Black Sheep

Visiting Mexico is always a great feeling. There is no feeling in the world that matches hanging out with all my uncles and cousins: laughter and humiliation. Just because I’m vacationing in Mexico and visiting everyone doesn’t mean I’m not reminded of my inability to speak Spanish on the level of everyone else. I am one of three people (the other two are my cousins Justin and Brandon) in the entire family that have Spanish as their second language. My control of the rules and verbs, adjectives as well as tenses and the labeling of male and female are all pretty shitty to say the least. My cousins still bug me about saying “la bano” instead of “el bano,” “Polandia” instead of “Polonia,” and “sambutar” instead of “sambutir.”

Due to my long hair, my uncle Robert calls me “Jesus Christ” every five minutes. My uncle Joel calls me “mosh” and my cousin Edson calls me “Pepe Nacho.” But my cousin has been changing my nickname constantly so by now I’ve los track. All my uncle Oscar does is joke about cutting all my hair and asking “what would you do if I cut it all off while you were sleeping?”

The entire family is sarcastic to say the least and insanely hilarious but after a while I feel like I’m about to give in and go off on everyone. No one in the entire family is as big of a joke punching bag than I am. I get shit for my hair, clothes, music. I get made fun of for what I say and what I don’t say. The big joke that all my uncles always bring out on me is the “misma playa” joke from about ten years ago. What happened was that I complained that we always visited the same beach (hence “misma playa”) because my grandma didn’t want anyone to risk getting hurt. 100% logical, but the problem was that the water at the beach for a good 20 feet is only about ankle high. I complained with my obviously not well developed Spanish and said “siempre misma playa.” Now, after so many years, it is still the heart of all jokes. I got tired of it many years ago but can’t really do much, just got to suck it in and take every punch. There is still a long road left to take before the joke disappears, until then, one step at a time.