MISADVENTURES OF AN ALIEN(ATED) LANGUAGE TEACHER

Part 2

PART 2

"Name!" barked the puffy guy.

I realized by his tone that this was not the first time he had asked me for my name. You see, I'm very skilled at recognizing all types of pitch variations in an utterance. It is part of my highly specialized training in phonology. Not that that training was of any use at the moment, but I like to show off.

I had been so absorbed in my revision of mistakes that I hadn't heard the puffy guy asking for my name... how many times? By the look of his face, it had probably been more than three. Yes, I'm also skilled in the recognition of paralinguistic features, that is, body language and stuff. For example, if a person is crying, you immediately know that this person is expressing an emotion of profound sadness. Well, either that or she (or he) is a drama queen. Whereas if the person is smiling... well, that depends... there are all sorts of smiles. Yes, the issue of smiling is very complex. Maybe I should write a book about it... Yes, yes, I know, let's go back to the puffy guy.

The puffy guy was not smiling, he was frowning. He had a pen in his hand and there was a stack of forms on the table that he had to fill in to satisfy the ever growing and insatiable monster called bureaucracy. As feeding monsters is not funny, you might understand why the puffy guy was frowning. I guess he was also unhappy because I was distracted and not very cooperative in the feeding process. My computer had been displaced to the side and he seemed to have lost interest in it, which serves to show that the triumph of chaos over order is not always to be feared.

"Name!" he barked again.

Just then, it occurred to me that I should say something along the lines of: "Are you kidding me? You mean that you kidnapped me and dragged me all the way down here in kidney killing cuffs and you don't even know my name? That's preposterous! You should check the identities of the people you decide to capture before bringing them here, don't you think? And that surely would not only be more sensible, but it would also save a lot of that paperwork that keeps you in this foul mood." Oh, yes, a speech like that would teach them to be more careful in the future. But when I was about to utter it, I realized it was not appropriate and it could be hurtful for the puffy guy. After all, maybe it was not even his fault that I was here in this room with him. So I decided to minimize the effect of the unuttered speech by reducing it to an offended look in my face. I don't know why, but it came out as blank stare. So much for paralinguistic features...

"So this is your game. You are not talking" he said.

"Huh?" I replied.

Yes, I know, of all the infinite combinations of words that can form an original message in a language, this was not the most fresh or smart. But you have to understand I was cuffed, and that does things to the brain. So you cannot blame me for not being able to use Chomsky's generativism to my advantage in this situation.

"Maybe some hours in a solitary cell will get you to be more talkative" he said.

The idea of solitude has always attracted me. I mean, when you live in a planet with more than seven thousand million people in it and you happen to be a teacher in quasi constant contact with some hundreds of these millions, well... you can understand that being alone is a treasured luxury. So:

"That would be nice" I said.

Yes, of course I was not thinking straight. Let's blame the cuffs.

"You should know that the cells have different levels of comfort, and I can choose in which one you pass your time" he said.

"Are you threatening me or bribing me?" was my response.

At this point, I have to clarify that I was in some sort of altered state of consciousness, that is to say: I was out of my mind. I don't know if the cuff excuse can cover this.

"You are pissing me off" he declared.

Shit! Yes, some sense came into my head at last, which made me internally exclaim again: "Shit!" And then the voice of my wiser self screamed into my head: "Apologize! Apologize, now!" But it was too late. The puffy guy stood up, came round the metal table, grabbed my arm and forced me out of the room. This action caused me to enter into some sort of shock, making me lose my brief lucidity and rendering me totally mute, while the puffy guy pushed me down the stairs to the ground floor where the cells were. Yes, I said down the stairs. No elevator this time. As you can imagine, the small area of my brain that was still functioning had its hands full trying not to fall down the stairs, (remember the cuffs), so there was not much else I could think of at that moment.

And that explains how and why I went from a comfy chair in a nice room with a metal table to this foul cell.