had conversations with people around Spain and Mexico, I’ve sometimes been unable to remember later that day which language I was speaking. Other times, not so much: there have been a few occasions when I’ve wanted to say something to an English speaker and had only the words in Spanish. To lose my abilities in French while learning Spanish, whether out of disuse or the Spanish “crowding out” the French in my head, that’s one thing. But to lose my ability in English!

I asked my parents a year or so ago whether they dreams in Tagalog, Visayan, or English. (It’s strange how often we know so little about the inner lives of the people close to us.) My father said he barely remembers any of his dreams, so he couldn’t say. My mother said her childhood dreams are in Tagalog and her adult dreams are in English, even though she doesn’t remember a time when she didn’t know both languages. I asked the same question of a couple of other fluent multilingual speakers I met last summer, and they both said it depends on the situation, on the people they’re meeting in their dreams.

…

Over the past month I have been inviting dreams about a particular Spanish word: patria. This is a key word in Filipino hero José Rizal’s last poem, which he wrote in the hours before he was executed. Sometimes he capitalizes the word, at other times no. It makes its presence felt as the second word, embedded throughout the poem, and then its stark literal absence from the last stanza. But what does it mean to him in each of these instances, and what word or words would be most fitting to use in an English translation?

My friend and former student, Daniel Davis, who is an accomplished multilingual translator of technical works, suggested one resolution is to leave patria unchanged in my translation. I had already considered that for the word salud elsewhere in the poem, which I believe is acceptable because as an interjection it is already on the edge of being a loanword in English. But if I were to take this route with patria, it would be because I see it as a shifting, nebulous concept in Rizal’s own thinking, both historically and within the poem. I’m not sure if I want to leave both of these words, salud and patria, in their original forms when the causes for doing this would be such different reasons.

There is so much more I would want to write about this one word, what it seems to mean throughout the poem and how different English words don’t quite fit, but I want to finish our taxes today.

And so I find myself still hoping to dream of patria.

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Bustamante, Tlaquepaque

On the third of this month I took a day trip from Guadalajara out to Tlaquepaque. I only brought my phone with me on the trip, and I just found this poem that I wrote outside an art gallery.

With a bigger laptop screen before me and a bit more time, I made a couple of edits to the original. In the first line, I substituted the preposition por instead of en between pasar and el césped. In the penultimate line, I replaced the indicative vive with the subjunctive viva, to give more of a sense of hope than expectation.

I don’t write poems much anymore. For whatever reason I was moved to that afternoon, and what’s more in Spanish.

…

El obrero puede pasar por el césped
y la obrera puede tocar las caras
de las esculturas en la casa
de Sergio Bustamante
en el pueblo de Tlaquepaque.

Por mi parte poseo las obras de arte
con mis ojos. No hay precios
en ninguna parte por los preciosos
excepto las joyas. El libro se llama
Alquimista de los sueños.

Pues la obrera no las toca de verdad
solo sí las plumas de su trapo.
También las piernas de una mosca
que no mueve durante mi visita.
Espero que todavía viva en esta zona

de aire acondicionado.

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the casual racism

Yesterday while walking along the malecón (esplanade) here in Puerto Vallarta, I sought some shade under a group of tree planters. One of the things I relearned here in Jalisco, including last week in Guadalajara, is always to walk and sit wherever there is shade. (I first learned this from Mookie, walking with him around Berkeley and trying to get him to heel on my left side, but he wisely insisted on walking in the shade instead, where the hot sidewalk wouldn’t hurt his paws.)

There was already some older white guy in the shade, fiddling with something in his hands, maybe his phone or his wallet, I don’t know. When I arrived, he immediately stood up. Walking away, he glared at me, shaking his head.

To the typical tourist here, because of my brown skin and casual clothing, they believe I’m Mexican. And so when I don’t act deferential, they think I’m dangerous or trying to scam them.

