OMG! My Sister Is So American!

I like to blend. Not smoothies or milkshakes - in fact, I haven't had a homemade milkshake since I stopped taking weight gain protein in high school. That's not substance abuse - that substance abuses, scars you and leaves you unable to blend, in the culinary sense. But I digress.

I like to blend, as in crowds. I like to chameleon, and it has been my personal mission objective in the past two months to be as incognito as possible on the streets of Rome. For someone with my height, hair color, and good looks, it is extremely hard to go unnoticed. I count it a victory to simply be ignored, or maybe identified as a Swedish or German tourist; anything but to be another American, pockets filled with freedom.

My sister, however, does not like to blend. She does not like the bland, black and white color scheme I adhere to. Tanner, my sister, arrived in Rome wearing gossamer teal cowboy boots, silver leggings, and a bright pink top. She was the American flag filled with neon gas.

As I have written before, I have gone to such extremes to be a part of a crowd as to put on a fake accent (though, partially unconsciously), to heavily roll my r's and to insert pauses into my speech, as if translating from one language to another. As foolish as this may sound to you, dear reader, it was much more so with Tanner. She has decided to speak as loudly as possibly, and to saturate all her words with the Southern Grace my mother says Rome lacks. Not only does she speak so, but she speaks so to everyone in her perimeter. Tourists and Italians alike stand no chance against her onslaught of good will, her infinite clip of questions in her machine gun mouth, asking the who, what, where, why, and how in the world even of people who cannot speak English. Buses, backstreets, bathrooms - beware, natives.

And that laugh. Pierces like a knife. It comes and goes like a snap in a silent auditorium, for one instant, but that moment is enough to garner the attention of everyone, no matter what tribe or nation. I could not count on both hands and both feet the number of times that I have wanted to die of embarrassment from the laugh of my Miss American sister.

OMG! I cannot believe my sister is so American. After I have spent half my time here trying to be Italian, trying to hide my ethnicity, saying few words and avoiding all tourists, Tanner destroys my well wrought reputation (or lack thereof, for I am just another face) with her Homecoming Queen smile and inability to control her volume.

But the funny thing is, the thing itself is, that my sister has made more friends in two days than I had in two months. Southern Grace in need, indeed.

I Take On A Foreign Accent

Being in Rome these past two weeks has really altered my person. I eat a lot of cheese, cheese which I cannot name. I've read a lot of Italian literature, which, as you might expect, is extremely depressing (nothing ever ends well for Italy, so why should they make it so in books?). I perused a haberdashery, a life long goal, and bought a 50 euro hat (1 euro=15000 Chinese yin, or 70 million tons of rice). I have also gained an accent.

It was Mircea, the Rufio-esque church friend with the Eastern Bloc nose, who first noticed it. I was talking to him in my national tongue, and he stopped me. He said he could not understand what I was saying. I tried again, switching to what little Italian I know. He stopped me again, and said that he could understand English fine; he couldn't understand my English, because I was speaking like a foreigner (not to be confused with Foreigner).

It's true. I find myself slipping down a slippery slope of linguistics, constantly rolling my r's, screwing up my grammar, and inserting frequent pauses, as if I'm translating from one language to another. In the back of my mind, I assume, the logic is that if I'm not able to speak Italian, the best way to appear non-American is to not be able to speak English.

And I say the back of my mind because it's all unconscious, like an internal mechanism meant to patronize the locals and separate myself from the college kids still here shopping. But if I can't control this, maybe one day I'll start speaking uncontrollable Italian.