not finished, just a draft for some school project.

It’s funny how I react towards instructions, building a book with a story based on a personal experience doesn’t make much sense to me, it’s not about not having an interesting life or not remembering a great event in my life that’s worth telling about, it’s quite the opposite, I have many memories that I find worth telling, because they involve wonderful people that have made my life amazing. So, in the event that I may start to frustrate over a school project that involves doing so, I chose to follow a different path. Not writing about a specific event, but a specific thing that fascinates me.
I’ve always been fascinated by language, well, to be honest, not always. When I was younger I didn’t have the knowledge to understand how it affected daily life and how important it was to be clear in communication. But, I certainly remember when I first started to read. How amazing it was to be able to read every single billboard, to read little books, to read in school and to feel tremendously excited to be one best reader’s in my first year elementary school class. I have many memories regarding books. I had an episode in my life when I read so much I had my memories mixed up with chapters from books and dreams. It was difficult for me to feel like I belonged sometimes, because I had this love for reading while my fifth grade classmates didn’t care the least about books. I felt strange.
Since falling in love with language was a slow learning and discovery process, I will have to guide you in. Probably, the moment when I discovered the amazing quality books had, was when I went on my first vacation. I was ten or eleven years old and went to visit my aunt (along with my cousin) to Oakland. This was also the first time I ever rode a plane. It was exciting. But, the part of this trip that I want to talk about isn’t precisely about riding the plane or traveling, it’s about writing. My aunt is really different from what I’m used to at home. She moved to Oakland many years ago and formed her life up there, she married a Hungarian man, had two daughters, etcetera. She doesn’t act Mexican anymore and has a big house and a wealthy life. She speaks English most of the time and acts like a gringa tourist when she comes to visit us. That’s just the way she is. When we went to visit her she advised my cousin and me to keep a journal of our trip so we could remember it for a long time. She also took us to a bookstore and I was really excited and wanted to buy the whole store, my cousin didn’t care that much for the books, she wanted clothes or toys. She gave us a couple of notebooks she had laying around her house and we kept them with us at all times. It’s true; I sometimes kept a diary back home, like those girls in movies, but mostly forgot about it later. But my aunt was actually developing her life inside the culture that these movies were showing. So, we kept a journal. I loved writing in it, the most random details, little secrets I wanted to keep from my cousin and so on. After I came back, writing became natural to me. I always told my mom to take me to bookstores and I was excited with history lessons at school. I loved to learn through reading.
Reading in English was the start of a weird love/hate relationship with language; it wasn’t completely natural for me to be reading in English since I was speaking Spanish all the time, but it did help a lot in improving my English grammar and opposed to my speaking, which came mostly out of the television, movies or music. Living in Tijuana, which is just across the border from San Diego, made English common, I could hear it every time we crossed the border to shop (either for groceries or clothing), I saw on local television, I could hear it on the radio. Living between these two exchanging cultures all my life was perfectly normal. Until I came to live in the next-door city, moving from Tijuana to San Ysidro, which is, ironically, just across the border. Then, the fascination that came with crossing the border pretty much died, the amazing United States were amazing in fact, amazing on many levels. School was virtually free and it was really worth it, the teachers were really prepared, the school had all the equipment, a beautiful library, trees everywhere, new computers, etc. But it was boring, really, really, boring. College came with the realization that I loved Spanish far much more than English, which, I already knew, because from were I left on my loving language journey before, until that time (when I finished high school/started college) came I was mostly reading Latin American literature. But, taking an English class, having to write essays in English and finding the common “writer’s block” way too common was frustrating. I was angry with myself for not being able to accomplish beautiful papers and express my ideas clearly.