This evening after sunset, while the sky continued to turn marvelously nuanced grades of hues, I decided to walk south along the boardwalk from Playa Los Muertos, because I hadn’t been in that section yet. I had already taken a bus up towards the Saturday tianguis, and also walked inland in search of more affordable food, and walked north along the malecón too. So I decided to head in a different direction this time. These restaurants didn’t have tables set along the playa — instead, there were beach chairs that had been rented and now abandoned by los ricos. I decided to sit in one and watch the changing colors of the sky, reflected in the ocean.

— Are you following me? asked a woman, perhaps my age, seated in a nearby beach chair.

— What? No. I have no idea who you are.

— It’s just that I saw you earlier.

I myself hadn’t noticed her at all. She was a complete non-entity to me. But then I realized she might think I’m dangerous. Fair enough. It was getting dark, and the only other people near us were a Spanish-speaking family. Like pretty much all the gringos here, I suspected she had made no attempt whatsoever in her life to learn the language at all. She was a solo female traveler and I was a stranger.

— Would you like me to move? I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.

— No, that’s okay. I’ll only be here for a minute.

It’s impossible to escape the racism of my fellow Americans, even when I’m traveling in another country. Last January while having tempura for breakfast (tempura for breakfast!) in a tiny shop in Asakusa, I was having an extended conversation with a group of men a little younger than me. Several minutes in, one of them said:

— Your English is quite good.

I had to pause for a long moment. Was this guy being serious? I mean, it’s true that I had come to the same conclusion about an Asian-Canadian when I first saw him in the hostel, but once he started speaking I immediately realized that he was like me, born outside Asia. We kind of laughed about it when he admitted the exact same thought about me. But this? We had already been talking for several minutes.

— I should hope so. I’ve been speaking the language for fifty-nine years.

No apology, no laughter, let’s just move on to the next bit of racism, this time from his friend, about why he won’t be traveling to the Philippines anytime soon.

— Why? I asked. Because everyone speaks English, because of the beautiful beaches, because the people are so friendly, because it’s so affordable… ?

— No, because my wife said she saw a TV program where they eat dogs.

Oh my god, it was like the Trump campaign all over again.

— I have never in my life known anyone to do that. Maybe in a big enough country, you can find someone who would do that, but I believe it’s extremely rare and the producers paid people willing to do this for the shock value.

He tried to be nice, in his own way, mentioning that he understood that people have diferent values in other cultures, that he himself didn’t think it was wrong, it was more because of his wife.

— I think it’s wrong! I interrupted. I didn’t want to get into a discussion about how I have been a pescetarian for nearly twenty years, having given up meat when Mookie died, but this bit of moral relativism definitely didn’t sit well with me.

He kept on going on until his friend reminded him that I had already said I think it’s wrong and don’t know anyone at all who eats dogs.

They seemed like nice guys, and they were also fellow boardgamers, but dear god. The amount of casual racism among my fellow Americans, I should be used to it by now, I hope to escape it every time I travel outside the country, but somehow it follows me.

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applause please

This evening at Playa Las Muertos in Puerto Vallarta, I watched the sun setting past some couples holding hands and families arranging photos, beyond the footprinted sand, over the waves on the beach and the boats on the waves approaching the beach, at the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. Then when the last bit of its reddening globe disappeared, I heard applause.

There is a kind of applause that is performative. It happens, for example, at the end of a play in a theater or at a rock concert. The audience claps, and sometimes there are several rounds of this, people standing for an ovation, or flicking lighters, and sometimes shouting or whistling. Then the actors come out for several rounds of bows in a preordained order, or the band returns to their microphones to play an encore.

This evening’s applause was not performative. It was not for the sun, which after all was going to set regardless of whether any of us were there to bear witness.

