March 26, 2001 (idea)

I took Spanish in high school and enjoyed it, and spoke it fairly well for a sheltered little non-Hispanic girl who's never been out of the USA. I have nothing against the people who speak Spanish, or what they say. And until recently I had nothing against the sound of it either, but I realized today that that had been ruined by one person.

There is this bitch who comes into the bookstore where I work, every couple of days, with her damn one-year-old. She allows the child to trash the bottom two shelves of most of the kids' books section. Guess who's department head of the kids' section? Yeah. Guess who has to repeatedly clean up after this monster? Yeah.

So when I hear this lady running after her one-year-old chattering in hushed Spanish that I cannot understand, I wince, I flinch, my blood pressure goes up, and it sucks. I know that shortly I will see kids' books all over the floor, and possibly juice spilled and baby-gummed crackers left all over the table (yes, they do this too, and make no attempt to clean up or apologize). Doesn't this lady think about what she's doing? Our store isn't her daughter's playroom, you would think she wouldn't let the kid destroy the store day after day.

And the weirdest thing about the whole situation is that this lady repeatedly bestows kisses upon her child. Lays the kid on the dirty floor and goes "mwah-mwah-MWAH!" between excited gibbering in Spanish. I was very scared the first time I saw this. Now I just pray for them to leave.

And today, I heard some people talking in Spanish. It sounded remotely like the lady (I found out later it was not her), and immediately upon hearing it, my heart started pounding with annoyance and anger that soon I would be playing maid to a kid I did not birth. Relief washed over me when I saw the source of the Spanish: A different family, in the intermediate readers section, calmly looking at Goosebumps books. I realized then that the Spanish language has been forever ruined for me by a total bitch.