Soy Tu Duena at the Mapco

I get in my car. Its raining this morning. I'm wearing a pink and teal button up shirt that looks like it was meant for summer. But it's November, and its raining, and I really don't care. It looks good on me, and I did my makeup carefully for once.

I feel my eyelid and realize that the anti-aging serum stuff I bought on 75%-off clearance has worked. My skin is smooth and soft. My eyelids are always getting flaky these days. Probably because I, myself, am also getting flaky.

"I'm running out of time! I'm on a schedule here, people!" I told my dad the previous night on the phone. I laughed when I said it.
"Whats so funny about that?" Again with the deadpan. God, Dad, you're gonna have to lighten up.
"I'M GETTING OLD! That's why its funny!" I laughed again. "I'm like those horrible girls who consider harvesting their eggs! I'm gonna get old and nobody will have ever been able to stand me long enough to procreate with me, much less marry me and doom themselves to forever being my sidekick."

Yes, I think, now driving to work in my car, I am also getting flaky. Sidekick? Seriously?
My windshield wipers make a squeaky noise when they scrape against the window. I really shouldn't have used them to help me defrost the window last year when I lived in that apartment.

I pull into a gas station and get out. I get water in my shoes because of the puddle that has most conveniently placed itself under my car. Again, its November, and I'm wearing grey open-toed shoes. Whatever, I did my nails all cute and french-like.

"Seis noventa y nueve." The cashier is an overweight white girl with bleached blonde hair. She is speaking Spanish to the All-Pro Lawncare workers who have entered the Mapco to buy coffee that they doctor with too much sugar. America has been bad to them, I muse, giving them all sweet tooths when it comes to a product that is most likely grown and harvested in their own native countries.

One of them cocks an eyebrow at me as I head for the energy drinks. I'm a sucker for energy drinks. One day my heart may explode. And it won't even be a man's fault. It certainly won't be your fault, I think to myself, side stepping around Pedro and his paint covered pals. Apparently there is more than one vanload of Latin men in the Mapco today.

I grab the drink and wait in line behind a guy with tattoos, peeking around his shoulder at the bleach-blonde cashier. She's really speaking Spanish! Like fluently. And its funny, because I look at her, and she does NOT look like a person who went to college, or a person who graduated top of their class, or a person who could even interview for a desk job, and yet she has learned another language to the point where she is completely fluent! And here I am, Miss 13th-out-of-three-hundred-twenty-five, Miss college graduate, Miss 7th grade teacher, and I can't do that. I mean, I could. I almost did.

But when I think about it, the bleach blonde cashier lady has probably married some Latino dude and now has two kids named Julio and Renber, and her last name is probably Pineda, and she probably goes home to her crappy apartment and drinks Tampico while watching Soy Tu Duena on Telemundo.
I don't live in that environment. Now, I think, if I did, I might end up being able to facilitate cash transactions in a gas station while speaking two languages. Hm.

She rings up my can o' energy and tells me to have a good day in perfect English, and I think to myself on the way out the door that we both have okay lives.

I kind of hate Tampico anyway, and the girls on Soy Tu Duena make me feel like a fat cow just looking at them. Which, by the way, is very un-stereotypical of Spanish tv. Usually those girls have crazy curves. Like me. But whatever, the point is that I think it would be cool to speak another language. And the fact that bleached-blondie with the GED has been able to do it gives me hope.

Besides. Instead of learning Spanish while popping out half-illegal children, drinking a juice-flavored fruit drink, and working at a gas station, maybe I should just move to Spain.

I slam the door to my car and my mouth waters just long enough thinking about a Spanish rendezvous with Sergio Ramos before I pop the top on my energy drink and wash it all down.

I turn out of the Mapco parking lot and merge back into the stream of traffic funneling its way toward the heart of the city.