Friday, July 16, 2010

Well, I deserved that

If I have ever slighted anyone, you don't have to worry about setting me up because I do a pretty good job of that to myself.

Today in class, I was chatting with my teacher about Chekhov's short story The Joke (oh wow, I just realized how utterly appropriate that is) when my stomach started hurting me.

As I'm discussing the story with her (in Russian), I'm trying to discreetly reach into my purse to pull out some medicine. Apparently I wasn't so discreet because she started asking me what was wrong. I explained that my stomach hurt & I was looking for my medicine. She started asking if it was my host mom's cooking, and I was like, "No, my stomach just always hurts." This led to a longer conversation

Now, as Russian is not my native language, I constantly have to think about what exactly I'm trying to say which involves nasty thing like verb conjugation and the declension of nouns and verbs. At the same time I'm fiddling with the medicine bottle & still thinking about the story when I start to explain my stomach problems as an allergy.

"I have an allergy to preservat--..." (I'm allergic to MSG & a bunch of preservatives) and right then and there I realize exactly what I'm telling my teacher. That the reason my stomach hurts is because I'm allergic to condoms. Yep, that joke I just suggested a few days ago. I played it on myself because I wasn't paying attention to what I was saying.

Even though I stopped myself short of uttering the full word in Russian I see her eyes go wide, and quickly yelp at her, "Wrong word! Wrong word!" and correct myself so that I can tell her that I have an allergy to preservatives. Of course, she wanted to know how I could possible confuse these two words in Russian, so I spent a good while explain preservatives vs. preserves (I figure I just might as well throw that in for good measure) and preservatif. Luckily, she thought it was hysterical.

I think jokes are a lot better when you're not playing them unintentionally on yourself.

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