I used to attend Cornell Cinema films frequently in Uris Hall. In 1981, the summer when I was in the pre-college program, I attended perhaps twenty films in a six-week period. Tickets were cheap, the auditorium (unlike the U-Halls — the University Halls where we lived) was air-conditioned, and the movies themselves were interestingly curated. These movies in pre-college and then in college exposed me to a much wider range of films than I had seen before on network TV, HBO, rented VHS tapes, or the theater in isolated small-town Ohio. And then at the end of one of these college movies, sometimes, sometimes but not always, we would clap.

Maybe this evening’s applause for the sunset was a little like this — for ourselves, to express appreciation we were sharing a moment, this singular moment during our mortality, together and never again quite in the same way. I mean it was a bit silly, we weren’t clapping for the projectionist, we were just clapping.

I think the applause, and that for this evening’s sunset, was also spontaneous.

I think it was just spontaneous in the same way that sometimes the passengers on an airplane used to applaud at the end of a routine flight, when the plane’s wheels touched the tarmac. This happened in the years immediately following the 1978 passage of airline deregulation in the US, when there were many people flying for the first time.

We want to do something when something delights us, when we are together, when something happens as it should, even if it may be happening for us for the first time. It is naive, like a child playing peek-a-boo or blowing bubbles with its own saliva, it is beautiful that we should clap.

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of pilgrimages

Last Saturday around 4am, my younger brother-in-law replied to some texts I had sent earlier, where I casually remarked that the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and various waterways could be considered “pilgrimages” (with the word in scare quotes). He wondered what I meant, so I replied with some groggy early morning thoughts, which I’ll organize a bit more here.

For me, a classic pilgrimage involves several elements:

  1. Trail. There is a path, or a set of possible paths. For example, there are defined routes for the Camino de Santiago (I completed the last part of the Portuguese Coastal Way from Vigo). There are also different routes on the Kumano Kodo, although only four or five are recognized for Dual Pilgrim status. While the way of a pilgrimage could be long-trodden foot trails such as these, for me a pilgrimage could be along converted railroad tracks or canal paths, such as the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O Canal Towpath from Pittsburgh to Washington DC, or on a natural body of water, such as the Colorado, Mississippi, or Hudson Rivers.
  2. Trial. A pilgrimage involves physical hardship or mental challenge. Such difficulties are relative to individual capabilities; I think many people visit the Holy Land at an age when they are less spry. As for me, because I already tend to travel lightly, at low cost with little baggage, and close to the ground, the challenges of a pilgrimage need to be commensurately higher. On the Camino, I was unaccustomed to walking long distances anymore, it often rained on my hikes, and without reservations I worried whether the public albergue that night would be full. On the Kumano Kodo, while I stayed in comfort and often took public transit, it was challenging to figure out how to navigate rural Japan.
  3. Rarity. Would it be possible to have a pilgrimage every day, for example when traveling to and from work? I think it’s possible to have an appreciation for living those moments — the year when I worked at Bard College and lived in Rhinecliff, I often felt for the beauty of my commute, the Catskills flashing between the trees from across the Hudson. However, I do think in general a pilgrimage should take you out of yourself and your daily life. I don’t know. Last spring I met Antonio, who had walked the Camino de Santiago forty times over the last twenty years, making it his life to help people along the way.
  4. Recognition. When I landed in Narita last month, the customs officer was surprised that I had only one backpack, small enough to fit under the seat in front of me (and at the time weighing only 4 kilos in total). When I explained that I will be walking the Kumano Kodo, he immediately understood. I feel a sense of fellowship and shared experience when talking with others who have walked either pilgrimage. As far as recognition, for both of these pilgrimages are also the stamps in the credential booklet, and at the end the certificate / compostela. On the Kumano Kodo I also collected special goshuin to honor the 20th anniversary of its status as a World Heritage site.
  5. Destination (or destinations). Generally a pilgrimage should involve a destination, something on which body and mind are focused on reaching. In the case of the Kumano Kodo, there are three destinations, a triumvirate of Grand Shrines. But although a pilgrimage should have something to aim for — whether singular or multiple, intermediate or final — for the Camino de Santiago, the Way was more meaningful for me than the End. Or rather, the point of the pilgrimage was not reaching the end, but rather what happened on the journey.
  6. Reflection. This gets to the most important aspect of a pilgrimage, which is internal. Although a physical body may travel with difficulty along a well-known path to reach a destination, what is most distinct for a pilgrimage, as opposed to a hike, is an element of mindfulness. On the Camino de Santiago, I often considered thought about how the parts of the pilgrimage reflected life, and how ultimately you are walking along a path that does not belong only to you. On the Kumano Kodo I learned to ritually purify my hands and mouth, and then bow and clap while I thought about the focus of each kami to be best of my ability.

