Muy Bonita
Muy Bonita: 15 November 2022
I’m at Emma’s weekly Cub Scouts meeting. She’s wearing most of the standard uniform, though we keep losing the slide that covers the knot in the Webelos kerchief. I like it that the Scouts have uniforms and teach respect for tucked-in shirts and having the correct patches. I also like it that this Cub Pack (and the connected Scout Troop) aren’t absolute sticklers for dress code. Many a night we’re pushing our limits just to arrive, more or less on time, with more or less the whole uniform.
She also needs a costume for her upcoming school chorus production; I need to look up the due date for getting those white shoes. Too bad she can’t be Hermione Granger in the chorus production because I’m pretty sure I can still find all the parts to that costume.
I asked her today why it’s fun to dress up. She said, “because sometimes it’s nice to be someone else for a little while.” Very insightful. Sometimes I dress to be noticed. Sometimes I dress to disappear.
We dress up to try on someone else’s life, to try on different personas. Do I feel braver if I’m a superhero? Do I feel more beautiful if I’m a Disney princess? Maybe I want the freedom to be outrageous. Will people treat me differently? Will they love me more? Does this feel like someone I’d like to be?
We dress up to celebrate and to mourn, to be playful and professional, to be accepted and to challenge. We can dress to signal etiquette, power, status, comfort or hostility. We clothe ourselves in words. She wears her prestige lightly…we’re as comfortable together as old shoes…his turtlenecks channel Steve Jobs…
We can dress to project some better or aspirational version of ourselves. Maybe a more trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean or reverent version.
Ideally, we eventually get to a place in life where we make appearance choices based on our own enjoyment and not the way we may be judged. When I am an old woman I will wear purple. I already wear purple, but I recently had our new bathroom painted a beautiful, smoky purple. It's an elegant, mature color and it makes me happy.
Our renovations are almost complete. Of course, the last 10% always seems to take a disproportionately long time, but we’re far enough along that over the weekend I was able to move the last of the kitchen out of the dining room and move most of the dining room back in. That means that the dining room table is no longer in the area we call the dance floor, and that means there’s room to walk (or dance) into the house. Clearing it all out gave me a huge sense of well-being, because it’s been messed up and cluttered and dusty since June. I felt like I could breathe more easily this morning when I didn’t have to dodge that big table to get to my coffee.
Most days I’ve been in very casual clothes, sometimes still in pajamas when workers ring the doorbell, like this past Saturday, for goodness sakes. But I’m always so grateful to have workers arrive that I scurry to throw on a T-shirt, jeans, and a nice attitude.
On Friday, the wonderful painter spent the whole day finishing up (most) of the caulking, patching, painting, staining. I checked in with him before leaving for a midday meeting, and he did a literal and most gratifying double-take when he saw me in my dress and boots. We both laughed and he offered a “muy bonita”. All of the workers have been amused and muy patient with me as I accost them with my beginning Spanish. I smiled and “Muchas gracias”-ed back.
I’m learning Spanish because of two incidents.
The first was being horrified at how ugly American I was when visiting Oaxaca, Mexico this Spring. We were visiting family, and I’d lined up drivers and guides, and was planning for international travel during COVID with children and it sort of just didn’t occur to me to try to learn a few phrases. Lame.
I was mortified when I walked to the nearby tienda wanting some lotion. I had no idea how to get what I needed except by pointing to the product on the shelf behind the counter. The clerk handed it to me, and I looked at it, and the description was, of course, in Spanish. So I bought it, took it back to the casa, and realized it was face wash, not lotion.
I walked back to the tienda, and we motioned through wrong item, can’t get a refund, could I look at that one, yes I’ll buy that, here’s my card again, walk back again only to discover it was a different type of face wash. I still have both bottles and the embarrassment that arises each time I see them. My face is red but muy clean.
The second instance was listening to the How I Built This podcast when Guy Raz interviewed Luis van Ahn who created ReCAPTCHA and Duolingo. It’s a fascinating story. This is the synopsis:
“In 2000, Luis von Ahn was starting his PhD in computer science when he attended a talk and happened to learn about one of Yahoo’s biggest problems: automated bots were signing up for millions of free Yahoo email accounts, and generating tons of spam.
Luis’ idea to solve this problem became CAPTCHA, the squiggly letters we type into a website to prove we’re human. He gave away that idea for free, but years later, that same idea had evolved into a new way to monetize language learning on the web, and became Duolingo.”
Duolingo produces web-based platforms and apps for learning languages for free (and also with a paid version that eliminates ads) so that anyone anywhere can learn a different language. As von Ahn says in the interview, he and his colleague started to wonder, “A lot of people talk about education as something that brings equality to different social classes. But I always thought it’s the opposite, something that brings inequality. At least in my case (in Guatemala), those who have money can buy themselves the best education in the world and those who don’t barely learn how to read and write.”
His colleague grew up in Switzerland and, “in both of our cases, learning English completely changed our lives. …when I was growing up, everybody in Guatemala wanted to learn English. Nobody could afford it and turns out that in most countries in the world, if you know English, you can double your income potential.”
I was impressed and I signed up for Duolingo, tried it for a couple of weeks and then bought a subscription without ads. I’m learning Spanish! It gamifies language learning so that it’s way better than the horrible language lab French tapes I struggled through in school.
It’s so fun that I try it out on the electrician, and the painter, and the trim guys and siding guys and cabinet guys. I tell them it’s my daughter’s birthday and my dog doesn’t wear pants and that I eat fish. It would be more helpful if I could say please move that door six inches to the left or I want this trim to be white or I ordered that part and don’t know why it’s not yet here. They smile about my daughter and my dog. And then speak to me in English about the door and the trim.
This morning after getting Mark and Emma off to school I opened my Duolingo app prepared to do my lesson, excited to rewarded with an acknowledgement of my 70-day streak. 70 days in a row I’ve shown up for Spanish! I’m clothing myself in this day-by-day accomplishment: I am someone who is learning Spanish. Aprendo español!
But wait…
I open the app and it says I’ve lost my streak. I’m starting over at day one. What?!? I’m outraged. I’m devastated. I’ve clothed myself 70 freaking days in a row with this accomplishment. You can’t take it away! I sent a report. I uninstalled and reinstalled. I searched the web for ways to reach the company. I found a Reddit thread.
It’s not just me! Thousands of people woke up to this affront. I was livid about my 70 days but my goodness, there were people who had lost years! One person lost a 1,700-day streak. That’s almost five years of showing up every day—clothing yourself in the story of “I am a dedicated language student”. Who are we when we cease to appear to be the people we tell ourselves and project that we are?
What’s left of us?
Happy ending: Duolingo tells me I’ll soon “see [my] streak restored to its former glory” and indeed I have. Apparently it was a new interface glitch and everyone’s streaks will be restored. But I was still the same person all along, right?
Ideally, we eventually dress to clothe the person that God wants us to be in each moment, for God’s purpose. Maybe eventually we settle into who we’re meant to be, and it really only matters whether we think we’re being true to God’s image and likeness. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway, and occasionally I alight there, like a hummingbird.
It’s when I truly feel muy bonita.
