Return to Spender

I often find myself wondering what I could do with all of the time I have wasted in my life. Like the hours I have wasted standing in the wrong line in stores – the line I choose confident it will move faster than the other lines only to have the person ahead of me pull out a check book or the cashier be unable to read the barcode on a pack of gum and be required to call for a price check in Tibet. Or perhaps the days wasted on hold calling doctors offices, companies, and other places that really should answer my telephone call crisply and cheerfully because I am paying them for their time. Then there are the useless months spent in classes through school that I have somehow erased from my entire memory system. Apparently I spent a semester in high school taking a course in communications and all I can remember is watching My So Called Life in class each week. I also spent three years taking German and the great extent of my vocabulary is the ability to sing My Hat Has Three Corners and to ask for a beer and a cheap prostitute. So if I am ever lost in Germany I can tell you how many corners are on your hat and spend the evening in interesting company. I can not ask for the bathroom, for help, for a taxi, or for the American Embassy but I can get beer and a prostitute. But not a high quality prostitute, because apparently that was above our standards, but a dirt cheap prostitute who is likely to leave you with a parting gift you will carry for the remainder of your life. Not that I need to worry, because were I to need a prostitute it would be only in the hopes that one would speak English and be able to translate for me so I could get back to whatever demented tour group had abandoned me. I find myself wishing that this time had been better directed – perhaps on learning things that actually pertain to my life. For example, no matter what we try to tell children I have yet to use the Pythagorean theorem outside of high school yet I could have really used some instructions on how to maintain a car – like opening the hood. Perhaps a peer tutoring system would have worked – you teach me to open the hood of my car, I teach you whatever academic skills you need that my nerd brain has made an abundance of connections for while skipping over things like gas is necessary to drive your vehicle. And those German months would have been better spent in Spanish or Sign Language or Farsi or Urdu or anything other than German. As I struggle to communicate with my families that do not speak English as a first language (or as a language) using translators and creativity, I wish that I had a brain for languages. Instead I have a brain for details and English, for memory and synthesis of information. However, I have a hard enough time retrieving the right English word in mid-conversation that trying to pull another language out of my over-packed mind is like trying to find a diamond lost in a desert at night. I want my time back to reuse – to learn functional topics rather than obscure mathematics and languages that will not help me unless I want a night in Berlin that I would rather forget, to make memories rather than to fidget way in lines and on hold, to live rather than to spend on pause.