Like every definition or classification scheme, this is imperfect. Jay, a history professor at my last full-time job, took a personal pilgrimage to retrace the road trip that his father had taken across the United States in the days before the Interstate. Ed, a history teacher at my first full-time job, had a mission to visit every Major League Baseball stadium.

If I compare my own experiences on the Camino de Santiago and the Kumano Kodo, my journey on the former trip was more trying, and the final destination was more clearly defined, and it is more widely known. But even though it didn’t fit my archetype of a pilgrimage as closely, the Kumano Kodo was not a lesser experience.

My brother-in-law in our texts last weekend shared that one of his spiritual teachers dissuades his students from pilgrimages, because they can exhaust your money and health, and that the main practice of mindfulness/meditation can be done anywhere, and the bias of saying one place is more sacred than another is a created concept. I agree that the notion of “sacred” is a created concept, a kind of crutch. But so are mandalas. Words are created too, and I lean on them every day. Words and pilgrimages, even as they are invented, help us in our finitude.

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Dual Pilgrim

Last month I traveled to Japan. The first time I was five years old, when we flew from our home in New York to visit Manila, Dumaguete, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Honolulu, and LA. I’ve wanted to return to Japan for many many years, because I have specific childhood memories: walking the grounds of the Imperial Palace and seeing geishas made-up and dressed in kimonos; staying at the Imperial Hotel, where we watched sumo on the television while Dad received a massage; eating tempura for the first time on the recommendation of the concierge; and, unlike anywhere else we visited, being surrounded by words I could not comprehend with my eyes or ears.

On my most recent trip I tried food I’d never had before and often found myself in places where the language was beyond me. But as Heraclitus says, you can’t step in the same river twice.

During my journey to Japan, I completed the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage:

2025 1 24WILLIAM ALBA HP

When I visited the office in Tanabe on January 24, they told me I was the first person this year to be certified as a Dual Pilgrim in their office. I think most people elect to complete their journey formally at Kumano Hongu Taisha, but I was traveling west to east and my plan didn’t take me that way. I hold that I actually completed the journey on the 23rd, after visiting the three Shinto Grand Shrines, but then again what is time when crossing the International Date Line, and anyhow the process of certification can happen on a different date: a student doesn’t graduate until Commencement, even if all requirements are completed beforehand.

When I asked for my Philippine nationality to be recognized in their records in addition to the US, the clerk in Tanabe asked me which passport I had used to enter the country. Fair enough — Japanese law disallows their own citizens from holding multiple nationalities. So even though I am a dual citizen, my listing on this website as a Dual Pilgrim of the Camino de Santiago and of the Kumano Kodo shows only one nationality.

This photo links to the Dual Pilgrim website. The URL and text refer to “Willam Alba”, although the photo and certificate spell my first name correctly. Personally, I think this adds to the charm, reminding me how the person who took my picture and wrote my certificate struggled with the spelling of such a common name as mine, even though she could speak English far better than I can Japanese. There’s also something a bit poetic about it, taking the “I” out of my name, a removal of ego from the sign.

