Jamie Wakefield

The alarm goes off at 8:00 am. It is still dark out. I roll out of bed, collect my clothes and computer and silently pad into the hall and get dressed so as not to wake Wendy any more than I have to. Then I heat up some two day old coffee, down it in one gulp, sit down for a couple minutes to read email and then the coffee starts to hit. I have a quick shower, dress and I am off to class. How odd to be worrying about being late to class again. I was sure I had left that long behind me. Will the dreams of showing up in class naked haunt my dreams? How about being late and unprepared for a test? Ah yes, the joys of returning to school after twenty years. Twenty years? Man I am old. Wandering up the streets to the metro I see row after row of tiny Spanish business people in suits drinking coffee and eating churros in the same bars that are open longer into the night than anything similar in America. At nine a.m. only a handful of shops have opened up and the sun is still low in the sky.

Panic Disorder or Global Warming? When I was in high school, the hit book was "The Population Bomb" by Paul Ehrlich. "the battle to feed all of humanity is over ... In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." -Paul "MacArthur Genius Award" Ehrlich. If you were alive then, you remember the staggering amount of press that book recieved. Now watch this video and wonder why so many of our kids are on Paxil.

October is “Learn Spanish Month." I’ve been doing “The Rosetta Stone” and copying notes down from Spanish phrase books and looking through guides I brought from the states, but it’s frustrating. It still baffles me the lack of understanding I have for the spoken word. I can read billboards okay and the lessons in Spanish I read get easier, but I still can’t have even a simple conversation. It’s frustrating to me and I know its frustrating to Wendy. She would like to be watching all Spanish TV and speaking Spanish in the house so we can both practice. Her Spanish is fluent, but not as good as she would like it. But really, the more time I spend doing Spanish is more time that I’m not writing. Both are extremely hard mental work. Well, they are for me anyway. Of the books that I have read on writing, most professional writers don’t write for eight hours a day, even Stephen King. He usually only works in the mornings. As for the Spanish part I really feel this is one of my weaknesses