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Dinosaurs

02/15/11

Albertosaurus, I can manage. T-Rex, a slam dunk and pretty much the baddest of bad asses. Stegosaurus and Triceratops begin to push it a bit. Quetzalcoatlus? Forget it, I give up. I postulate (based solely on anecdotal evidence) that childhood obsession with dinosaurs is a quintessentially American thing. To a Colombian parent trying to raise his children bilingually, this obsession makes for hours of educational entertainment, but it’s also a huge linguistical challenge (“Hypsilophodon”, really? cut a guy some slack!). Not only do I have to read out loud these mouthfuls to my kid about a hundred times a day, but I have to pause and face this ethical dilemma: Do I bother to figure out the Spanish names for these creatures, beyond the…

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When You’re Strange (Faces Come Out of the Rain)

02/13/11

Being weird is cool and fashionable. By the way, I was into pretending I was weird waaaaay before it became cool. Is that weird? Good. The thing is: being stuck between cultures and languages will inevitably make you a bit weird or at least be perceived as such. When I first arrived in the US, one of the several jobs I was hired to do despite lacking qualifications was as a daycare teacher (scary, I know). Such was the exuberance of the mid 90’s. So with my foot fresh off the boat and my English language skills just a notch above adequate, I was put in a position where I needed to exert the confidence and authority that I lacked as an immature individual just learning the cultural…

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Enter Number Two

02/10/11

A year and a half ago, a kind nurse placed in my arms a perfect little baby boy who looked uncannily like his older brother. Wiping off tears of joy, I thought: I am a blessed man and my wife’s and my genes appear to combine in one and one way only – we have unwittingly perfected human cloning. But it only took a few days for this newly minted magical creature named Samuel to begin showing evidence of his individuality: his body appeared to be leaner and longer than that of his brother’s, his eyes larger, his head smaller, his last name the same. Eighteen months later, we have in our home two young brothers whose personalities are each a universe of its…

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