I got into work this morning before the clinic opened, as usual. One of our regular patients was already there, wandering around the lobby. I wasn't exactly thrilled to see him. He can be loud and aggressive at times. He's shown up in our clinic extremely drunk more than a few times. He's come in with injuries from fights. We've often had to call Security to have him escorted out of the building. As I was setting things up, the patient walked up to the front desk. "Hey, can I ask you something?" he said. I tensed up a little, glanced at the panic button, and replied that of course he can. He placed a National Geographic Magazine on the counter. The cover story was "Oil." The patient asked me, "Were you around in the 70's, when you could only buy gasoline on odd or even days?"

The patient and I talked about the price of gasoline. It was the patient's viewpoint that when minimum wage is above seven dollars an hour, three dollar for a gallon of gasoline is not unreasonable. (I thought it was an odd viewpoint for someone who's unemployed and semi-homeless, but I kept that thought to myself.) We shared the idea that oil companies push gas prices extremely high just so that when they drop the price, we're happy, even though the price is still higher that it used to be. We both complained about the oil company monopolies.

"Do me a favor," the patient requested when the conversation died down.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Don't tell anyone that I had an intelligent conversation, OK?" Then he grinned.

----

Esta noche, en clase, estudiamos marcas del acento y sílabas.

Spanish class started off well tonight. I got to talk about mi escritor favorito: Gabriel García Márquez. I got to discuss mi película favorito: "Trois Couleurs."

Then, right at the end, it went bad for me. The instructor read aloud, three times, a passage from an article, en español, while we listened. Then on the fourth time, we had to write down what he was reading, making sure we get every comma, period, capitalization, tilde, and all the spelling, correct. I did very badly. Fortunately, we were not graded. Even more fortunately, the class ended before my turn came to list my errors. My problem was not so much my knowledge of Spanish, but my dictation skills. I am terrible at taking dictation. When I was Council Secretary, I took the minutes by ignoring all spelling and grammar, and just writing key words - and then finalizing it up on the word processor later. I found it nearly impossible, tonight, to write each word at the same time I was listening to sound of the word.