sarah HANNAH gómez

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Hey, friends. This book, Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date by Katie Heaney, is pretty great. It is my memoir, except I didn’t write it, which is weird. And also it is not at all like my life, but it totally is, too.

It’s like this. Katie Heaney is my age (in this book; actually, I think she’s about a year and a half older than I am) and has never dated someone. She, like me, has yet to understand how it is that two humans come to an understanding that they are going to publicly acknowledge that they hang out with each other. And accept the other person, more or less, how they are. So this is her life story, punctuated by crushes and almost-kisses and situations which totally should have made a right turn into boyfriendlandia but didn’t, all of which I am also painfully familiar with. (I should be fair and say that Heaney and I have had very different ways around this noboyfriendness when it comes to sexytimes, and also there was a four-month period in which I did have one, this one time, but it was very much out of our friends all dating each other, so it just made sense, and also, clearly it’s not one of those situations where having done it once changes your pheromones so you can become a member of the club – I am still not a member of the club of People Who Know How To Get Significant Others.) Continue reading →

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I hate on Greater Boston a lot, and I think I have reason to, but there are some things about it that are awesome, and one of those things is Harvard Square. It’s the place that looks and feels like the reason I always wanted to move to the East Coast and be a city girl when I was young. Lots of independent businesses, students everywhere but not bro-y ho-y students, tons of ways to get there via public transportation, etc etc. Basically it’s where things I like are, and it’s where I feel like myself.

Curious George store! Harvard Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One of the biggest reasons I adore Harvard Square is that there is not one bookstore that I like to go to, but many. Strangely enough, for an intellectual city that’s chock full of students and professors and writers, there really aren’t that many good bookstores. I haven’t the foggiest if there’s even a Barnes & Noble that’s not in, like, Newton or Watertown, and I just don’t love the feel of most of the bookstores I’ve tried. They’re okay–I’ll go to Brookline Booksmith if I have time to kill in Coolidge Corner, and I think it’s interesting that they have both new and used materials; Brattle Book Shop let me unload a bunch of books I wanted to get rid of, and that was nice, even if their trade ratio is way, way low compared to Bookmans . Meh, book-selling establishments in Boston. Meh, I say to (and about) you.

So it’s incredibly refreshing to cross the Charles and check out Harvard Book Store or Raven Used Books or Porter Square Books (not in Harvard Square, but just one stop farther on the Red Line–also the ONLY place in Greater Boston that agrees that soy is gross and bad for you and has other options for coffee drinks, like rice and almond milk) and Continue reading →

I am incredibly gifted at languages and linguistics. Not bragging, just saying. That’s my strong point. I can mimic the sounds of a foreign language after not much exposure. It only takes a little bit of partial or full immersion for me to start understanding the grammatical structure of a language, even if I don’t know any of the words. After four years of choir, a year of eighth-grade Latin, a semester of Portuguese, two and a half years of French, and many years of Spanish, I can recognize and “read” written languages, especially Germanic and Romance ones, competently enough. When I learn new words, I invariably pronounce them correctly. Languages are my strong point. We all have areas in which we excel, linguistic nuance happens to be one of mine.

So it’s interesting that last night I was writing a quick, informal review of a book on GoodReads, and I spent a great amount of time grasping for a word that I could literally see and hear, through some kind of curtain, in my head, but could not totally get out. I am very, very attached to my thesaurus, which is weird when you consider that I almost never need to look words up when I’m reading. I understand and remember the meaning of most English words, and I can look at them and probably tell you what language they come from, but I can’t call words up out of my head without a problem. And even though I can read a page of Spanish and be perfectly satisfied with the 80-100% I probably understood, I have a lot of difficulty translating word for word, and I absolutely hate it when people ask me “how do you say [blank] in Spanish?” because I cannot tell you, even if I previously spoke or read the word in question. I suppose my language skills are based on nuance, context, and intuition, not direct correlation. This is probably also why I don’t keep my languages separate in my brain, and why I don’t think I’ll ever be totally fluent in any of the languages I’ve studied, because they mix together. From growing up, my most comfortable way of talking about tropical fruit is to say the names in Portuguese, I use regionalisms and Spanglish slang, especially when talking about cultural or food things, I’m not funny except when I’m using Yiddish, and I adore learning new compound German nouns, because they are so damn good at expressing ideas. Continue reading →

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