And my story begins...

Life is full of moments, so let me give you a quick recap of mine.

They say you can’t choose family, well that also means you can’t choose where you grow up.

I was California born and raised, many outsiders wish they were but me not so much. Lived there 17 years, until one day I decided to skip town and flee the country jk jk. Anyways, I ended up moving to Mexico and with that came many new experiences.

Have you guys ever sat in class thinking to yourself, I’ll Remember this on the exam. Then when you’re in the exam you look at the test and you realize you don’t know what any of this is. Well it turns out my Spanish wasn’t that great and grammar was a huge part of the test.

Imagine one day being in kindergarten and barely learning your ABC’s and then the next day you decide to blow this popsicle stand and move on up to middle school. Let’s just say it was a bit of a learning curve. Conversational skills in English decent, conversational skills in Spanish eeeh!

As a Latino growing up in America, you learn Spanish from your parents and you get pushed into English pretty fast. You tend to create your own mix and this is how Spanglish gets started. You get to a point where you think you can translate everything directly chocolate-chocolate, biology-biología, format-formato, compliment-complemento. ERR, WRONG! My compliments to any fluent Spanish speaker out there that noticed the error in my translation.

In the US we have a saying “Imma take that as a compliment” when you’re not really sure if they’re actually saying something nice. Here I am in Mexico, in a situation I had been in 100’s of times before in the United States and I’m over here trying to translate this phrase like “Voy a tomar eso como un complemento.”

Everyone’s face quickly showed confusion trying to understand what I was trying to say. Suddenly I was that math professor that no one quite really understands. I began defending my choice of words, saying “ complemento, yeah! Like when you say something nice to somebody, obviously…”

As soon as they found out what I was trying to say everyone began laughing in unison. “It’s cumplido not complemento, complemento is like an add-on.” What the heck!? An add-on? I’m over here taking the comment as an add-on? What does that even mean? I made zero sense. You would think I would have learned a lesson and would never ever repeat the mistake but you’d be surprised how many times I said that again.