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taking time

In one of the last chapters of one of the books I’ve been reading, Meditations for Mortals, the author Oliver Burkeman indicates

When it comes to confronting the myriad problems large and small that life throws at us, we have a standard operating procedure for how we try to respond, one so fundamental it can be hard to perceive that it even is a procedure, or that there might be any alternative. It goes like this: first, you try to work out exactly what the hell is going on. Then and only then, once you’re confident you’ve got a handle on the situation, you take action.

However, Burkeman points out, this is only one strategy. It is a modern illusion that we should first attempt to understand how a system operates before taking any action.

Imagine how things might have felt for a medieval peasant – or, really, for anyone at any time in history when people experienced life as radically more uncertain than today, yet were perhaps more clear-headed on the topic of human limitation.

While I have only a passing understanding of the work of Nobel laureate Herb Simon, I wonder whether Burkeman is suggesting that we moderns should make decisions about our actions in a satisficing way. That is, we should take action once we discover a sufficiently satisfactory solution, because when we delay a decision we could incur costs such as lost time, wasted resources, divided attention, and lost opportunities .

…

I am someone who can err on the side of analysis paralysis. For example, over the past day I’ve been considering whether to buy a travel backpack on a big discount that I saw last night at REI. Because it’s a Re/Supply item, it’s non-returnable, so I’ve been thinking about how much it costs, where I would store it, how often and under what circumstances I would use it, alternative items that I already own or could instead purchase that serve the same function, and so forth. While this process entertains me to a certain extent, there is an opportunity cost to my time. Likewise, I have been thinking about buying a MagSafe-compatible power bank for my upcoming trip to Mexico, because too often on last month’s trip to Japan I found myself constrained when the battery on my smartphone was low. But for me this involves reading reviews, comparing dimensions and weights, learning about battery capacities, etc.

I think both Burkeman and Simon would suggest that I should lower my mental threshold for how much information and consideration I need to do before making these purchases.

…

On the other hand, there is the question of how to know whether a proposed action is sufficiently satisfactory. In the case of my purchasing an item like a backpack or power bank, the stakes are not that high for each individual item. But there are other very real human situations where we would be better off to take more time rather than make a decision hastily. For example, Elon Musk, an unelected billionaire with fascist tendencies who holds the imprimatur of Donald Trump, is dismantling entire government agencies and threatening to destroy more. He is operating under the strategy of breaking things, with the idea that maybe they will get patched up afterwards. You can get away with this in a company, where you are responsible only to a board and shareholders, and failure means bankruptcy. But to act in such a hasty manner is a foolish way to run a country, especially the world’s most powerful country, where breaking things means endangering the safety and livelihood of citizens as well as people around the globe.

It also takes time to know people as individuals, to avoid stereotyping and prejudice. All of us use mental shortcuts when we meet someone, to understand how to conduct ourselves in their presence and to predict how they will behave. But we should have some awareness of these cognitive biases. Furthermore, these heuristics should fade as we become better acquainted with a person.

Both in magnitude and in kind, these two circumstances — running a functioning government and conducting interpersonal relations — are vastly different than individual purchase decisions. And both of them illustrate an inadequate threshold for satisficing. Herb Simon also used the term bounded rationality. Musk’s decisions are rational in the sense of satisfying his and Trump’s political grudges and their own economic interests. For many people, their actions do not seem to be about government efficiency, but rather about settling personal scores.

…

Originally this was going to be a blog entry on taking time in an entirely different realm — taking time to make food. After reheating pieces of Domino’s pizza in an air fryer and on the stove, I realized that the ingredients and arrangement Domino’s uses are good enough quality, it’s just that the dough was simply undercooked. The bottom of the pan pizza wasn’t crispy enough on arrival, but with additional heating time it gained a crispy crunch, and the middle of the crust lost its raw chewiness. I guess the Domino’s model has always been to make things fast (“30 minutes or it’s free”), to satisfy customers’ hunger and to maximize the throughput of their ovens. However, the outcome is a less satisfactory product.

Some things do take time.

