ABC

I was almost done grading the quizzes when I left the office last night. All I had to do today was finish grading one problem and record the scores. Should have taken an hour, maybe two at the most. It took all friggin' day. Admittedly that was partly because I spend way too much time screwing around, but only partly. Alphabetizing Spanish names is hard. I know that sounds ridiculous, but it's true. For one thing, Spanish people have two last names, and they get alphabetized by the first of them. (So Ignacio Carrera Sanchez comes before Ignacio Sanchez Carrera.) Easy enough, but that's like alphabetizing by people's middle names, which isn't what I'm used to. So I kept fucking it all up, which made entering the grades take forever because the quizzes weren't in the right order. Also, I'm not familiar with that many Spanish names, which meant that if people didn't write clearly, which they often didn't, I couldn't tell quite what their names were, which also fucked up the alphabetization. I'll recognize a handwritten name like Smith or Williams even if it's badly written because those are names I know. A name like Morillo though is easy to confuse for Norillo or Marillo if it's not written clearly, because it's not a name I know. I guess having trouble reading handwritten Spanish is the visual equivalent of only being able to understand spoken Spanish if it's spoken very clearly. So anyway, getting the quizzes in alphabetical order took forever--just another little reminder that everything is different here. Alphabetization... fascinating.

I had microwave paella for dinner tonight. How pathetic is that? It was on sale. What I neglected to glean from the instructions I didn't really read, though, was that although the paella itself was microwaveable, the paella container was not. (Again, things are just different here. What microwave meal in the US would come in a non-microwavable plastic bowl?) So after two minutes I opened the microwave to find lots of steam, a flattened plastic container, and paella everywhere. And you know what? I ate it anyway. (Don't worry, the microwave was clean.) It would be horrible and humiliating to be so broke that I had to do that. As it is, I'm just broke enough that I chose to do it and am now laughing about it.