MISADVENTURES OF AN ALIEN(ATED) LANGUAGE TEACHER

Part 9

PART 9

When you are a language teacher, you have a very close relationship with words, you become fascinated by them and you even fall in love with some of them. If I were to ask you which your favourite word is, I'm sure all of you would differ in your choice, because such a choice obeys to each personality and also to the experiences you have had. Furthermore, (yes, I know I could have used moreover so as not to repeat myself, but I like furthermore, so deal with it!) each particular choice of favourite word depends on the situation you are going through in your life at any given moment. For me, at this exact moment, while I'm looking through the window of the doctor's office, my elected favourite word has become in fact two words that go together, these are, at present, the words I most love in the whole lexicon of the English language: ground floor.

Oh, Yes! That is the floor where the doctor's office is located: ground floor. And ground floor means relief, ground floor means life, ground floor means freedom, ground floor means the end of suffering, because ground floor means ESCAPE.

Seriously? You are asking me what I did? Well, obviously, I jumped out of the window and ran like hell!!!! Then, I continued running. After that, I ran some more. And finally, I went on running.

At some point, I stopped. Not because I judged that I was far enough, but because I collapsed when my legs couldn't support me anymore. And while I'm here, lying on the floor, catching my breath and waiting for my legs to respond again, (don't worry, I'm not lying in the middle of the street, I'm in some sort of park, under a nice tree. No, I have no idea where I am or how I got here, I was not thinking, just running) I'd better tell you something about my personal history.

Well, well, I can sense your curiosity. So, when it's about important historical issues of great transcendence, you want to skip the part, but when it is about gossip regarding my personal life, you show real interest. That says a lot about you, my friends! No, no, I'm not angry, I'm flattered. I hope I do not let you down!

I was born in a middle class alien family. Parents well educated and with a lot of ambitions. This means that my mum, my dad, and my bibi had great expectations put on me. (What's a "bibi"? You have not been paying attention, have you? I said my race has three sexes, so obviously, any child of my people has three parents. As you might reckon, divorces get very messy, especially when there are custody issues.)

Now, for my people, there are two main fields in which you can make a good name and advance in life: engineering and medical exo-research. The day I failed to qualify for a career in engineering was very disappointing for my folks. Especially for my bibi. Being an engineer binself, bi had exerted a lot of pressure to push me in the direction of bis field of study. (No, there are no typing mistakes in these last two sentences. The pronouns that correspond to the third sex are "bi", "bis" and "binself". I think you should check yourselves for Alzheimer's, you are losing your short term memory: I have already talked about this.) Since I was a child, bi had put me through a lot of computer screen hours with complicated mathematical formulae, which I had failed to solve, and bi had made me watch countless boring documentaries on quantum physics, which I detested.

Although my disqualification had not come as a surprise for me, it was a terrible shock for my parents. I still remember their serious faces when they sat me down in the living room to have the talk with me. (Yes, we have living rooms, what's strange about that? We also have T.V. sets. We use them to watch The Simpsons and Futurama. Please don't think less of us as a race for this, you have to understand that alien jobs are very stressful, and indulging in human T.V. shows relaxes us.)

The talk consisted mainly of asking me the question: "What are you going to do with your life now?", waiting for me to feel completely ashamed, with my self-esteem utterly crashed, and expecting me to try to please them with a sensible and intelligent answer concerning my future. I was at a loss for words (I was not a language teacher, yet). The only thing I could say was that I wanted to relate more to humans. I didn't say it because I couldn't think of anything else, I said it because I meant it.

Of course, they completely misunderstood me and they enrolled me in the High Medical Exo-Research School. There was hope for me yet. I was to become a Hybridization Technician and make the family proud. On the first field trip, I puked my guts out all day long and passed the whole journey in the spaceship's sickbay. That was the end of my medical career.

My teacher had put me in charge of guiding the terrified abducted humans to the examination tables, forcing them to stay put so that the other more advanced students could poke their guts. I can still hear their screams in my head. That day, I was traumatized for life. That was definitely not what I had meant when I said I wanted to relate to humans.

It was a horrid experience, but I have to admit that it taught me a lot about who I was and what I really wanted in life. This trial brought me to instantaneous maturity, and I developed what might be considered a curse among my family members: inter-racial morality. As a result, I joined clandestine groups that advocated for human protection rights. We mainly tried to alert our society about the cruelty carried out during human abductions. To do this, we transmitted high frequency waves (the equivalent to human pamphlets) with messages like: "Humans should be given the choice to refuse going on board of alien spacecraft" and "Don't do to humans what you wouldn't do to your own kind".

It was all good and well, until one day, my father discovered the recordings of the messages in my bedroom. He was furious. He told me I had dishonoured the family and called for a clan meeting. During the audience, I remained obstinately loyal to my cause and wouldn't budge. The consequence of my stubborn behaviour was that my father was forced to cast me out of the clan and cut all my lineage lines. My mum cried a lot and begged my dad to give me another chance. My bibi stayed out of the business and didn't declare binself for or against my banishment. The rest of my relatives frowned down on me and condemned me without mercy, except perhaps, aunt Flora, because I had always been her favourite niece.

The disadvantages of being an outcast are mainly these:

-You lose family financial support and housing is no longer provided.

-You lose alien medical coverage. This means no alien doctor will touch you and you find yourself at the mercy of the primitive human medicine. (This is a serious problem because our biology differs from the human one, and human doctors may make fatal mistakes trying to treat us. Yes, like giving us electroshocks to try to revive us when we do not need it.)

-You are denied access to your teleporting training course and corresponding license to practise it. (That explains why my teleporting ability sucks.)

-You lose any possibility of a higher alien education. (I had had enough of it, so I didn't care.)

-You are denied access to location codes. They don't want you trying to sneak into another city and causing trouble. (That is why I didn't have a file in my computer with the codes matching the cities and I had to rely on memory to find aunt Flora's old city cave.)

-You are forced to live in exile, among humans. (This is what I had always wanted so I welcomed it gladly)

-And of course, you are not able to see any of your relatives ever again. (This was fine by me because I didn't want anything to do with people that were in favour of human torture.)

My mum came to me in secret when I was preparing my backpack to leave, and gave me some human money she had covertly stashed for years. She also told me that if I ever found myself in a serious emergency, I could contact aunt Flora. She gave me a paper with instructions, explaining how to reach her without alerting the clan.

And so it was, that I was cast out into the human world.