Posted on by William Alba 1

expectations

According to Duolingo, I’ve reached a high intermediate level in Spanish (CEFR B2). I do believe it’s true. The day before yesterday, when Marissa asked me to translate some attention-getting phrases for her class, I immediately saw when Google Translate had mistakenly substituted “hablar” for “decir”; knew as if it were second nature the use cases for those two verbs as well as “contar”; understood her intention to use the affirmative imperative in the second-person plural and corrected the machine translation even with an irregular conjugation; suggested an alternate second line so the lines would rhyme; and removed an unnecessary definite article from the vocative. As an example, I suggested

Alumnos, denme:
A, B, C, D, E

in place of the machine translation:

Los estudiantes me dan
cinco cuatro tres dos uno

Then yesterday at the laundromat (one of my projects this weekend is to determine which thermal fuse or solenoid needs to be replaced inside our dryer at home), I understood what other people were saying to each other in Spanish. In the afternoon, when I read the label on the bag of corn chips I bought from a Mexican grocery store, I simply read the paragraph of text in Spanish, not bothering to look at the English until afterwards, reading everything con fluidez, pausing only once at “totopos”, which I learned from context as the Mexican word for corn chips. 

…

Still, I have much to learn. For example, I believe I don’t fully understand how Spanish speakers distinguish among the meanings for “esperar”. I know it can mean “to hope” or “to wait for” or “to expect”. While these concepts are similar, they are rendered quite distinctly in English. In contrast, in Spanish, these blur one into the other.

I get that a single word can serve many functions in a language, and that often you just know which one is intended from situational or grammatical context. It just seems to me, as a native English speaker, that these three concepts are more ambiguous than they ought to be, when rendered by a single word.

…

The other day I ordered four pizzas from Domino’s, one for each of us, in whatever style we fancied. Our eldest child complained that Domino’s is not great, and their “New York style” is certainly nothing like a slice of pie you’d get at a shop in the city. I absolutely agree, there are better pizza joints in Vegas, even accounting for the general rule that pizza gets worse going from east to west in the US. But the point, I said, is to have a reasonable expectation. Don’t think of it as a pizza from New York. Just accept the food on its own terms, enjoy it for what it is.

I relearned that lesson for myself this morning. I had picked up a Too Good to Go bag from Whole Foods last night. It was my first time trying one here in the States; I had them last fall in London and in Dublin. Getting home, I was disappointed on opening the bag that they were salted caramel and plain brownies, as well as cake donuts, because at my age I avoid chocolate late at night and I much prefer yeast donuts. But after popping a sour cream donut in the air fryer for breakfast, I realized that if I think of a cake donut not as an inferior substitute for a raised donut, but simply as a kind of cake, it’s actually enjoyable. It’s cake, made even better without the usual excess of icing.

…

It’s as though I continually have to wake up to this notion, to relearn the lesson expressed by sayings such as

You get what you get, and you don’t get upset (a phrase I learned when the children were about the age of the ones Marissa now teaches)

Happiness = Reality/Expectations (I believe I first heard this expressed aloud by my friend Marc when were in college. Less commonly I’ve seen: Happiness = Reality – Expectations, but whether expressed as a ratio or difference or more complicated algebraic expression isn’t the point)

Comparison is the thief of joy (in this case, comparison not to what others have or do, but to what you wanted or expected)

This does not imply fatalism nor blind acceptance to one’s situation when seen as as a portion of the Serenity Prayer:

God, grant me
the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference

…

Today I will finish reading Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, which describes the inner peace that comes with accepting that we have mortal limitations. Being the sort of person who needs to wake up every day, I will immediately begin re-reading the book, perhaps on a regular basis.

And I will not be disappointed by how much more Spanish I want to learn. I will continue to enjoy the process in the hope, though I suppose not necessarily with the expectation, that one day I may achieve CEFR C2 proficiency.

Posted on by William Alba 1