Shikha, I check my gmail regularly, and I WILL write you back one of these days

It really bothers me when people lack imagination.

I’m not talking about the type of imagination science fiction authors have. Or the kind of imagination needed to make a visit to the gynecologist enjoyable, or the kind to plan a burglary of the Crown Jewels. I’m just talking the good old-fashion imaginative know-how that gets you through 2 hours of an Italian 101 class.

Everyone’s gone through a 101 class. It’s when you are the lowest of the low, the pit of the arm, the heel of the foot, the drain of the sink. You’re just getting introduced to the stuff, so you can’t really go around talking like you have the foggiest idea what’s going on. And if you happen to entertain the idea that you are the cat’s pajamas in your class, then there is ALWAYS someone who knows more. Even the dumbest people in the 102 class are better than you, and that’s pretty pathetic…to be beaten out by the bracefaces of a subject.

I am in Italian 101. I realize I have a distinct advantage by already kind of sort of knowing Spanish. I can now roll my Rs and execute some pretty impressive hand motions when I’m saying “Alexander and his dog are very smart.” But this can still not get me through the day. This class is so long and excruciating that it’s capable of rendering me infertile and making various parts of my body rot off and disintegrate on the spot.

To get through 2 hours of this class everyday, it’s necessary to take some drastic measures: create my own diversions. Since it was required to buy colored pencils the first day of class in order to underline the subject, verb, and adjective in such phrases as “He is a witty student,” accompanied by a picture of a very witty student, I have a ready source of entertainment. The very witty student finds himself with a deadly disease where skin turns purple with green polka dots, hair becomes a glorious shade of orange, and his very witty homework bursts into flames. In addition to providing me with endless amusement, other students also get a kick out of looking at such artistic endeavors when I go up to the front of the room to project my homework onto a large screen.

However, this is not enough. This Italian class is labeled as a “multimedia” class. I mistakenly thought in the beginning of the course that this meant I would have to take an internet class. Not so! This just means the teacher brings in video clips and Italian songs to enrich our learning experience. We listen to jovial Italians singing their traditional folk songs, and yesterday we spent the entire 2 hours looking at pictures of Italian foods on the internet.

My first year of college I went through a very rough patch where nothing in the dining hall tasted good anymore. I call this my Dark Months. In order to get through these months, it was necessary for me to download lots and lots of pictures of good food. What started off as a very wee section of the “My Pictures” section blossomed into 6 albums of pictures of very good foods. Julie and Mary Kate rightly called this “food porn.” Every time one of the pictures would flash across my screen in my screensaver, all three of us would start salivating uncontrollably and we’d see little yellow stars.

Yesterday’s 2 hours of class when we had to look at pictures of cannolis, panelles, and all manner of assorted main dishes and desserts, I thought I was going to pass out. It wasn’t that I was really hungry, but really, WHY would you do that for 2 hours straight?

I realize I am jumping around a lot, but just bear with me. Sorry. It all started in Spanish 101 when we had to make up sentences for class. There were always the boring people who would say stuff like: I have a dog. The dog is big. But THEN, there were those people who realized that it didn’t matter what the hell you said, as long as you conjugated the verbs and put the adjectives in the right place. And the teachers would be a-ok with this. They had to sit through an entire day of be-pimpled and be-hormoned students; they needed some sort of cheap distraction. So the good students, those who got extra pats on the backs, made up sentences like “The criminal with the green face is in the hardware store,” or “Lucia, my very dumb aunt, makes a cake with a dead dog in it.”

I have tried my gosh-darn best to integrate this method of teaching into our classroom. Not only because it is exceptionally fun, but because it’s necessary. Why in god’s name would I have to look at 15 different pictures of a cannoli? If you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. And unless this cannoli is walking down the street waving its arms and handing out lots of booze and money, or it’s brandishing a machete and heading straight towards me, I think I could have lived in blissful ignorance of what the 13th cannoli looked like. However, I need to know about serial killers in the cereal section of the grocery store and prostitutes in libraries. It is ever so much more likely that I will have to yell out to everyone walking on Via del Corso "ATTENTION! THERE IS A LARGE BLUE-FACED MAN WITH A KNIFE WALKING WITH A SHOPPING BAG" than "May I please have water without gas."

So when I’ve had the opportunity to talk to people in that class in our painfully structured conversations, I have tried to get people to open up. To tap into their creative fountains. To no avail.

The points of these exercises is to just hear ourselves talk and conjugate the two verbs we happen to know. But NO ONE gets the point that even with two verbs, there is potential for some extreme things here! I say something like “Antonio is over there, and he is with the daughter of the president who is very tall. Are you angry?” and the kids say “Who is Antonio?”

PEOPLE! WORK WITH ME HERE! USE SOME CREATIVITY!

That’s when I confess that actually I don’t have the foggiest idea who Antonio is, he could be your brother, boyfriend, or drug dealer, but you know, you are free to make up anything you want. Then they get this deer-in-the-headlights look as if to say “You want me to LIE? In Italian 101 class?!?!?!”

That is PRECISELY what I am asking you to do.

If this were a support group, I’m sure I’d have all manners of problems. I have said such outlandish things that no one believes anything I say. My house is to the right of a big volcano, I eat bears when I am hungry and it is hot outside, and I have a brother who lives in a train station. However, this also means that I can say anything I want to, even the truth, and no one will believe me.

Like:
“Last night I went out and I drank a lot of good wine!” I could say.

Or

“There are 9 very dumb girls in my class. They are ugly and the also have very large ears,” I say. “But this is all a joke of course.”