Passive, tense...

Many remember one of the famousist reality tv couples of 2001, Franz and Fran, German/Boricua couple whose amazing race ended when she disqualified them by refusing to descend a zip line between two bell towers in Prague. They broke up right then and there but were featured in subsequent reunion competitions giving each other dirty yet longing glances. Fritz is in the academie (inherited). He often submits on this subject, wanting to give the ‘real story’ of what happened to the academie for eternal storage. Us putting it back out on the streets where it can once again be undercut might be questionable ethics on 1430’s part, but ethics are always in question.

We thought that speaking Spanish would be a way to protect ourselves from the world. Even though a camera was in our face while we made split-second decisions, we could be safe in our little bubble of language. But we should have known that giving the TV people one more layer of interpretation in the form of subtitles would just let them exploit us further. Of course they always made things between Fran and I worse than they really were. But the time I can’t forgive is the big one, up at the zip line. Of course I was pissed off —- it was right then that I decided that in life as a total, her tenacious stubbornness couldn’t make up for her lack of logical thinking -- but I never got violent.

What I said in that moment was “da ganas de empujarte,” which means “The situation gives one the desire to push you.” It’s passive. But of course they translated it to,‘I wanna push you off,’ which made me look like the total bad guy. Now when I run into Latinos at bars I always ask them to back me up on the matter, and usually they do, but not by adressing the structure of the sentence, but by saying that they would have pushed her too. And when I say that I didn’t push her, they say “claro que no,” which means not ‘clearly not’ which sounds harsh, but actually just ‘of course not.’