Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,22

I’ll crucify the Democrats, the Communists, and a good 97 percent of the college students. Don’t laugh, Tim Cobblestone, because you’re next! Think you can let your cat foul my flower beds and get away with it? Well, think again! And Curtis Devlin, who turned down my application for a home-improvement loan; and Carlotta Buffington, who only got her job because she’s paralyzed on one side; and even my grandson Kenyan Bullock. He just turned five, but no matter what Trisha says, this is not a phase—the child is evil, and it’s best to stop him now before any real damage is done. And all the other evil people and whores and liars who want to take away our freedom or raise my taxes, they shall know our fury, Jesus’s and mine, and burn forever.

Easy, Tiger

On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. “Goddamnit,” I whispered. “I knew I forgot something.”

Normally, when landing in a foreign country, I’m prepared to say, at the very least, “Hello,” and “I’m sorry.” This trip, though, was a two-parter, and I’d used my month of prep time to bone up on my Japanese. For this, I returned to the Pimsleur audio program I’d relied on for my previous two visits. I’d used its Italian version as well and had noted that they followed the same basic pattern. In the first thirty-minute lesson, a man approaches a strange woman, asking, in Italian or Japanese or whichever language you’ve signed up for, if she understands English. The two jabber away for twenty seconds or so, and then an American instructor chimes in and breaks it all down. “Say, ‘Excuse me,’” he tells you. “Ask, ‘Are you an American?’” The conversations grow more complicated as you progress, and the phrases are regularly repeated so that you don’t forget them.

Not all the sentences I’ve learned with Pimsleur are suited to my way of life. I don’t drive, for example, so “Which is the road to go to Yokohama?” never did me any good. The same is true of “As for gas, is it expensive?” though I have got some mileage out of “Fill her up, please,” which I use in restaurants when getting a second cup of tea.

Thanks to Japanese I and II, I’m able to buy train tickets, count to nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, and say, whenever someone is giving me change, “Now you are giving me change.” I can manage in a restaurant, take a cab, and even make small talk with the driver. “Do you have children?” I ask. “Will you take a vacation this year?” “Where to?” When he turns it around, as Japanese cabdrivers are inclined to do, I tell him that I have three children, a big boy and two little girls. If Pimsleur included “I am a middle-aged homosexual and thus make do with a niece I never see and a very small godson,” I’d say that. In the meantime, I work with what I have.

Pimsleur’s a big help when it comes to pronunciation. The actors are native speakers, and they don’t slow down for your benefit. The drawbacks are that they never explain anything or teach you to think for yourself. Instead of being provided with building blocks that would allow you to construct a sentence of your own, you’re left with using the hundreds or thousands of sentences that you have memorized. That means waiting for a particular situation to arise in order to comment on it; either that, or becoming one of those weird non-sequitur people, the kind who, when asked a question about paint color, answer, “There is a bank in front of the train station,” or, “Mrs. Yamada Ito has been playing tennis for fifteen years.”

I hadn’t downloaded a Pimsleur program for China, so on the flight to Beijing I turned to my Lonely Planet phrase book, knowing it was hopeless. Mandarin is closer to singing than it is to talking, and even though the words were written phonetically, I couldn’t begin to get the hang of them. The book was slim and palm-size, divided into short chapters: “Banking,” “Shopping,” “Border Crossing.” The one titled “Romance” included the following: “Would you like a drink?” “You’re a fantastic dancer.” “You look like some cousin of mine.” The latter would work only if you were Asian, but even then it’s a little creepy, the implication being “the cousin