spainsomnia

For some reason I can't sleep even though I was tired earlier today. It's 3:30am right now. Whatever. My boss said that she was worried that since there's another metro strike tomorrow that it'll be hard for me to get to work. :( I hope not. I like having stuff to do! Otherwise I spend too much money on diversions.

So! A new thing that Julia has added in to our workshops is a reading where we all take turns reading it aloud. Julia does it so that the old ladies can exercise their brains and have better memories, and she makes me read so that my pronunciation gets better. Last week we read about the Quakers and how they came from the UK to the US and they're pro peace and they promote women's rights, and so she segued into discussing the wage gap in Spain (It's something awful like women making 31.7% than men) and talking about how we need to fight for equality and such. Well, after the workshop Tita stayed behind, and talked to Julia. Tita's the oldest of our group at 85, and she was like "Why are we learning about an American religion?" Like she had absolutely no desire to think about America or other cultures, as if it were no use to her. Julia explained that some of the ladies find it interesting, and it gets them to learn about the feminist movement. I was surprised that Tita was like "Um hello? We're Spanish Catholics. I don't want to learn about American Quakers" since I was always under the impression that Americans don't care about other cultures but their own and they're ignorant and whatnot. And on the other hand, Europeans were much more open to it because they're surrounded by other cultures all the time. But I guess this is not the case.

Also, another lady took a jab at me and my Americanism today and I was rather taken off-guard. During the reading-aloud we were talking about the history of the feminist movement and how it started way back with roman philosophers and whatnot, and they write the centuries in roman numerals. I was already reading slower than the ladies and my accent was bad, but whenever I came across the roman numerals I needed help. I apologized saying that we don't use roman numerals as often in English so I have a hard time just recognizing them. The lady next to me, I think her name is Susana, was like "Julia" (not even asking me) "Why don't the Americans and the English use roman numerals? They're a part of history!" As in it was an insult to world history to not use a number system that you have to know math for just to read the numbers. I told her myself in Spanish that we do learn in school, but at the moment I was doing 2 different levels of translation, from roman numeral to regular numbers, to saying them in spanish aloud. Big numbers are especially hard in Spanish! I was miffed that she was like "Pff why don't THEY care to learn this part of HISTORY!?!" GIMME A BREAK LADY. Save it for our stitch-and-bitch sessions. (By the way I finished my first headband, now I'm making a purple one!)

It's interesting that these ladies come to these workshops because they could use the time and creativity and air conditioning. And since it's run by a feminist org, they get fed different cross-cultural/feminist things that they might not have come across otherwise. Julia knows when to argue with the old ladies and when to just laugh off what they say. But she did get into it the other day with one lady because she said that "Well men are stronger/do harder work so thats why they get paid more." Julia went off on her and was like "DON'T YOU SEE THAT'S A STEROTYPE!? MY MOM WAS A COW WRESTLER!" (or something like that) "YOU'RE A PART OF THE PATRIARCHAL SYSTEM THAT'S KEEPING WOMEN'S WAGES LOW!!!" I don't quite remember how the lady responded, but the situation was diffused. It's interesting to see how they interact.