Suck It

My husband, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, is Mexican. My Latin Lova. My Little Jalapeno. He is one handy man to have around when we go to Superior Grocers (our low cost shopping extravaganza!). Because instead of me asking for things at the meat counter, the bakery, the deli, or to the random employee by the milk to find out where the bread crumbs are, and getting a blank stare in return, my husband uses his powerful and handy skill of speaking fluent Spanish to get our shit done.

And as I giggled to myself as we walked away from meat counter with our two red snapper fillets and a pound of pork chops, thinking to myself "Gosh, that's really quite convenient," my wonderful husband says, "You know, I guess it's a good thing you married me; I'm pretty convenient to have around when we go grocery shopping." Well, of course, silly!

I love my husband for more than the fact that he speaks Spanish. What kind of wife do you think I am?

But with a husband that speaks fluent Spanish, there also come the pitfalls. Such as telling me to ask his mother what the word "culo" means. "Ay, Edgar, don't teach her those words!!!" (subtitles in English courtesy of me). I don't speak Spanish very well. I understand it much better, and my comprehension, if not my language skills, increased a lot during the 9 month period that we lived with his parents. Of course Edgar's new favorite trick is giving me a completely innocent word and telling me to ask his mom what it means, and watching me flat-out refuse to do it because I'm certain by that evil glint in his Mexican eyes that it's surely something horrible and foul and will cause his mother to have a heart attack the moment it passes my lips.

So to do my part to make sure this dying language, that no one every speaks anymore, especially not in Southern California, never goes away, I try to add Spanish words into my daily vocabulary.

• I play around with the cat's name, alternately calling him "gato," "gato magnifico," "cagon" *translates to shitter*, "cagoncito" *little shitter*, "menso" *dummy*, "chango" *monkey* and "Chupacabra" *no translation necessary*
• I call my milk "leche" (which Edgar promptly follows up with "de pecho" to bastardize my cow milk for my cereal into breast milk)
• "I can't find my telefono"
• "I need to go to the bano" (Sorry, I don't know how to add tildes)
• "Baby! A donde vas?"
• And some word that I don't know how to spell but sounds like it might be "juacatelas" which means "gross". Doesn't juacatelas sound so much more fun than just saying gross? Add some exclamation points in there and it is a simply awesome word.
  

And then yesterday, the day that will live in infamy, came the ultimate of all of my all-time-new-favorite-spanish-words (title formerly held by juacatelas). Chupon. Chupon. I love it! It means "pacifier." I don't even know how the word got brought up, but Edgar said it and I was all "WHOA, WAIT, what does that word mean?"

I think I was magically drawn to it because I was a pacifier freak as a child. I had my "doogie" (I don't know why I called it a doogie, I just did) until I was two years old, when my parents decided to traumatize me by making me put it in the trash. And they proceeded to be heartless, horrible, child-abusing Mommy and Daddy by listening to me cry all night and wail "Dooooooooogieeeeeee! Dooooooogieeeeeeee!" because I couldn't sleep without it. There is not a picture of me under the age of two without my pacifier either in my mouth or somewhere in the immediate vicinity. Surprisingly enough, I never needed braces.

BUT, the point of my story is that I love the word chupon so much that I've already nicknamed it into chupie for the use of my as-yet to be born (or conceived, for that matter) children. Can you hear it now? "Chuuuuuuuupieeeeeee! Chuuuuuupieeeee!!!"